Greg Field

This all may seem a pointless exercise in aesthetics, but it didn’t start that way. I’ve been trying to find time to swap back onto the Eldo the 13-mm front brake master cylinder it used to have. Last spring, I had swapped the 13 for a 15-mm master cylinder, on the advice of others, who said it would improve the braking. It took but one ride to know I did not like the change. Sure, lever travel was shorter, but the brake felt less powerful and less controllable. Unfortunately, I just never seemed to find time to put back on the 13. This week, I vowed to find some time for this and a bunch of other projects by spending less time on the internet. That initiative seems to be working because I actually, finally got the master-cylinder swap done. And after that, I had time left over to do something I’d long wanted to do on Billy Bob, as well. The photo above shows the stock brake master cylinder on my Billy Bob, with its stalk-mounted remote reservoir. This style of master cylinder looks great mounted on the clip-ons of a fully-faired sports bike, but I never really liked the looks when mounted on the Billy Bob’s normal handlebars. The look didn’t bother me enough to do anything just about that, but after the swap of master cylinders on the Eldo, I had a perfectly good 15-mm integral-reservoir master cylinder just sitting on the bench, so why not? Its piston was 1 mm smaller than that of the stock Ballabio master cylinder, but that might be a good thing, making the Billy’s brakes a little more powerful. Luckily, I also had a 13-mm clutch master cylinder in the parts bin from another planned project, so I could clean up the left bar, too. Unfortunately, as shown above, the clutch master cylinder was not drilled for the clutch cut-out switch. That seemed easy enough, so I measured, marked, and started drilling. The first hole was for the switch actuating plunger, as shown in the blurry photo above. Then, I drilled and counterbored for the screws to fasten the switch, as shown in another blurry photo above, bolted up the switch, mounted the master cylinder, and bled it. It looked good and worked perfectly, too. Fortunately, the brake master cylinder already had a brake switch, so I didn’t have to fit one. It bolted right up. After bleeding, it worked and looked great. Since I was there, messing with controls, I played some more with rotating the handlebars fore and aft to get the best feel. Rotating them backward shifted weight on my hands more onto the web between my thumb and hand. Rotating them forward shifted weight further onto the meat of my hand. When I got them in the position that felt best, I locked them down and rotated the clutch lever to the most comfortable position and locked it down, too. Unfortunately, when I rotated the brake lever to the angle that I liked, the back of the brake lever fouled on of the mounting screws for the kill-switch housing. To get the brake-lever angle I wanted, I’d have to rotate the switch housing. The housing is held in position by a brass dowel that mates with a hole in the underside of the bar, as shown in the photo above. To allow the housing to rotate, I’d have to lengthen the hole in the bars to a slot. I did that with a Dremel tool and bolted everything back up, rotating the switch just enough to get the lever clearance needed. The result of all that is shown above, from the back. And from the front in the photo above. I think the cleaner look was worth the effort, but I doubt I would have done it if I had to buy two new master cylinders.

I will check on the brackets. I probably will not hear back until next week. Then, I'll let you know what I found. I have one tank bag, and the Guzzi parts system says they do not have any more in the US. They could get more on Monday or it could be 6 months. You just never know. If anybody wants the one I have, you can email parts@motointernational.com or call 800 949-6686.

Moto Intl. has a tank bag. I think we can still get the bags. I will check. We have put Ballabio (essentially the same as Tuono) bars on many V11s. It is expensive, though. It's far cheaper to get some generic risers for 7/8-inch bars, bolt them to your top triple clamp, and then experiment to find the right bars for your needs.

Yes, in my experience the rear is far more in need of improvement than the front. A properly re-valved and re-sprung Ohlins from a Scura in the rear, then properly adjusted, makes the rear about as good as the front is with sorted Marzocchis. Add sorted Ohlins, and what I found was that the front was again enough better that the rear paled in comparison.

Could be a lot of things. I'd look first for oil contamination of the plates, from engine or trans oil.

I third or fourth the comment about the comfort improvement of the Ohlins. If both ohlins and Marzes are eaually well adjusted for spring and damping, the Ohlins provides a noticably more comfortable ride, gliding over bumps you can clearly feel with the Marzes. I am fortunate to work in a bike shop and get to ride a lot of bikes with Ohlins and with other forks. The superior ride comfort of the Ohlins is something I've een able to feel and appreciate on every such ride. That's why the cost was worth it to me. The cost is high, though, no matter where you get them.

OK, whatever.

I re-sprung and re-oiled the Marzocchi forks on my '04 Billy Bob. THey work well, but they do not work like Ohlins I replaced them with. I'm not sure the Ohlins increase in performance is entirely justified by the cost, but they are substantialy better than my Marzokes were.

Unless something has changed recently, MPH is not an Aprilia dealer. If you find yourself in Seattle, Moto I has demos of both the SXV and the Tuono (and Mille).

Good work, Slug. Good work also on that carbon under-fender thingie.

As you've discovered, there's very little storage space on the V11s. Mine's my commuter/grocery getter, so i have Hepco & Becker hardbags. For long trips, I also strap on the tank bag.

Yes, congrats.

The SXV is the street version. While they are not technically street legal, we have gotten plates on every one we've sold. Every one of them is currently being used as a commuter. I'm considering one myself.

That's fantastic that they got back the dealership. It never should've been taken away. You'll love that 550. Through third gear, you can just roll on and have the wheel in the sky as high as you like, and some wheelspin at the same time in first and second. You have to de-restrict them, or they're crap. Have the dealer build this into the set-up. Trust me on this. It doubles the horsepower, maybe even more than doubles it.

I'll be swapping out the external-reservoir clutch and brake master cylinders for some I have laying around that have integral reservoirs, just to see how it will look. I never have liked how the stock m/c's look in combination with the Billy Bob bars. Then a ride, if it's not iced up.

Daniel: Perhaps that's the best way to sum up the net effect of the tariff: Not only did it not save Harley-Davidson, the company would've been better off had it never sought the tariff.

Exactamente, Skeeve. We need an Italian Vaughn Beals to take the reins at Guzzi instead of the succession of bandits we've gotten.

Well, since some are enjoying this and may be interested in forming an opinion based on other than anecdotes from the time, here, in a nutshell, are some facts about the tariff and its effect on saving H-D that detailed research could reveal to any who are not still stuck in Ronald Reagan's "it's morning in America" circa 1984. Almost all of what follows is the result of original research with primary sources (primarily the people involved, on both sides) and through searches of public records and newspapers. This work was performed in the research phase of writing books and magazine articles. It is what I consider an informed opinion based on all the foregoing, plus anecdotes of friends at the time. If you don't like my conclusions, so be it. The tariff story began in the mid-1970s, when the market for motorcycles in the US began contracting and then accelerated into a death spin by the dawn of the 1980s. It is only relatively recent that the US market for street motorcycles has rebounded to its pre-1976 levels. This background colors everything that follows. It was not just Harley that was losing sales every year; it was all players. Many were losing money every year, starting much earlier than some of you probably think they did. It was a horrible time to be in the motorcycle business. Refusing to face reality of the shrinking market, the Japanese kept building more and more bikes and dumping them below cost in effort to win market share against the others doing the same. We all remember this from the early 1980s, but how many of you remember them doing this in the late 1970s? It happened. It got so bad during this period, that H-D asked for tariffs from the International Trade Commission (ITC) in 1978. Milwaukee even won the case, proving the Japanese were dumping bikes. Unfortunately, H-D’s lawyers were unable to convince the ITC that H-D was damaged by the dumping, so no tariff was instituted. So, from this the Japanese learned that they could continue dumping motorcycles, and the US government wouldn’t do anything about it. Harley learned from this that it would have to rely on its own resources to effect a turnaround, and not the US government. To do just that, H-D began to develop the Evolution engine and got Porsche to help design a water-cooled, modular engine concept called NOVA. Things soon got even worse, mostly because sales continued dropping but also because of one man who sought to change the balance of power in the motorcycle market. This was Hisao Koike, head of Yamaha, who staked his personal honor on wresting from Honda the sales lead by the end of the 1982 model year. When the Honda leader, Kiyoshi Kawashima, heard this, he said, “Yamaha has not only stepped on the tail of a tiger, it has ground it into the earth. We will crush Yamaha.” That’s when the dumping and discounting began in earnest. Neither man gave Harley a second thought as they pushed bikes onto US shores in record numbers, at the same time their sales fell and the yen began a long climb against the US dollar that made these bikes more expensive. They smashed together like two sumo giants, and starved-to-the-bone Harley was nearly crushed between them. Ultimately, it was Yamaha that was crushed. Meanwhile, in June 1981, despite dropping overall motorcycle sales every year and plunging H-D sales in particular, Vaughn Beals and a dozen others combined all their cash to buy H-D from AMF. Nineteen eighty-one H-D sales were down by 14 percent, and they were losing money on every sale. To stem the red tide, manufacturing chief Tom Gelb instituted a just-in-time inventory system at H-D. Its first year of operation was 1982. During the1982 model year, H-D sales fell by a further 27 percent. By spring 1982, H-D was days from closing its doors. “A semi-recession had hit automotive earlier,” remembered Tom Gelb, “and all of a sudden in March 1982 it hit us. At the time, the Japanese manufacturers had about 18 months worth of finished inventory in the country, and they were selling two- and three-year-old bikes right out of the crate and discounting them, so the bottom fell out of the market. “I remember we had a policy meeting, and in the next weeks we cut our production rate in half, laid off 40 percent of our workforce, and cut all the salaries of the officers by something like 12 percent and the salaried workforce by 10 percent.” If all that wasn’t bad enough, Harley’s production was now below the minimum level specified in the agreements with its lenders. What that meant was, those banks were free to foreclose and seize Harley at any time. Fortunately, they chose not to, and here’s where Gelb’s Japanese-inspired changes became key: They saved Harley $20 million in inventory costs for 1982. Said Vaughn Beals, “In essence, the cash freed up from inventory offset the operating loss for 1982. Absent that, I’m absolutely sure our lenders would not have supported us.” To a man, the bankers I interviewed, plus all the H-D execs (except Gelb, who is too modest to claim that he saved the company) said this was the critical point and what saved H-D. This was before the bid for the tariff even began. But Beals went after the tariff anyway. Once people had been laid off, Beals knew he had to do something publicly to show that he was fighting back. On September 1, 1982, he petitioned the ITC for relief. Union men from around the US gleefully joined the bandwagon, and if they weren’t Harley men before this action, they damned sure were afterward. Here was Beals, the American Eagle, standing tall and alone against the might of Japan, Inc. It was a masterful PR ploy that whipped up a lot of emotions—not all of them positive. Beals told me he never dreamed he could actually win the case. But it would distract those who needed distracting from looking deeper to see what Harley was up to. Though he denied it to me, he also planned to use the tariff as leverage to get loan guarantees of $15 million to complete work on the NOVA series of modular Harleys. Despite the denials, it is a matter of public record that Harley admitted to these actions (though they never got the loan guarantees). In short, Beals went ahead with the tariffs, but the tariffs were never really part of the plan to save the company because a) he never thought he’d win them anyway, the company was already saved, and c) he would be willing to drop any tariffs he did get in exchange for not even cash but just guarantees of loans to complete projects that weren’t even part of the “saving” plan anyway. This is why I say it was a sideshow. The ITC heard arguments on Harley’s petition on November 30, 1982. The Japanese made a fatal error before the hearing even started. “They had one attorney represent all four companies, which was tangible evidence of Japan Inc.,” said Vaughn Beals. “I can’t conceive of anyone dumb enough to do that, but they were.” The ITC adjourned the hearing and deliberated before recommending tariffs of 45 percent on all foreign motorcycles over 700 cc (after the first 7,000 imported) the first year, with diminishing percentages in the following five years. On April 1, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the tariffs into law. Anticipating the possibility that they might lose, the Japanese had stepped up production and shipment of their large 1983 models to get them on US shores before the tariff took effect. A few months later, the Japanese reworked most of their 750s into tariff-evading 700s, and Honda and Kawasaki avoided tariffs on their larger models by shifting assembly to their US plants. As a result, the only companies that paid any substantial amount in tariffs were Yamaha and Suzuki, both of which were very minor players in the market for heavyweight motorcycles to compete with Harley. The tariff to the Japanese was no more than a mosquito bite to an elephant.. Another reason I judge it an inconsequential sideshow. Despite the tariff, H-D sales fell again for 1983. (Yet another reason I say sideshow; the tariff did not result in sales increase, despite the introduction of $3,995 Sportsters the company offered that year had a measurable positive effect.) Despite this further fall below the production covenants in the loan agreements, the bankers decided yet again to hold off on foreclosure because Harley’s cash flow was positive and because Harley was making profits on practice bombs for the military, and because the bankers knew the Evo engine and Softail were debuting at the start of the 1984 model year. Once those bikes hit the market, Harley was back, and Beals was a rock star. In the January 1984 issue, Cycle named him Motorcyclist of the Year for 1983, because of his winning of the tariff battle and because of H-D’s astonishing resurgence. Sales for model year 1984 were 31 percent higher than for 1983. Meanwhile, sales of all other street bikes as a whole continued in a death spin in the US, except for sales of the new cruisers the Japanese began cranking out in effort to keep up. Despite this new, direct competition by imitation, Harley sales continued to rise every year after 1985 and the Japanese are still trying to catch up by escalating the imitation.

The original assertion was that the tariff SAVED H-D. It did not. It was and remains what Vaughn Beals intended it to be: A way to distract everyone while he pulled the real trick. It still works, what, 23 years later? I salute you on being as predictable and easily fooled as he knew most of you would be. If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

I usually buy whole T or T3 front ends, with wheel and rotors and all. I've never paid more than $250 for them. That gives most of the parts for converting an Eldo to disc front end. From there, there's at least three approaches to accomplishing the rest of the conversion.

Challenge all you like. But to call what you wrote fact while asserting what I wrote is belief is so absurd that only you could do it with a straight face. A look at the facts, should you ever chose to look beyond your anecdotes, would convince most folks that what I said was true: The tariff was an inconsequential sideshow.

Actually, I'm laughing too hard to get my panties in a bunch. And crying, too. See, I spent weeks of time and hundreds of hours in the Library of Congress, in Milwaukee, and on the phone tracking down guys like Vaughn Beals and the legal eagles and industry people involved on all sides to get the story. Dummy me! I could've just called Gary Cheek to get the real scoop on what happened. Next time I'll know better.

Unknown. I'm hoping the silicone will act to keep the nipples from backing out, but it's too soon to tell if that is what it will do.

Pardon me for espousing a belief not pre-approved by Gary Cheek. As he proves every day, he is the sole arbiter of truth on this earth. All else is opinion.

You all will believe as you like. For my part, I know that then, even more so than today, most folks who were in the market for a Harley were in the market only for a Harley, and if you were in the market for a Harley, you never even considered Japanese bikes. Thus, the tariff was of no consequence to these folks 'cause it did not make the Harleys cheaper. But $3995 Sportsters, on the other hand . . .