Before we could leave the cafe at lunch on our Sinday ride, several phalanx of HD riders fired up and hit the road.  Phalanx? Look it up.

I guess in part the upper room at the Cafe acts as a reverb chamber.  All we could do was sit there and laugh as one Harley after another fired, revved up, and road off.  It was impossible to converse for a period of time.  So, I wasn’t going to share this, but after today’s luncheon interruption I changed my mind, go ahead and check it out:

I had shown this video to my son earlier, and got to see him laugh more than I’d seen in quite awhile.  So, why is Harley bashing so satisfying?  I think this is a fair question, the answers to which may shed light in that dark place of our souls, you know, the place that is responsible for the weird fact that riding is fun at all for grownups.  I mean, just because a HD is underpowered, overpriced, doesn’t handle, are often fiddled to make an unholy racket, and have lousy brakes, its still a legitimate form of cycling fun, isn’t it?

Many of us have or have had HD’s, and they can be a lot of fun, but it is quit a different thing than riding a sport or sport/touring bike.  My most recent phase of cycling began with a Suzuki Savage, a 650 single cylinder pocket cruiser, with lots of torque, and not much else.  But, it was very satisfying to putz up and down the parkway at or below the speed limit. Admittedly, when on a more competent bike, riding the speed limit isn’t that much fun, so there is sort of a trade off.

So, what is a cruiser?  Well, it is image, as well as a particular machine configuration.  The configuration is what is called in Britain and on the continent, feet forward.  Feet forward is a riding position that is similar to sitting in a rocking chair with your feet flat on the floor in front of you.  The cruiser riding position is initially comfortable, natural, and familiar, sitting bolt upright with your feet out in front.  Scooters also utilize the same riding position.  The feet forward position works pretty well until speed demands better rider control, and wind pressure dictates getting down out of the wind stream.  As distance ridden, speed, lean angle, and the need for control increase, the cruiser feet forward position becomes progressively less viable.  Part of what is going on here is the need to get your feet up and out of the way when leaned over, but even more so, is the need to get more of your weight forward.  As riding becomes more aggressive, more and more control is established by having more and more weight on the front wheel.

So, there is also image, based on association with loners, outlaws, and criminals, made glorious on the silver screen, thanks a lot to Mr Easy rider, Dennis Hopper,  RIP. Check out Dennis’ filmography, quite impressive.

So, for many cruisers, in addition to a feet forward riding position, is the bad ass image, and a machine that features a lot of torque.  In addition to HD, all four Japanese cycle makers have a line of metric cruisers, generally more capable, with more advanced engineering, and a toned down version of the BA marketing image, think Honda Shadow.  Remember, BMW tried their hand at a cruiser not that long ago, gave it quite a try before they gave up.  The BMW C was a very stylish bike, had an extremely high level of fit and finish, was made to sound American with some special models such as the Montauk, and did not sell well.  I personally was attracted to the bike, looked at a used one, but discovered that they were geared very low, would be revving pretty high at interstate speeds, and lost interest.  So BMW got the “slow” part right, but sort of missed the Bad Ass part.

There was also, briefly a variant of the cruiser, called the power cruiser.  Honda made the original Magna from 83 to 86, and Yamaha answered with the V-Max which they still make.  These were both feet forward bikes, but with water cooled V4 very potent motors, torque and a lot of horsepower, plus more contemporary suspension and brakes, for the day anyway.

If you go here http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/4216203 you will see a list of contemporary bikes that Popular Mechanics considers to be power cruisers.  Other than the V Rod and the Triumph Rocket III I would disagree with PM, so what do they know about bikes, or anything else for that matter?

Somewhat related to the power cruiser, is the naked bike or street fighter, an approach pioneered largely by Ducati with their Monster series, and of course now many makes have a street fighter.  About all this marketing stuff amounts to is to strip the fairing and or touring equipment off a spot or sport touring bike, and try to horn in on the Bad Ass aspect by calling it a street fighter.  Give me a break.  You get a stripped down, lighter weight, maybe cleaner looking bike, and maybe a bike in which you can look thru the engine to the other side of the bike, like the older British twins.  Personally, I don’t think this street fighter designation means much of anything, and most of them have a lot more in common with the UJM, that is Universal Japanese Motorcycle, think 1970′s on on 4 cylinder Honda 750 up to todays 1400 cc inline fours without a fairing.

While discussing the taxonomy of bikes, particularly looking at cruisers, something must be said about the in line V twin.  The inline V twin is almost synonymous with the cruiser, but not quite.  Ducati has fabulous V twins, that are anything but cruisers, as did Vincent, back in its day.  Most modern V twins use an alternate firing cycle.  Harley, however, has both cylinders fire in the same cycle, which gives that unique syncopated sound, potato potato potato, which they have copywrited, and which does tend to produce more torque, as the twin cylinder engine functions more like a big single cylinder engine, think older John Deere tractors.

So, to bring this discussion to a close, what about Eric Buell?  Eric is/was a very race oriented innovative designer, who tried his best to bring HD kickin and screaming into the 21st century.  Sorry Eric, but that ain’t bad ass anuff, never mind that a Buell would run circles around the comparable HD in all departments.  Too bad, cause that syncopated V twin in a decent chassis makes a hell of a bad ass motorcycle.  In my book, bad ass is a slim bike and engine that lets you drop your feet straight to the pavement, with a lot of butt kicking torque plus power up to say 110 mph, but leaving most of the vibration at home.  In other words, a modernized HD Sportster.  Back in the day, early 60′s I learned to ride on a Sporster, in an age when 650 cc was a big English bike, the Sportster’s 883 cc was totally Bad Ass to me, and the HD FLH at 1200 cc was, well, a HOG.  In the ultimate irony to me, the HD affectionadoes, Harleyistas (?), consider the Sportster a “girly” bike.  That’s it.  I was going to show you a picture of my granddaughter’s (3 1/2 yrs old) pink plastic electric jeep, parked next to Poppi’s BMW.  Oh well.

Dave Johnson
Boone NC
The Kilometer High City

BMW 1100RT ’2000′
Honda Magna V65 ’84′