The History of Harley-Davidson

The History of Harley-Davidson : Over 100 Years of Motorcycle Greatness ARTICLE BY MOTORCYCLE INSURANCE
If you’re a motorcyclist, you know that the name “Harley Davidson” simply can’t be touched by other names in the business. Harley Davison started out as a pipe dream nearly 110 years ago now, and it’s spent the past century becoming perhaps the most prestigious motorcycle company across the entire globe. Over the course of the past century, 

Harley Davidson has produced some of the most beloved motorcycles in history. This house name continues to faithfully roll out new, beautiful bikes, all under the same dedication to craft and quality that the original Harley and Davidson stood by. From huge bikes to smaller one, everyone has their own personal Harley preference—and whatever model you love most, you know you’re riding a roaring piece of high quality machinery. You love your Harley, but you may not know the history behind the business. From humble beginnings—Harley’s design of an engine to fit on a bicycle— to big earnings, Harley Davidson has left a rich legacy in the US and all over the world. The following timeline chronicles just a few of the great moments in time for the big business of Harley Davidson.

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HARLEY DAVIDSON V-ROD | CUSTOM MOTORCYCLE

HARLEY DAVIDSON V-ROD | CUSTOM MOTORCYCLE BY WONDER BIKES
Wonder Bikes is a custom bike studio in Texas. The owner Jason Wonder only took a couple of months to turn a Harley Davidson V-Rod into this killer bike. The bike is called Rev-2 features Brembo 4 piston brakes attached to HogPro Daytona wheels wrapped in Metzeler tires. Of course it comes with a V-Rod motor, a fuel-injected 1130cc water-cooled V-twin engine, outputting 115 horsepower!

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1927 Harley-Davidson Powered Airplane

1927 Airplane engine based on a Harley JD V-twin. This looks very similar to the 1928 Wilson Miller airplane powered by a Harley-Davidson engine on display at Wheels Through Time Museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina.

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Harley-Davidson LR-64 Rocket.

Harley-Davidson-produced LR-64 Rocket. Manufactured by H-D for the U.S. Navy at their York, Pennsylvania, assembly plant, the LR-64 was used to power drones during military training exercises. Harley produced more than 5,000 of these rockets between the mid-Sixties and the Nineties.

VIA Hemmings

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HARLEY-DAVIDSON INDIAN FLAG

 CREDITS PaulReesPhotography 

Happy Independence day India
Grease N Gasoline
http://hydro-carbons.blogspot.com/

BuilderShaw Speed and Custom
OwnerJohn Shaw
LocationHolmes Hill, East Sussex
Country UK
Websitehttp://www.shawharley-davidson.co.uk
Bike NameStrike True UAE
Year/Model2010
Engine Make/Size1584
DrivetrainH-D stock
Frame Make/TypeH-D stock
Front EndPaughco 2 inch under
RakeStandard
StretchStandard
SwingarmH-D stock
Wheels FrontH-D hub aftermarket rim 21
Wheels RearH-D hub and rim 17
Tires FrontMetzeler 21
Tires RearMetzeler 17
Brakes FrontPerformance Machine
Brakes RearPerformance Machine
PainterImage Design Custom
Chroming/PlatingN/A
Additional InfoH-D gas tank fabricated at Shaw Speed and Custom, rear fender handmade at Shaw Speed and Custom, battery cover, rear inner fender and regulator cover fabricated at Shaw Speed, frame stripped welds cleaned, and all repainted. Rear swingarm modified at Shaw Speed and Custom for driveside sprocket and rotor assembly. oil tank NYC Choppers, headlight and rear tailight CSC. Roland Sands Design full engine and transmission covers. Performance Machine forward controls and master cylinder and switch gear assembly. 1930 speedster handlebars, Vance and Hines exhaust system, brass footpegs and handgrips, glass/brass air breather 0571 garage, lowered rear suspension, handcrafted seat on Roland Sands seat pan. H-D rotors and wheels stripped modified and rebuilt in house.

V-ROD CAFE RACER

 Harley-Davidson V-Rod cafe racer

 This Harley-Davidson V-Rod cafe racer was built by a company called Dr Mechanik in Stuttgart for the Austrian actor Georg Friedrich. Friedrich had his V-Rod rebuilt after it was heavily damaged in a collision with a car, and he had it done all the way including a rear shock, adapted from a Ducati 916.MORE INFO

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RUNNER UP 2012 STURGIS AMD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

 2nd Place: 2012 STURGIS AMD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
Shop:  LC Fabrications in Crawford, Virginia USA
Name Of The Bike: Old Black
Builder: Jeremy Cupp
Engine: 1976 Ironhead 900

 2012 STURGIS AMD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 

2nd Place: 2012 STURGIS AMD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
Shop:  LC Fabrications in Crawford, Virginia USA
Name Of The Bike: Old Black
Builder: Jeremy Cupp
Engine: 1976 Ironhead 900

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“The American” Cafe Racer

Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster “THE AMERICAN” Cafe Racer by Deus Ex Machina AmericaThe new design director Michael Woolaway came up with a brilliant idea – to build an all-American Deus cafe racer custom motorcycle .The American Incorporates a C&J Low Boy dirt-track chassis as well as a fully-built Harley Sportster engine mated to a five-speed gearbox.

The fully-built motor includes forged J&E high-compression pistons, Edelbrock big-valve cylinder heads and bob-weight-balanced crank performance rods, all of that sitting on top of a Halrey five-speed bottom end. The front suspension comes from Buell, while the triple clamps are sourced from Durelle Racing. Other goodies include Works Performance hand-built shocks, SuperTrapp mufflers and a Motogadget speedo

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Top 10 Weird looking vintage motorcycles

1) MZ Trophy – It truly boggles the mind to consider the sort of styling perversions that were permitted behind the Berlin Wall, and above them all (an entire order of magnitude above the Trabant) lies the MZ Trophy. Where can we possibly start? The horrific huge square headlight which butts out from the front of the tank and envelops the triple clamps? The toucan beak front fender? The jerry can side covers? The patched-together chromed cannon exhaust? This is the only motorcycle ever built that’s uglier than me with a hangover!

2) Harley Davidson Bobcat – So you thought that Harley only made huge V-twins, huh? In the Sixties the Hog people got into this weird partnership with Italian manufacturer Aermacchi and foisted a number of small displacement malodorous piles on the American motorcycling public. But nothing could compare to the Bobcat, with its dented tank, scrawny forks, Schwinn front fender, silly high pipe, and to top it all off, a bumpy lump of bodywork running the entire rear half of the bike that looked like it had been run over on the freeway. Did this homely design set the scene for the dreaded Bobtail in the early Seventies?

3) Sears Puch – For reasons known only to retail historians in Chicago, Sears Roebuck decided to rebadge some Puchs (not Pukes, but close) as Sears and Allstates in order to sell them to anyone insane enough to buy one. Taking the pressed steel school of motorcycle design to outrageous limits, the kyphosic scoliosis of this backbone is enough to scare off even a chiropractor. Throw in oversized fenders, chain guard, paint the whole mess fire engine red, and then prop a fat bicycle seat suspended on the back of the tank and you have a Searsaster!

4) Jawa Bizon – Drawing from the same creative well that created the MZ Trophy ugliramathon, here is another Iron Curtain siamesed tank / headlight with a triple tree running through it. The Commie Red and Siberian Snow paintjob outlines each and every disgusting line on this massive piece of junk. If anyone needed proof that command economies don’t work, they could just put a poster of this aberration on their office walls.

5) Royal Enfield Diesel – I’m kinda partial to the traditional ultra-vintage styling of India’s Royal Enfields, but when it came to building a diesel, they definitely were smoking that wacky tabacky. What were they thinking when they put that big lawnmower chromed sidecover on the side of a scrawny little cylinder spewing out through a thin reed of an exhaust? It looks like they forgot at least half of the top end!

6) Honda Dream – For some reason known only to Hondaphiles, it is generally considered sacrilege to diss the Dream and its “sporty” cousin the Benly, even though they are profoundly ugly bikes. If anyone ever needed a reason to never consider designing a pressed steel frame, the BenlyDream is it. The front fender would keep the rain off a Peterbilt, the chain enclosure and fork covers are a bulky mess, the sidecovers look like they belong on a Craftsman tool chest, and that horrific square headlight! Eeek!

7) BSA Rocket 3 – This original inhabitant of the Top 10 Ugliest List is just as ugly as before, but under due consideration to the six uglibikes ahead of it, I’ve cut it a bit of slack. Still, how can you justify the gargantuan six-slotted sidecovers, the toaster reflector shrouds, and those triple muffler tip extensions straight out of the Thunderbirds? And almost half a century later, the same Rocket 3 name is being used on a bike that’s just as hideous!

8) Harley Davidson Sprint – Another Aermacchi Harley bastard son of the Sixties was a bike with every line in the wrong place. The monstrous over-finned horizontal single cylinder engine just hanging off the frame set new lows for both styling and engineering, the sidecovers were put on as an afterthought, and they weren’t fooling anyone with that pseudo-Sportster fuel tank. What an Aermess!

9) Triumph 3TA – What do you get when you back a Bonneville into a bathtub? The Triumph Three T*ts & A*s! This juggeruglinaut would have scored much higher on this list had the front half not been such a beautiful classic, but what possibly possessed the Triumph stylists to come up with that twaddle of a rear end? That one piece fender thing certainly qualifies as the ugliest single motorcycle part ever built!

10) Suzuki TC – It’s not entirely fair to pick only on Suzuki, as Yamaha, Kawasaki, Bridgestone and Honda all produced equally stupid looking scramblers in those days, but the TC homey tank curvature, speedo embedded headlight and atrocious nameplate on the sidecovers got a bit of an edge over the competition in the weird race !

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An Italian Harley-Steve Bond

The name “Harley-Davidson” usually conjures images of large, V-twin, heavily-chromed motorcycles, but this Harley has only one cylinder, utilizes magnesium instead of “bling” and, even though its natural habitat is Daytona, you’ll find it at the racetrack, not trolling Main Street.

Aeronautica Macchi (soon abbreviated to Aermacchi) was founded by Julio Macchi in 1912 and originally manufactured seaplanes. The company stayed true to its airy roots until just after World War 2, when (for obvious reasons) it started producing three-wheeled delivery vehicles. Their first motorcycle hit the Italian market in 1950 and the company became so successful that Harley-Davidson bought 50 percent of Aermacchi in 1960.

Why? At that time, the “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” lightweight motorcycle boom was in full swing in North America and Harley, with nothing smaller than their 883 Sportster available, wanted in. So they re-badged Aermacchi 250 and 350 cc horizontal single-cylinder machines in Italy and sold them as Harley Sprints.

As recreational motorcycling grew, so did various forms of racing. So it was natural that Sprints were transformed into racers. Some were pressed into dirt track duty while others competed in the pavement wars – quite successfully. With 35 horsepower on tap and a dry weight of only 215 lb, the motorcycle had a great power to weight ratio and the chassis was Italian thoroughbred so you can bet the handling was top-drawer. In fact, Dick Hammer won the Expert 100-mile 250 race at Daytona on a CRTT and as late as 1968, Don Hollingsworth won the 76-mile Novice race at Daytona on an Aermacchi 250 – beating a horde of TD1 Yamaha two-strokes in the process.

The motorcycle gracing these pages is a 1964 Harley/Aermacchi 250 cc CRTT – purpose built from the factory for road racing – not a modified street bike.

The frame is a massive single backbone with the engine hung below and is further reinforced with judicious bracing, most noticeably the one connecting the upper shock mount to the swingarm pivot. Harley got their fingers in with noticeably oversize street handgrips and the somewhat clunky folding footpegs, all proudly sporting the Harley Davidson logo.

The engine is the full-race undersquare “longstroke” motor with bore and stroke being 66 x 72mm. The 30 mm Del Orto carburetor is mounted vertically so the fuel mixture gets a straight shot into the intake port of the horizontal cylinder, but to prevent extreme flooding, the carb has a rubber-mounted remote float bowl. Confirming the pedigree, both cylinder and head are aluminum but go one step further by being sandcast. Nice.

Both brakes have magnesium hubs, the front drum being a twin-shoe model with racing linings, and wheels are gorgeous aluminum alloy units. Racing touches abound on the motorcycle, as brake stays, activating arms, and even the friction steering damper knob are drilled for lightness. The CRTT is set off beautifully by the streamlined aluminum fuel tank.

Bar Hodgson purchased this CRTT from Paul Trethewey, a collector and enthusiast of Italian exotics. The original owner had raced this bike out of Florida where the bike saw a lot of action in the Southeast USA. When Paul began the restoration he found the original racer had rebuilt the brakes and wheels after campaigning. Paul shipped the crankshaft to England for rebuilding and balancing and then commissioned noted Aermacchi builder, Joe Lachniet, in Michigan to complete the engine rebuild. After dealing with the painting, chroming and suede seat recovering Paul had Rick Covello complete the re-assembly. The restoration is complete although Bar is currently tidying up a few items and trying to locate an original Smiths tachometer.

Some Aermacchi race bikes (and street bikes) were given the name Ala D’Oro. Honda actually had to pay Aermacchi for the rights to use this name when they introduced a revolutionary touring bike in 1975 – the Gold Wing.

This Harley isn’t an overweight poser in a Hawaiian sport shirt – it’s a genuine tri-athlete with an Armani suit.

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