What makes a Harley a Harley?

What makes a Harley a Harley? Is it the "chopper" look, the V-Twin sound, or something about the ride?

Where to ride in San Diego

There are a lot of great places to ride in San Diego County from the Coastal roads to the desert out East with the mountains in between. I found a great map of roads that includes some helpful ratings on the BMW Owners Club of San Diego web site. Click the image on the bottome of the page to get the big picture. If you live in San Diego or are just coming out for a visit, print this out and cover as much road as possible.

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California Motorcycle Smog Testing Bill

Alert from the American Motorcycle Association (AMA), if you live and ride in California you need to take action on this Bill now!

Senate Bill 435 (Motorcycle Smog Testing Bill) Scheduled for Hearing on May 28th in Appropriations Committee!!

This bill, which would require all model year 2000 and newer motorcycles over 280 cc's to be smog tested every 2 years, has been scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Finance committee on May 28th.

You can find the AMA’s “click to send” message in opposition to this bill at http://capwiz.com/amacycle//issues/alert/?alertID=12937506. Even if you have previously sent a message please consider doing so again. A phone call, letter or fax to your Senator's office would also be very helpful. Go to http://www.senate.ca.gov/~newsen/senators/senators.htp to find your representatives contact information.

Go to http://info.sen.ca.gov/cgi-bin/pagequery?type=sen_bilinfo&site=sen&title=Bill+Information for the latest bill information.

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Working on the Sportster

A big part of buying a Harley-Davidson is the heritage. The Motor Company goes way back and the Sportster line started in 1957. The heritage shows up in design and the classic V-Twin engines. Harley-Davidson has never been about cutting-edge, delivering on a fairly consistent motorcycling experience. This is not to say technologies have not changed and that the mechanics have not improved over time but the pace has been slow and steady. 

This slow pace of change, or commitment to the past, is evident in much of the add-on parts available for the Sportster. I’ve worked on cars for a living, and worked on Suzuki and BMW motorcycles as a hobby more recently and I can tell you that the German and Japanese manufacturers take a very different approach to the mechanics of their accessories. This includes everything from the directions to the fit and finish. More importantly, it was obvious that the majority of accessories from Suzuki and BMW had been thought of at the time of bike design. The electrical harness has plugs available for accessories to plug into. Parts fit extremely well with no adjustments required. 

The Sportie, however, is a different beast. Adding the Harley-Davidson tachometer and garage door opener kits requires splicing into the existing harness, adding ground wires, and a lot of work that you don’t encounter when working on other brands. I also found that the directions while not outright wrong do not necessarily provide the most practical guidance on how to install the factory items. 

A lot of this probably has to do with the age of the design. When creating the add-on parts the engineers seemed to go for obvious choices, or maybe the only choices, when they were creating the instructions. The other issue is that many of the parts are multi-purpose, they work on several different Harley-Davidson models and you have to carefully follow the directions to get the right configuration for your bike.

Harley-Davidson would do their customers a service by:

1. Updating their specifications and instructions based on the current models
   
2. Designing with the idea of factory accessories in mind
   
3. Providing model specific kits
   

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Ariel Atom

If you just have to be on four wheels than this is the car for you. The Ariel Atom is about as mimalist as it gets for a car, no roof, no doors, no windshield. Just a two-liter Honda i-VTEC engine putting out 245 BHP! Check out the Top Gear clip on YouTube that compares the Atom to a Yamaha R6. In this ride you don't need a helmet but you'd be mad not to wear one!
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Back on the road

After the electrical problems I spent some time going over the Sporster checking all the work I had done. The installation of the tachometer, garage door opener, and performance management system did require modifications to the electrical system. Everything checked out okay, all the connections were solid.

I took the battery down to the Harley-Davidson dealership where they plugged it into their “deep cycle” charger and told me to come back the next day. The next day at the dealer they told me the battery took a charge and passed all the tests. I installed the freshly charged battery in the Sportster and bike fired right up – no sign of a problem. 

Now this did not make me feel real comfortable with the reliability of the Sportster – I’d have preferred to have had a dead battery instead of a battery that had been fully drained while on a ride. I checked out the voltage going to the battery and this came in at 13 plus volts, so the charging system was working but maybe not creating enough amperage to charge the battery.

So the Sportster with its suspect charging system sat in the garage until I could coordinate getting it down to the dealer to have the electrical system checked out. Finally, after several months I fired up the Sporty, the battery held the charge, and rode down to the dealer. After a few days in the shop I got the call that the charging system checked out and that the problem had to do with the bolts that attach the battery cables to the battery, apparently my 2008 Sportster Custom had “the old bolts”. The dealer replaced the bolts, no charge, and everything is good.

Since then, I’ve been out on a short two hour ride, no problems encountered, but I have to say my confidence is about 80 percent. 

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Break down on the Pacific Coast Highway

It’s been way too long since my last post and I apologize for that. I’ve not had a chance to do much riding this year – been a combination of schedule and mechanical issues. I do have a backlog of updates that will hopefully be interesting. Let me know if there are any specific topics you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to pass along what I know (or don’t know). Topics in queue include:

• Installation of Race Tech Caddies front-end kit
  
• Installation of Progressive 440 Series rear shocks 
  
• Installation of the Harley-Davidson garage door opener kit
  
• Installation of the Harley-Davidson tachometer kit
  
• Installation of the Harley-Davidson Screamin Eagle Stage I intake kit
  
• Installation of the Terry Components Terminal Velocity-3 fuel management system 
  

But first the partial reason I’ve not been riding much these days (besides a very hectic work and family schedule). At the end of last year I had some time of work, the holidays had passed and I wanted to get a decent ride in. I planned to ride North along the coast to Monterey and then head back. About a thousand miles with the route I planned. I figured I could do this in two to three days depending on where how the ride went.
The route I planned was not direct and I started by going East and North up to Temecula so I could ride the Ortega Highway. That ride was pretty cool though I’m not sure it was worth going out of my way to hit that stretch of road. I started late morning and got to San Juan Capistrano a little after noon, headed for the coast and then North on the Coast Highway (Highway 1).
I’d never been up the Coast Highway and thought it would be cool to check out the beachside communities. Turns out that while the area is nice and the scenery pretty good overall, the traffic sucks. It took me far longer than I had planned but by late afternoon I was past LAX (the Los Angeles international airport) and into Malibu around sundown.
The Malibu stretch was right out of Entourage but the traffic was very heavy. I took the opportunity to pull over for fuel and switch up the playlist on the iPod. Tank full I went to start the Sportster and nothing happened, no crank, no click, nothing. I checked the to make sure everything was on, turned the key … nothing. The electrical system was full on dead, no headlight, indicator lights, nothing.
Now I learned an important fact about the Harley-Davidson extended warranty; the marketing materials state that the warranty includes towing costs but this is only partially true. The costs are reimbursed if the tow is related to an item that is covered under the warranty. A battery is not covered but the charging system is. And by the way, unlike Auto Club, Harley can’t help you get a tow – that is not part of the service so you’re on your own.
Harley-Davidson being absolutely no help I called Auto Club – I did not have motorcycle coverage because I thought the HD planned had my back. Even without coverage the Auto Club dispatcher sent a truck out to assist no questions asked. The driver arrived within 30 minutes, helped jump start the bike, again no questions asked.
Now the real fun began. It was dark, traffic in LA was bumper to bumper and I was hell-bent to get the Sportster home. I split lanes (legal in California) on the access roads and freeway until I got to the HOV lane (for cars with multiple passengers or motorcycles) which was clear. There it was throttle open headed South. About twenty minutes into the ride the XL1200 started acting strange, the engine momentarily cutting out, like a heavy engine misfire, then the indicator lights flickering on and off, then the headlight flickering on and off.
I’m thinking this is not an ideal situation as I’m doing 70 miles per hour in the far left lane, with a concrete divider on my left, a steady stream of cars and trucks to my right, and a car about 100 yards and closing behind me in the HOV lane. If the bike’s electrical system had a catastrophic failure not only would there be no where for me to go, there is no “break down” lane, I’d probably get hit by the car closing from behind. Saying a few “hail Mary’s” I managed to weave the Sportster through the surrounding traffic, all the time the electrical system cutting out, and get to the right-most lane. Here I would have room to pull over if needed. As long as I could keep a safe speed I was not going to pull over, especially on a dark stretch of freeway.
I found that at around 55 mph in 4th gear the Sportster would not cut out and the electrical system stabilized – the headlight stayed on and the instrument lights stopped flickering. I pulled into a well lit gas station, kept the bike running, pulled the battery cover and checked the connections – everything I could see appeared okay (you can’t see the negative terminal without disconnecting the positive and pulling the battery from the bike.
I got back on the Sportster and continued the ride home. It took me about 90 minutes to get back and as long as I kept the bike in 4th gear and didn’t go over 60 miles per hour it performed pretty well. Needless to say I was happy to have made it home.

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