Electra Glide Report Card
Electra Glide report card
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
TOUCHY BUSINESS, THESE HARLEYS. I have discovered since buying my new FLHS Electra Glide Sport that owning a Harley has exactly the same effect on people as professing an interest in country music or opera.
Mention Hank Williams or Giacomo Puccini in mixed company and you will find the group immediately cloven into those who are enthusiastic, or at least sympathetic, and those whose eyes glaze over, hoping for a quick change of subject. Heard it. Don’t like it. Next topic, please.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised at the mail I received last year when I wrote a column about buying my new Electra Glide. Seems there are a great many motorcyclists out there who are thinking about buying their first Harley-this very model, in many cases-after having owned (or while still owning) a long string of other bikes.
About half of the readers who wrote in are actively looking for a new Harley, but can’t find a dealer who has their favorite model in stock, and the other half are undecided. But in both cases, they wanted to know how my bike has held up mechanically, and if I still like it. Did I take that long trip out West? How did it work, two-up, for touring?
Time to fess up and report back.
First, my wife Barbara and I did not take that long trip out West. Family illness and other matters caused us to cancel our regular summer vacation in favor of a few long weekend trips.
But I did break away late in the summer on an impromptu 2500-mile tour around Lake Superior with Editor David Edwards and two of his old riding pals from Chicago. The Great Western Tour is still on for this summer. In any case, I put exactly 5000 miles on the Harley last season.
Reliability? So far, no problems. Not even a burned-out lightbulb. After a long, hot weekend trip there is usually a very small amount of oil mist around the seams of the transmission and engine cases, but it washes off easily with the normal cleanup. No drips. Scheduled maintenance, lube and oil changes during break-in have been quick and painless-the cheapest dealer visits I’ve ever made. Hydraulic lifters eliminate the usual valve adjust ritual, and the belt drive has needed only minor adjustments.
Performance? Well, the bike is just fine in top gear with one person on board. It has plenty of torque for passing, and goes down the road with a wonderful, vibration-free serenity and a nice low-key engine cadence cruising anywhere between 60 and 80 mph. Top end, with the big windshield, is just over 100 mph.
But add hills, a passenger and luggage, and the bike needs at least 10 more horsepower to be happy. Downshifting doesn’t help acceleration much; it just makes more gearbox noise. Eighty cubic inches should do more. I give it an A for personality and fun on solo cross-country riding, and a Cfor two-up riding in hill country.
Handling: Easy to ride around town, effortless to maneuver, the low eg hides the 700-pound weight well. Dead stable on the highway and composed in long sweeping corners. Try to push it too hard on a curving, bumpy road, however, and it loses that composure pretty quickly. On backroads, it’s no Ducati. But in city traffic or on the open road, my Ducati is no Harley, so there you go.
Brakes: They work fine for me. I’ve heard complaints that the front lever demands too much effort, but this is something I stopped noticing during my first day of ownership. And the dual front discs will haul the bike down ferociously when conditions (farm dogs, deer) require.
I should add here that Barb, as a passenger, doesn’t like the bike as much as I do as a rider. She is used to more performance, particularly when passing trucks, and more speed, lean and agility in corners. She also says the big cushy rear seat places her up in the wind, rather than tucked in, and she loses that one-with-the-bike sense of unity. Whenever we take the old BMW R100RS for a ride, she says “This is more like it.”
As a passenger, of course, she doesn’t sense much of the mechanical essence of the bike, which is a part of its charm, and as it’s too big for her to ride solo she doesn’t get to experience its one-up acceleration. But again, an 80-cubicinch motorcycle should not be this sensitive to the addition of a 120-pound passenger. So why not put a cam in it, add pipes or a Screaming Eagle carb?
Well, the bike starts, idles, carburetes and cruises so nicely that I hesitate to mess with it. My friend Rick, who is a service manager at the Harley shop, also has an FLHS and has left it dead stock. “If I wanted more performance and noise,” he says, “I would get a different bike. The FLHS runs just the way it should.”
And he’s right. Which is why I put so many miles on the Harley last summer. Its sheer usability allowed it to take over all the trips for which I would normally use a car. Unless it was raining, I took the Glide everywhere. Pull on an open-face helmet (or no helmet if you prefer) and sunglasses, sit down behind that big windshield and go. Effortless, fun transportation.
I’ve gotten so used to having the Big Harley now, I can’t quite remember what I did without it.
It’s also probably a good comment on the bike’s character that (a) I haven’t even thought of selling it, and (b) if it were stolen I’d try to find another one just like it. It’s the first bike I would choose if I wanted to ride from here (Wisconsin) to California. It was built to be ridden across the Great Plains. And will be, I swear, next summer. Would I want the FLHS as an only bike? No. But then I’ve yet to ride a motorcycle I would want as an only bike. As Willie G. Davidson once said to me, “We all need four or five motorcycles.”
True enough. And for me the FLHS has become one of those five. I love the bike. It makes me smile when I ride it, every time.
