this is my history of harley-davidson ownership
through a lot of my life both in joy and frustration
it didn't take but a few minutes of riding that sportster is to understand why you know all
people get obsessed with harley's because there's something about it they rumble the you know that
b-twin bellowing underneath you how uneven the timing is because of the way it's designed
with that common crank it's just a unique engine design it shouldn't even work for physics probably
but it does and it it's everything from that first start when you hear the starter motor chugging
away and it takes off and fires and once it's actually running then you you shift and you let
up the clutch and it's it's almost like driving an old tractor i mean these things are like a
two-wheeled version of farm machinery almost just so crude and rudimentary in their design but
that's part of the appeal to it i couldn't wait to get rid of the bike i had and find some kind of an
option for our the next summer i got a really good job working on a state-funded job for construction
and actually had the money to go find something cheap you know that they needed a little work
i asked the neighbor he had an old sportster he wasn't interested in selling and so i found
kyle and asked him if he knew of any options and he told me about a bike and you could tell
his eyes kind of went up into the stars and he said i remember my first bike you know and just
reinforced i was on the right path so he told me about one dad and i went over to look at the bike
that owner had basically come out of the bar drunk made it three blocks hit a parked car the bike
fell around his leg broke his leg another guy tank that gives you an indication of the size
happened to go over to try to get the guy's jacket out of the way and ended up stepping
on the leg he just broke so unfortunately for that guy you know years afterwards he's still limping
just and he started taking the bike apart and trying to redo it but
he was never going to finish it that was the reality it sat out in his garage
i can't remember if it was a dirt floor or not but you know you had the skeleton of a bike and these
awful brown body parts that were kind of scattered around and there were i don't know three or four
milk crates full of parts it was a true basket case so we looked at it he told me he wanted you
know four grand 4500 whatever for it and dad and i went back home and we talked about it and he said
you know that bike's gonna need a lot of work and i said i totally agree a couple days later we went
back over there picked up the bike put all the crates and parts and everything into the trailer
at the back of the pickup and we got home and my mom and sisters came out to look at it and
it did look awful it was all dusty cobwebs just a skeleton there and it looked pretty discouraging
and that's not very pretty but i wasn't seeing this ugly bike in ugly color and cobwebs
i was already picturing it bright red ripping down the black tops so once we get this pile
of parts home the next day i asked dad i said is there anything i can do to start the process
and he said yeah go up to royals which was the local harley shop but it lost its franchise
years earlier the old guy that ran they just still had all these parts and pikes had a few old bikes
in there like an old wla and an old sportster and stuff and he had a ton of inventory old parts so
i went up there bought the repair manual which he had as dad had told me i started taking the clutch
apart figure out why it didn't work so i get home and i start reading the book and i start taking
the clutch apart and trying to figure out what's wrong with it and stuff and get whatever parts i
need and you know over the next you know few days and whatever else it took to get parts in that
i finally had it back together and i had the primary case all sealed up and everything
and i was really proud that i'd done my first tax well shortly after that i'm sitting at
coffee i think with dad one of his buddies that had an old 65 shovelhead with a sidecar
and he said yeah remember that brass washer that went on the end of the starter shaft you gotta
have that or else it'll crack your outer primary so i go home and sure enough i found in the box
this brass washer looked in the manual and somehow i missed the line about the brass washer because i
was too eager to get it put together so i had to tear the whole thing apart put it back in
so it was a learning process right like i've never really worked on stuff like that before
so you know you eventually learn that with enough time and money and patience and the
manual you can figure out anything you know you might break a few things on the way but that's
how you learn through the next year with school and all that dad did most of the work honestly
he ended up painting the parts it was a 77 flh it's electric light classic and we ended up
taking all the heart bags and the tour pack and the double buddy seat and all that ugly stuff
earrings all that i just threw it down in the basement i had no intention of using it
dab into the painting i think it was a ford red color and it didn't look it looked a little bit
flatter dull in the uh in the dark but once you get out of the sun it's a very nice bright red
coming back that next summer we got it to where it was actually ready to fire for the first time
it had an su carburetor on it which is skinner's union it's uh i think they used to put them on
jaguars actually or jaguars it's a cv card so you've got this piston going up in the cylinder
well during the wreck that cylinder just bent in just a little bit so it's touching on the
piston inside and it wasn't running smooth so i took it apart sanded it down trying to make
it smooth just didn't work so i ended up buying another cylinder piston assembly got that all set
we finally got it to fire for the first time and dad said let him take it around the block
first just to make sure everything's safe on it it was amazing to hear that thing going down the
road here and coming around the corner like that was that was my first harley now i had
a harley and it was running that was step one and now i want to write however i'd only had hernia
surgery about a week before that so i wasn't even supposed to drive a car for two weeks
about that next day or two my buddies called and said hey we're going to metallica at the
state fairgrounds dancing's opening up for him you need to come down [ __ ] yeah well so
even though i'm not supposed to even drive a car yet that weekend i hopped on the harley threw a
couple of clothes in the saddle bags you know i had these bolt-on leather bags one full of tools
one with some clothes and rode down to my buddy's place and maverick which is kind of like annoying
on the way down there the bike dies in ames won't start so i had to push it i still got my
13 staples in down here had to push the bike to a service station to get the battery charged up
then made it down to maverick and was checking my points and trying to do the basics of what i
knew how to do to try to make sure the thing was running okay ended up going onto earlham
where i met all the rest of the derelicts we all carpooled to des moines went to the
danzig and metallica concert i just i couldn't go in the mosh pit i just kind of stood in the back
making like a squirrel and protecting my nuts and eventually hopped on the bike from her room
driving home two and a half three hours whatever ride it was it was in the dark i'd been drinking
i had a raccoon run out in front of me at some point i heard a noise of clint clinton down the
road and what that was is the big old blinker bar in the back of that those flhs one of the little
press nuts or whatever the hell they are had come loose and it drove through the nice new paint
and then rattled off and went down into a ditch somewhere so the first ride wasn't the
most enjoyable the other aspect of it is that i couldn't even turn it off with the gas pumps
because the carburetor wasn't tuned right yet it ran but not well and not over time so i had to
tune that i got a book from kyle actually on how to tune an su card because that was not in the
harley manual got that set and then it actually was tuned and run pretty decent now this bike had
actually originally been owned by some guy who wrote it to sturgis and he dropped a valve down
into it so you've got original engine first owner drops a valve that's on its second engine dad and
i rebuild it so now it's on its third engine by the time that i even start riding that bike
at some point i wanted to make it a little bit faster because it was pretty gullets especially
after driving dad's sportster which went like hell to that thing it was a bigger heavier bike
it was more comfortable i love the bike but i thought well if there's something simple
i can do to get a little more power out of it so we bought a camshaft for it it's a 77 flh
we put new bearings in we line rhema we want to put the nose cone on over the cam and it just
didn't seem like it fit quite right so start reading the fine print it had a groove on the
front face that groove means that even though it says 1977 it's a late 77 bike which means it
takes a 78 cam not a 77. so had to go get another cam new bearings new liner put to put together
and at the end of the day it really didn't make any difference on the bike as far as power
i couldn't tell any difference anymore it was the biggest can you could go without having to do you
know head work other than that i really didn't do a hell of a lot for upgrades it was more with that
bike i was always trying to just keep it running not trying to make it faster but if you made it
somewhere okay something was probably going to break on you on the way home that's you know it
was usually just little stuff but you know i had a lot of problems with that bike so it's on engine 3
at some point it started developing some top end noise i tried adjusting the push rods
making sure those were good i put my finger up inside the hole on the underside of the
heads to see if there was play in the rocker arms a little bit and i mean they couldn't measure
them from down there early effectively so adjust everything and put it back together coming home
from the bars at florida lakes at night it's about a 25 mile drive 2 a.m i'm blazing down highway 18
and it i could hear that noise and i thought you know it's going to break it's going to
break so i just pinned the throttle let it go and it broke and the back tire locked up
fortunately i had just enough coordination left to pull in the clutch quick so that it wouldn't
slide into a ditch got it stopped and i was right by duncan which is a tiny tiny town
but i have a cousin that lives there so i pushed the bike back up the hill to duncan
put it out in his driveway and went in and just laid on the floor it was iowa duncan iowa doors
are open nobody cares so i just laid out the floor called mom and dad and said i'll be you know come
get me in the morning so the next morning come around dad comes with the truck and then we
put the bike in there i started taking it apart and when i took the air cleaner off there were
pieces of the piston inside the intake manifold not a good sign took that off took the heads off
and you could see the top of both pistons but the rear one was all beat to piss
and when i reached down i realized that all i had left was the dome of the piston everything from
the oil rings down was completely disintegrated and floating throughout the engine so you had
the aluminum intake you had pieces of it down in the case it was disastrous it bent the rod
of course too don't really know what went wrong uh if somehow a wristband had come loose or what had
happened but it was catastrophic so whole engine comes apart this time had to take the bottom end
of part two i had a guy over mason newt went and rebuilt the bottom end for me and i think
he redid the valves with the impregnated cast iron valve guides because you know at that time
fuel no longer has a lead in it like it was in 77 when the bike was built
so get everything done put it all back together works again now it's on its fourth engine right
there are other things along the way the rear brake calipers those old banana calipers you
know they started egging out with that pin in there and so there was a period where you'd hit
the back brakes and then just lock up and sit there and roast your pads for you so if i use
the back brakes i'd have to stop pull over pry the pads open with a screwdriver uh we eventually
put the bigger pins in and you know you gotta like line ream it out and put a bigger pin in
after college brought the bike with me to texas road around down here up to austin to the event
you know just around san antonio and everything had a blast on it it was a good time of life you
know first time out of college with a decent job a few bucks to go blow up the bars had a great time
and there were of course events like writing to meet my buddies at the gym showing up with
oil over the leg because uh oil pump line burst whatever else it may be it's always something with
that bike at some point i did end up replacing those awful banana calipers with a decent set of
gma breaks and then new uh hand controls and stuff one of the best upgrades i could have ever done
for that bike i wish i'd done it years earlier made such a different stop on that bike but at
some point it started dying too and i was starting to get noise and it's like well you know i don't
have as much tools here being kind of out on my own for the first time is what dad had in his shop
so i took the engine out by this time i could get that whole engine out of a
right old bike in about three and a half hours so got it all out hold it down to a shop lease
power cycle that's now an airbnb but all down there they took the engine apart the cases were
getting tired they were chipped they had to weld in and machine it out and there's only so much
you can do with those engines because the way the frames are built you can't just go stick a nice
big new 121 in there or anything about all you can do is a square 100 inch maybe you can find one but
i hated to go away from factory as well we did punch it up to uh from uh 1200 to 1340
or whatever which i think is an 80 inch i think the michael had 60 horsepower to start with being
an flh dfl at 55 i think but it's never going to be a high performer it's always going to be just
a big old fat hog that's only going to go so fast which honestly from the time of my life in college
those first years after a big slow bike is probably perfect for me as opposed to the
crotch rocket or something but it'd been almost 10 years and it just became like a girlfriend that
you bought diamonds for the [ __ ] the neighbor it was on its fifth engine with 25 000 miles or so
and i'd given it everything i could it just didn't play well and i think we were tired of each other
shortly after that engine build then the transmission started sounding bad you could tell
lifted it up and put put the screwdriver in my ear to the transmission it was coming from there
so i took it to a local shop here in town and asked them if they could swap out the gears
the owner really didn't give me a warm fuzzy that he knew what the hell he was talking
about mechanically which made me a little bit nervous but i was traveling so much for work
i didn't have time to do it myself i needed to get the thing back on the road so they went in
they replaced all the gears and then about a week or two after i had it i was driving home from work
and it suddenly would not shift out of fourth gear that shifter gear broke in it
so i took it back to them and they replaced the shifter here with some chinese knockoff
and they almost dumped it because of the way it locked up
so then they tell me well we can't find anything except these cheap chinese knock off once you dry
i found one in some store in texas a harley store shipped it over to them so there now you got the
right part get it done so they finally got it done and then they came back to me the spotlight was
rotated 90 degrees didn't even take the time to straighten that out for whatever they did
the starter solenoid was actually shorting against the bracket they stripped out the
thread on the rear exhaust stud and it also was leaking oil on the transmission seal over on the
primers when i finally had it back and it was finally running and i fixed all their [ __ ] ups
and it was still leaking at the train so i went back over the shop super pissed off it was in
between cars so that was my only vehicle and i didn't get a rental car for a couple weeks
there's a little dude in front of me and he says you're here for dennis i said yes sir
and uh he pulls up his shirt he's got the butt of a pistol sticking out of his pocket he goes
well i get him first you can have what's done and i pulled up my shirt
i had the glock right there too that guy had no business having anything to do with motorcycle
repair i probably ended up floating in the rio grande based on some of those business practices
i finally got the bike all together it's running but it's time to separate
fifth engine in 25 000 miles or so whatever it was i loved it i had great times with it but
it was time for a change and that's when i started building my first chopper i'll soon be posting a
video on all the choppers that i built while i had my shop my chrome customs in florida as well
and that link will be in the description of the video below so until then keep the shiny side up
subscribe to my youtube channel below and let's celebrate turning fuel and air into adrenaline