Tomb of the Unknown Harleys
Tomb of the Unknown Harleys
UP FRONT
David Edwards
IT’S NOT A DISCOVERY THAT RANKS UP there with unearthing King Tut’s burial chamber or finding the R.M.S. Titanic's final resting spot, but while researching his stories for this issue’s special Harley section, freelance writer David Johnson came across some Harley-Davidsons that even the most rabid H-D fanatic probably doesn’t know about. Call them the Harleys that never made it.
Did you know that Harley seriously considered making an inline-Four shortly before Honda released its CB750-the bike that sparked America’s love affair with high-tech Fours? And there have been other, equally interesting no-goes in Harley’s 90 years.
“It’s possible to view these nevermade-it Harleys as ‘skeletons in the closet,’ but they serve better as evidence of a company willing and able to explore alternatives, but unwilling or unable to pursue them,” says Johnson.
That 1960s Four wasn’t Harley’s first exploration into multiple cylinders. Though no photographic evidence exists, writer Maurice Hendry alleged in his 1972 company history that during the mid-1920s, H-D called in Everett DeLong, designer of fourcylinder bikes for the Cleveland factory, to draw up a number of Fours for police-bike applications. Harry Sucher’s account in Harley-Davidson: The Milwaukee Marvel squares with this, and adds some surprising details.
“DeLong’s first design was an alongthe-frame Four, but this was rejected as being too costly to produce. The next design was a V-Four, essentially two J top ends placed side by side on a wider crankcase. From a production standpoint, this was a better design, entailing fewer new parts, but it, too, was killed as being overly expensive to produce. The wooden mockup was reportedly destroyed,” says Johnson.
How about a British-style Harley? After WWII, both Harley-Davidson and Indian found themselves at war with lightweight, affordable Singles and vertical-Twins from Great Britain.
“David Wright, in his ‘official’ history of H-D, reports that during the 1940s Harley prototyped a bike that was clearly designed to beat the British at their own game: a shaftdrive vertical-Twin with hydraulic fork and rear suspension, as well as
foot shift and hand clutch. Unfortunately, no photos of this bike have surfaced to date,” says Johnson.
Jump forward to 1966 and the bike that could have beat the Japanese to the four-cylinder punch. Code-named the XI000, this was a wet-sump, lOOOcc, across-the-frame design with doubleoverhead cams and a distinctly Italian look. Using two carburetors rather than four, this engine would probably have been tuned for torque rather than peak horsepower, Johnson reports.
Though the mockup XI000 predated the production Honda 750 Four, it was a creation in cardboard and clay rather than a running prototype-and apparently never got past that stage.
Johnson calls the next unknown Harley engine “The $10 Million Dead End,” and notes that it is not a subject openly discussed by H-D officials.
“If you sunk a bundle of money into an investment that went sour, you’d naturally be reluctant to talk about it, right? That’s why there’s not a lot of information available on the overhead-cam 880 and llOOcc Vees Harley-Davidson was working on in the 1970s. Peter Reid mentions the engines in Well Made in America, noting that they fell short of performance expectations, ran afoul of noise regulations and had structural problems to boot. After numerous styling mockups and over a dozen prototypes, the project was abandoned in 1976,” he says. On the heels of those aborted ohc Twins came the Nova Project, a program for a new family of modular engines built with two, four or six cylinders, in displacements ranging from 500 to 1500cc. Design and development of the engine was turned over to Porsche in Germany.
“This was revolutionary stuff,” says Johnson. “AMF, which then owned Harley, initially supported Nova to the tune of $10 million, but by the early 1980s, AMF balked at the additional millions that would have been required to make the bike a reality. H-D officially shelved the project in 1983.”
The only Nova bike pictured in detail was a test mule, so it is hard to say how the bike would have been styled. But that running prototype reveals plenty.
“The mule’s engine was an 800cc, water-cooled V-Four, with chain-driven dual overhead cams and wet-sump oiling. Fuel was delivered by Bosch Jetronic fuel injection. The horizontally split crankcases made provision for a balancer shaft, though one may or may not have been fitted to the prototype,” says Johnson. “The deeply finned cylinders and heads belied the fact of liquid cooling, as did the apparent lack of a radiator. The radiator was, in fact, located above the engine, shrouded by a false gas tank that would duct air across it. The real gas tank was located beneath the seat.”
Though Nova never went into production, the program may yet pay dividends. For one thing, the current Evolution engines, good as they are, may someday require fuel injection and liquid cooling to meet ever-tightening emissions and noise standards. And some of the engineering of the Nova engines may find its way into the much-rumored, long-awaited Superbike engine.
As interesting as it is to speculate about the effects these Harleys that didn’t make it might have had on Motor Company history, Johnson warns against second-guessing the decision makers at America’s sole remaining motorcycle company.
“However intriguing these bikes may be,” he says, “Harley-Davidson finds itself hale and hearty on its 90th anniversary in spite of-perhaps because of-the no-go decisions it has made in the past.”
