Chapter 13 – Wheels of Rage by Kurt Saxon

It’s like people who started out as early as 1925 with a touring car modified for living in. Of course, this was just for vacations and the like, but out of that came people who lived in them year round and they were a special breed.

What is important is that, like us, they wanted to live largely independent of the establishment. A modern mobile home type looks like most people but he’s got tricks you would not believe. And he is closer to us than guys you see tooling around on a Yamaha.

You got a Yamaha, you not only depend on the establishment, you depend on the establishment in goddamn Japan, for parts. But a Harley is American, red, white and blue. In any service station you got the bolts and nuts that fix it and the tools of the rack to take it apart for general maintenance. The fact that it often takes a little physical culture to make garage people loan tools is beside the point.

What’s important is that you can jerry-rig a Harley Chopper with parts from a dime store. But you can be in some little town with, say, a Honda and lose one lousy nut and you’ve blown your whole show.

So screw those foreign machines. They just put Americans out of work; that’s all they do. And they’re tinny, man. They have a buzz that makes them sound like toys. The Harley has a deep throated American roar. You know it’s around, baby.

The main reason the Harley-Davidson got to be the number one hard assed bike was due to the Second World War. Guys came back restless and wanting action, like after any war.

The Harley was a thrill in itself and it was the cheapest, often war surplus. So the ballsiest characters used them for racing and general tearing around.

As the machines got older, the wiring and parts broke down and the Chopper evolved. The original reason for chopping was to make them easier to repair and to work on. Along with this came a desire for an all-round sleek machine.

A full dress Harley, once it becomes old and ratty, is almost impossible to work on. You have to pull off the gas tank to get at the carburetor and the wiring must have been designed by a mad Russian.

I don’t think there is anybody who can wire a stock Harley, properly, unless it’s a guy who’s been trained in the factory. It’s about the most complicated gobbledy- gook I’ve ever seen.

When you go to chop a Harley with all the original junk on it, called a dresser, you can go one of two ways. If the bike is real clean and in good condition but you want to chop it anyway, your best bet is to do it a little at a time. But if it’s a real mess to start with, you just tear it all apart and redo it completely at the beginning.

For a dresser, one week you throw in a set of slugs, or pistons, in the front forks to make them longer. On a stock bike this raises the center of gravity, which gives you a better feel of the road, adds comfort and makes it easier to lean into a turn.

Of course, if you have fairy forks, those extended way out front, you have something that might look great on a showroom floor but isn’t very roadworthy. The long, dainty forks demand a wider radius to turn in and therefore are almost impossible in traffic. Aside from less maneuverability, the juncture at the fork and the frame has a lot more pressure on it and if weak will cause the bike to break in half. That can be unnerving at eighty miles an hour. You also lose a lot of the advantage of the springers due to the angle of the forks.

The forks can make or break your bike as far as maneuverability and safety are concerned. Along with the choice of forks is the choice of frames.

There are two kinds of frames. One is the swinging arm rear wheel suspension which has two arms attached to the frame and then to the rear wheel. These have hydraulics which give more comfort and bounce. The other is the rigid frame to which the rear wheel is attached without any hydraulics.

Harley springers are very popular because when chromed they look prettier than glides. Glides are kind of dumpy looking and they are aluminum so they can’t be chromed easily.

A lot of chopper magazines say people run springers because they look prettier and they choose rigid frames because they can put upswept pipes on them. Well, they do look better but the main reason the rigid frames and springer forks are so popular is they give the bike a lot better control.

When you have a bike that weighs around five hundred pounds and there’s a lot of hydraulics between you and the road like shock absorbers over both wheels, you lose a lot of feel of the road, especially on curves.

On a Harley with a rigid frame and springers, if you go through a mud puddle or an oil slick and your rear wheel starts to lose its grip, you’ll be able to feel it, like right now, and you can correct. On the other hand, a friend of mine was running a Harley with glides on the front and more hydraulics on the rear. Anyway, his rear wheel started skidding and, riding that featherbed, he couldn’t feel the skid in time to correct it. Naturally, his bike went down and he rolled about fifty feet.

Even so, he would have been alright if he had just tucked in. When you fall off a scooter the thing to do is just tuck your chin in and curl yourself into a ball and hope you don’t fetch up against anything solid.

He was doing alright, flopping along the pavement, until nearly the end of his roll. Then he put his hands out to stop himself because he thought he was going off this pier into the ocean. That got him a broken wrist but he still considered himself lucky not to have been killed.

After that he put a springer front end on his bike and he took the shock absorbers off. Then he welded struts where the shock absorbers were so he’d have a rigid frame.

Anyhow, the rigid frame and springers are super popular with the chopper set. So popular that we are now manufacturing springers in a garage.

We use 1020 steel, which is what Harley uses. Nearly all the manufacturers of springers besides us and one other firm use 4130 chrome Moly. This is aircraft tubing and has been around since the early thirties.

It’s designed to be extremely light. It’s really not all that functional on a motorcycle. Anyway, unless you preheat and post-heat it, you set up stresses in the metal and the welds have a tendency to crack.

Several of the larger firms that have been manufacturing these springer front ends have gotten a lot of complaints. I’ve talked to people who have come back in Louisiana and said they’d never buy another product from so-and-so, because these people got into the business when it started booming and they didn’t know what they were doing.

They didn’t bother to road test anything like most of your car manufacturers do. Consequently, there’s a lot of parts floating around the country, especially custom parts, that are extremely dangerous.

Now, these springers we’re making are selling for ninety-seven dollars and fifty cents. The price of springers from the old Army 45 cubic inch motorcycles is seventy-five bucks all through the South. That’s when they can be found.

That model isn’t very well known. Harley made the little 750 CC, called a 45 cubic inch, for the Army. They also made springers for it and they put them out until about the middle fifties.

The trouble with these 45’s is that the stem going up through the neck of the frame that attaches the springers to the frame on the 45 is fifteen-sixteenths of an inch. On a Harley 74, there’s a full inch opening. That sixteenth of an inch difference makes it extremely loose and it wobbles and is very dangerous.

To overcome this you have to change the race cups which are the parts on the bottom and top of the frame neck. That’s an involved operation. So our springers are a lot less hassle and cheaper in the long run.

Going back to general chopping, say you’ve got a dresser with springers and a rigid frame. You’ll first put on a custom seat, then the week after that you’ll put on a small fender. The next week a sissy bar goes on and like that. Before you know it, you’ll have your Chopper.

Now, my bike was the original reason for chopping. The engine was almost destroyed and coated with rust. The third gear in the transmission was all pitted and fouled. When you let a transmission sit for any length of time, especially in a cold climate like back East, you get condensation and the gears pit after awhile. If a bike is to be stored, you can stop pitting by either filling the transmission completely with oil or draining it completely.

When taking a Harley apart to chop it, be sure to save everything, even the stuff you don’t intend to put back on. There might be a nut or a bolt there that you can use.

When you’ve got the bike all apart, you first examine your engine. You remove the cylinder heads and cylinders and examine the valves and pistons and rings to see how badly beaten up they are. If they are in pretty good shape, you have saved a lot of money right there.

Next, you should check the lower end bearing for play. They’re on the bottom of the connecting rods. Then take out the transmission, the clutch assembly and the primary chain and its inner and outer covers.

If you have a horse shoe shaped oil tank, you save that. But a lot of these later model Harleys have an oil tank that looks like the Statler-Hilton. It’s a great big piece of garbage and it’s practically useless on a Chopper.

You save the rear wheel and brake assembly and the brake linkage. All you’ll usually have to do to a wheel is to respoke it and chrome it. If you exchange a wheel at most Chopper shops, it’ll bankrupt you. They want like fifty bucks on an exchange.

A sizable club usually has it’s own wheel respoking and truing equipment. Such equipment isn’t all that expensive and with a lot of guys using it, it saves a lot of beer and gas money.

A club should also have a small welding set plus a lot of special Harley tools. A small lathe will prove indispensable in time.

Big clubs that have all this stuff don’t have all the financial problems that the poor slob out in central Los Angeles has who can’t afford it. Or maybe he’s a rumpkin and nobody wants him. Consequently, he pays premium prices for everything.

Getting back to the subject; you save the front forks even though they’re usually pretty roachy. You have to take off the shields, or coverings, on them and the Harley-Davidson head light. It doesn’t look like a head light. It’ more like a big old plane spotter so it has to go.

If you’ve waded through this, let’s say you finally have all the parts off and are down to the rigid frame. To start building it back up, you first fit a peanut tank and a rear fender on it. Rear fenders are pretty cheap. You can buy one of them from a Chopper shop for about nine dollars.

A new peanut tank costs thirty dollars. You can get a used one for fifteen dollars. Sometimes you can scrounge one from a little Mustang or other old bike for maybe five dollars.

You usually have to drill a hole in the frame to bolt the rear end of the tank down. Several holes have to be drilled in the rear fender. The rear fender not only bolts onto the frame but also to the oil tank.

Then, if you’re going to have a buddy pad in back of the operator’s seat, instead of just one long seat, you’ll have to drill about four more holes in the fender for that. You also drill a hole in the fender for your sissy bar.

Once you get all this set up to where you know where your tank and fender go, then you do any molding off of sharp corners and get down to the painting.

What really sets the righteous Choppers off from the rumpkins is the paint job. I’ve seem paint jobs done with spray cans that looked like they’d been done with a brush in the hands of a child. A lot of them look awful.

If you get a compressor, and most sizable clubs have them, you are set up to do professional paint jobs. Before painting, however, take the frame, tank and fender to a sandblaster. They are in the phone book and are the only ones who can give you the surface you want to paint on.

After you’ve applied from eight to fifteen coats of paint, for long life, you wax your surfaces.

While you’re putting on your layers of paint, you check out all your engine parts to make sure they are reasonably free from wear. You’ll find yourself replacing a lot of parts even before you get the machine back together. But it’s better you do it now than when you’re on the road.

When the engine is ready, you go over the transmission. Take off the lid and side plates and examine the gears. If they look alright, just throw the whole thing back together. Harley transmissions practically never wear out.

If it’s a pretty old bike, the oil and gas tanks are likely to be pitted due to condensation. This is especially true of the oil tank. After a while tiny holes will appear in the top of the oil tank and when it is full, it will dribble oil all over the place. These pinholes in both tanks can be repaired with a welder.

Before you put your rear end back together, you should check your rear tire. To put up to a thousand dollars work into a bike and then have it go down to destruction because of a bald, ten dollar tire is frustrating.

When all that is taken care of, you check the clutch assembly. Examine the clutch plates to make sure the rivets are still tight. Make sure there’s not too much oil on them because a lot of times a guy will build a chopper and put on an extended front end but doesn’t lengthen the kick stand, so the bike leans way over to the left.

In this case, and it’s pretty frequent when buying a used Chopper, you have clutch trouble. If you’ve got a bad oil seal in the transmission, it will dribble oil all over your clutch and you’ll wonder why your clutch keeps slipping.

When you get all this taken care of, you look to your exhaust system. Your exhaust system should always be fitted on at a muffler shop because if you buy a set of pipes from a Harley shop, the odds are that the pipes you put on aren’t going to fit.

The reason for this trouble is that the Harley head projections that your exhaust pipes fit on wear down after about twenty years. So, no two Harleys are going to have the same size exhaust port to put your header pipe on.

You’re going to have a lot of air being sucked back into the exhaust system. You’ll then get a lot of backfiring and consequently you’ll burn your valves up and they’ll warp. But if you have it done by a muffler shop, they’ll fit nice and tight.

Besides, muffler shops don’t charge any more and they usually do a better job.

The handlebars on the old model Harleys were like a broomstick stuck straight across the front end and were uncomfortable to ride. From there they went to these high “ape hangers.” They just bent the bars and added the needed comfort.

When you rework the front end, if you’ve got springers, all you do is take a pair of radius rods from a junk 1940 auto and weld them onto the fork stock to replace the main, or back, fork. You then take one inch stock steel for the front legs, or spring fork, and you make them about one inch longer than the back legs. All this will be your front fork assembly.

If you do this part yourself, it costs you about ten dollars for materials and about fifteen to get the welding done. Altogether, about twenty-five bucks. The Chopper shops charge a hundred and thirty.

A lot of people, especially in California, don’t run front fenders but you should. It looks a lot better without a front fender but your front wheel has a tendency to throw rocks and small birds in your face. It’s also embarrassing if you go through a puddle and get a big brown streak up the front of your shirt.

When you get to the wiring, you learn to appreciate a Chopper. The wiring on a dresser is hopeless. It can get so old and funky it would cost as much as the machine is worth to have it rewired in the old way.

The original wiring is activated by a triple switch. When it is switched one notch to the right, the ignition is on. Two notches and the lights are on. Then all the way back to the left turns the main lights and ignition off and the parking lights on.

This makes for a lot of complicated wiring which goes through junction boxes in a useless maze, probably to discourage repairs by the owner. That’s why bikers devised the system of Chopper wiring, which is about as simple as it can get.

The Chopper wiring has only two simple circuits controlled by two separate switches. One handles all front and tail lights and the other handles the ignition.

This is basically how a Chopper is put together. It is much easier to work on and much better looking this way.

Of course, if you don’t have an old, beat up model to chop and insist on a Chopper, you can get a dresser, as mentioned before, and start taking things off.

Old Harleys are becoming so hard to find nowadays that some people even resort to buying a brand new trash wagon off the showroom floor. It isn’t showing a lot of class to chop one of these but if that’s all you got, that’s all you can do.