Return of the Super Glide

Return of the Super Glide

CW EXCLUSIVE

new bikes 2006

The Most Important Harley Ever Gets an Encore

WHAT? A NEW, NOSTALGIC HARLEY? SHOCKING, truly shocking. But this 35thanniversary Super Glide isn't reaching back to the Forties or Fifties like most of Harley's retrobikes. It's harking back to the fall of 1970, and the most important Harley-Davidson of them all: the 1971 Super Glide, in all its white, red and blue glory.

That Super Glide made Harley-Davidson what it is today. Before the Super Glide, Harley was building 16,000 motorcycles a year-not many more bikes than Buell will build this year. Honda used to sell about that many CB350s in a month back in 1970. But Harley was cranking out Electra Glides and Sportsters; the first for a few old men and Shriners, the second a proto-superbike about to be caught in a perfect storm of real superbikes-Honda CB750s and Kawasaki H2s and Z-1 s-bikes that would change the performance universe forever. After the superbike wars, Harley would never again sell a bike on the basis of absolute power and speed.

If the Motor Company had continued with just tourers and Sportsters, it might not be around today.

But young Willie G. Davidson had come up with something new, a stripped down FL Electra Glide with a lightweight XL Sportster front end. This mongrel was given the designation FX, and it set the world on fire. It was a literal “chopper,” a machine with parts cut down or removed, a style and performance alternative to gross touring machines that at the time were not nostalgic, merely outdated. It was Harley-Davidson’s future, and from it sprang every customstyle motorcycle that’s come from Milwaukee ever since.

For 2006, Harley is producing a 1971 lookalike in a substantially updated Dyna chassis. It doesn’t have the odd boat-tail fender that was available on the first Super Glide, it weighs more than the 565 pounds of the original, and it comes with an electric starter. But other than that, it’s a fair rendition of the original, right down to the red, white, and blue “1” emblem on the gas tank, and if you could ride one past a 1971 Harley dealership today, no one would notice that you were from the future until you stopped and they got a close look.

Then they’d see the truly shocking things. Take the 49mm fork, new for 2006, up a whopping 10mm from last year’s tubes. The original FX had spindly 35mm Sportster units which look spaghetti-flexy to modern eyes, suitable only for some minibike. The new fork, clamping an enlarged 1inch-diameter axle, is bridge-like in comparison. It should certainly firm up the connection between handlebar and front tire patch, aiding steering precision. Non-offset triple-clamps carry the tubes at the same conservative 29degree angle as the steering head.

STEVE ANDERSON

Similarly, the swingarm has been strengthened, and the rear-wheel assembly given a stiffer, 1inch axle. The new swingarm makes room for a wider 160/70-17 tire. Seventeen? No one made such a tire size in 1971, but it’s now the current motorcycle mainstream, introduced for Harley models on the V-Rod.

But it’s the Twin Cam engine and transmission package that would truly astonish a time traveler. Even with mufflers that silence far, far more than the original, the 88-cubic-inch engine outpowers its Seventies 74-inch Shovelhead counterpart. In reliability and durability, there is simply no comparison. For 2006, Harley has worked to enhance all aspects of the engine/transmission package-truly an integrated unit these days. The bolt-on transmission has been redesigned in every aspect and given a sixth gear ratio-two more than the original Glide, and one more than even the imports carried in 1971. The new gearbox (“Cruise Drive” in Harley marketing speak) uses quieter-running helical gears and has seen its torque capacity increase by 28 percent, the better to deal with some of the big displacement possibilities offered by Harley’s Screamin’ Eagle catalog. Because helical gears can’t slide sideways for shifting purposes as can the gears in a conventional straight-cut motorcycle transmission, special rings carry shifting dogs and do the cog-swapping, just as in a racecar transmission. The light shifting rings reduce inertia, allowing Harley to reduce shifting effort while shortening shift throw. (The Buell Ulysses tested in this issue uses a similar design, and proved the best-shifting bike we’ve ever experienced with a Harley-built engine.) The sixth gear ratio on the new Glide is used as an overdrive, reducing engine speed on the highway.

The interface between the Twin Cam engine and the gearbox has been revised, so that engine oil (carried in a tank in the gearbox) now flows through ports at the interface, rather than through external lines. Further reducing maintenance is the new automatic tensioner for the primary drive. This allowed Harley engineers to design new primary covers and eliminate the no-longer-needed inspection port on the outer cover. They also gave the clutch a new diaphragm spring, re-leveraged the throw-out mechanism, and specified a less-slippery-for-the-clutch gear lubricant, all to reduce effort at the clutch lever by a whopping 35 percent. You could consider this a nostalgic bit of engineering, aiming to achieve a light-pulling clutch lever that hasn’t been seen on Big Twins since the demise of their (occasionally) dry clutch.

As for the engine itself, one of the few problem areas of the Twin Cam has been redesigned: the cambox. The cams now ride in plain (rather than rollingelement) bearings, and a new, hydrau¿jäjjHT (m lie tensioner takes the slack from a ^

redesigned cam chain. To support those plain bearings, the engineers also increased the engine’s oil flow 10 percent while more substantially upping the scavenge capacity. Harley wants the Twin Cam to be reliable in ways almost unimaginable to someone who suffered with a Seventies Shovelhead. The new Super Glide, along with all other Dynas, now comes with Harley’s ESPFI fuel-injection system; a carburetor is not an option.

The Fat Boy-style twin tanks on the 2006 Super Glide closely resemble those of the 1971, a design that Cycle magazine in November of 1970 labeled, perhaps unfairly, “gross, designed with a heavy hand, intrusive.” They’ve only been seen on a few hundred thousand Big Twins since. Of course, Cycle's Cook Neilson wasn’t shy about telling us what he really thought, as when he said that the 1971 model FX’s left footpeg “shook like a palsied chicken at 60 mph; the only way to keep your foot in place is to wedge your heel against the clutch bulge.” That shouldn’t be a problem on the rubber-mounted 2006. Nor should it have the problems braking as did the original with its Sportster-sized front drum brake. “It faded like an echo,” said Neilson, and insisted the Super Glide’s

brakes were “an abomination.” The single disc on the front of the 2006 model has proven entirely adequate to stop other Harleys, and recalls slightly later Super Glides in which Harley answered Cycle's criticisms, fitting them with the Motor Company’s first disc brake.

The riding position of the new machine also recalls the old, coming as it does with only mid-mounted footpegs. That reminds us of when the whole custom experience was considered edgy and radical, when motorcycle outlaws were real, and Harley-

Davidson executives had to think long and hard about whether they wanted to build a machine that played on that image. Forward pegs were a step too far for that day, which tells you more of the difference between then and now than does most anything else. That first Super Glide was a machine at the edge, a leap into the unknown. It succeeded so completely that its 35th-anniversary replica is one of the most conservative machines in Harley’s cruising lineup, homage to a radical past that’s no longer radical. But aren’t revolutions always like that? □