Why are Harleys cool?

[Gummiente]

You must admit that Harleys have an outdated engine, suspension and who knows what else

What, exactly, is so outdated about the engine, suspension, etc? This is a common statement whenever the topic of Harleys come up, but most people are just parroting what they've heard others say without taking the time to investigate on their own. So, I'm all ears here...

[Johnj]

The Sportster engine began life in 1957, the new one is the same with updates. The Big Twin started in 1936 and has been updated through to today's model.

[Grey Thumper]

Hmmm, is what's going to happen what I think is going to happen?

[Johnj]

What, pray tell, do you think is going to happen?

[SlingVTR]

I reckon its gonna happen, dont know what it is but when it does we will surely know.....waiting....

[JC Viper]

Hell, I want a Harley Fat Boy or Fat Bob or the new Custom 1200 with the fat front tire. I always picture myself riding through some quiet little town in the evening and pulling up to a gas station with the sound of the engine pumping along and I dismount in a "Lone Wolf" kinda way. I remember that happening when I rode my Vulcan through Pennsylvania after a Rally race. It was dark, needed gas and had the bike in 6th which made it sound more v-twin cruiser like for a parallel twin. I would've felt complete if the bike were a Fat Boy or such. V-Rod would've worked too.

I've always felt cruisers had more character and H-Ds was the one with the most. As long as it does 90MPH without feeling stressed and gets 40 - 50 MPG with a 5 gallon tank I'm good (majority of H-Ds do).

[Grey Thumper]

What, pray tell, do you think is going to happen?

Too early to tell, but I'm half expecting a sort of haters vs apologists kinda thing to start popping up. Although since it hasn't happened in half a decade and 22 pages (man, this is an old thread), maybe its unlikely then.

[totalmotorcycle]

What, pray tell, do you think is going to happen?

Too early to tell, but I'm half expecting a sort of haters vs apologists kinda thing to start popping up. Although since it hasn't happened in half a decade and 22 pages (man, this is an old thread), maybe its unlikely then.

Thankfully that happens very rarely in the Total Motorcycle community forum. We are more friendly and mature than that here, thankfully, and we can all discuss a topic without all the bad stuff popping up.

Mike

[totalmotorcycle]

The Sportster engine began life in 1957, the new one is the same with updates. The Big Twin started in 1936 and has been updated through to today's model.

In fact you could look at it in an even bigger light, the internal combustion engine started around the 1860's and really hasn't changed much since. It doesn't really matter what manufacturer it is. The only way we can really make a new engine is by breaking the mold and going to a new form such as electric.



"Modern vs. historical piston engines - The first piston engines did not have compression, but ran on an air-fuel mixture sucked or blown in during the first part of the intake stroke. The most significant distinction between modern internal combustion engines and the early designs is the use of compression and, in particular, in-cylinder compression."

1600 to 186017th century: inventor Christiaan Huygens used gunpowder to drive water pumps, to supply 3000 cubic meters of water/day for the Versailles palace gardens, essentially creating the first rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.
1780's: Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol[3] in which an electric spark exploded a mixture of air and hydrogen, firing a cork from the end of the gun.
1791: John Barber receives British patent #1833 for A Method for Rising Inflammable Air for the Purposes of Producing Motion and Facilitating Metallurgical Operations. In it he describes a turbine.
1794: Robert Street built a compressionless engine whose principle of operation would dominate for nearly a century.
1798: Tippu Sultan, the ruler of the city-state of Mysore in India, uses the first iron rockets against the British Army.
1807: Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saône in France. A patent was subsequently granted by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on 20 July 1807.
1807: Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an internal combustion engine powered by a hydrogen and oxygen mixture, and ignited by electric spark. (See 1780's: Alessandro Volta above.) [4]
1823: Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially. It was compressionless and based on what Hardenberg calls the "Leonardo cycle," which, as the name implies, was already out of date at that time.
1824: French physicist Sadi Carnot established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines. This scientifically established the need for compression to increase the difference between the upper and lower working temperatures.
1826 April 1: American Samuel Morey received a patent for a compressionless "Gas or Vapor Engine."
1838: a patent was granted to William Barnett (English). This was the first recorded suggestion of in-cylinder compression.
1854-57: Eugenio Barsanti & Felice Matteucci invented an engine that was rumored to be the first 4-cycle engine, but the patent was lost.[note 1]

Early internal combustion engines were used to power farm equipment similar to these models.
This internal combustion engine was an integral aspect of the patent for the first patented automobile, made by Karl Benz on January 29, 1886
Karl Benz1856: in Florence at Fonderia del Pignone (now Nuovo Pignone, later a subsidiary of General Electric), Pietro Benini realized a working prototype of the Italian engine supplying 5 HP. In subsequent years he developed more powerful engines—with one or two pistons—which served as steady power sources, replacing steam engines.
[edit] 1860-19101860: Belgian Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir (1822–1900) produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine similar in appearance to a horizontal double-acting steam beam engine, with cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, and flywheel in which the gas essentially took the place of the steam. This was the first internal combustion engine to be produced in numbers.
1861 The earliest confirmed patent of the 4-cycle engine, by Alphonse Beau de Rochas. A year earlier, Christian Reithmann made an engine which may have been the same, but it's unknown since he didn't clearly patent it.
1862: German inventor Nikolaus Otto was the first to build and sell the engine. He designed an indirect-acting free-piston compressionless engine whose greater efficiency won the support of Eugen Langen and then most of the market, which at that time was mostly for small stationary engines fueled by lighting gas.
1870: In Vienna, Siegfried Marcus put the first mobile gasoline engine on a handcart.
1876: Nikolaus Otto, working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, improved the four-cycle engine. The German courts, however, did not hold his patent to cover all in-cylinder compression engines or even the four-stroke cycle, and after this decision, in-cylinder compression became universal.
1878 Dugald Clerk designed the first two-stroke engine. He patented it in England in 1881.
1879: Karl Benz, working independently, was granted a patent for his internal combustion engine, a reliable two-stroke gas engine, based on the same technology as De Rochas's design of the four-stroke engine. Later, Benz designed and built his own four-stroke engine that was used in his automobiles, which were developed in 1885, patented in 1886, and became the first automobiles in production.
1882: James Atkinson invented the Atkinson cycle engine. Atkinson’s engine had one power phase per revolution together with different intake and expansion volumes, making it more efficient than the Otto cycle.
1885: German engineer Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for a supercharger
1891: Herbert Akroyd Stuart built his oil engine, leasing rights to Hornsby of England to build them. They built the first cold-start compression-ignition engines. In 1892, they installed the first ones in a water pumping station. In the same year, an experimental higher-pressure version produced self-sustaining ignition through compression alone.
1892: Dr. Rudolf Diesel developed his Carnot heat engine type motor .[5]
1887: Gustaf de Laval introduces the de Laval nozzle
1893 February 23: Rudolf Diesel received a patent for his compression ignition (diesel) engine.
1896: Karl Benz invented the boxer engine, also known as the horizontally opposed engine, or the flat engine, in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead center at the same time, thus balancing each other in momentum.
1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrated the diesel engine in the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) using peanut oil fuel (see biodiesel).[6]
1900: Wilhelm Maybach designed an engine built at Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft—following the specifications of Emil Jellinek—who required the engine to be named Daimler-Mercedes after his daughter. In 1902 automobiles with that engine were put into production by DMG.[7][8]
1903 - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky begins a series of theoretical papers discussing the use of rocketry to reach outer space. A major point in his work is liquid fueled rockets.
1903: Ægidius Elling builds a gas turbine using a centrifugal compressor which runs under its own power. By most definitions, this is the first working gas turbine.
1905 Alfred Buchi patents the turbocharger and starts producing the first examples.
1903-1906: The team of Armengaud and Lemale in France build a complete gas turbine engine. It uses three separate compressors driven by a single turbine. Limits on the turbine temperatures allow for only a 3:1 compression ratio, and the turbine is not based on a Parsons-like "fan", but a Pelton wheel-like arrangement. The engine is so inefficient, at about 3% thermal efficiency, that the work is abandoned.
1908: New Zealand inventor Ernest Godward started a motorcycle business in Invercargill and fitted the imported bikes with his own invention – a petrol economiser. His economisers worked as well in cars as they did in motorcycles.
1908: Hans Holzwarth starts work on extensive research on an "explosive cycle" gas turbine, based on the Otto cycle. This design burns fuel at a constant volume and is somewhat more efficient. By 1927, when the work ended, he has reached about 13% thermal efficiency.
1908: René Lorin patents a design for the ramjet engine.
[edit] 1910-19601916: Auguste Rateau suggests using exhaust-powered compressors to improve high-altitude performance, the first example of the turbocharger.
1920: William Joseph Stern reports to the Royal Air Force that there is no future for the turbine engine in aircraft. He bases his argument on the extremely low efficiency of existing compressor designs. Due to Stern's eminence, his paper is so convincing there is little official interest in gas turbine engines anywhere, although this does not last long.
1921: Maxime Guillaume patents the axial-flow gas turbine engine. It uses multiple stages in both the compressor and turbine, combined with a single very large combustion chamber.
1923: Edgar Buckingham at the United States National Bureau of Standards publishes a report on jets, coming to the same conclusion as W.J. Stern, that the turbine engine is not efficient enough. In particular he notes that a jet would use five times as much fuel as a piston engine. [9]
1925: The Hesselman engine is introduced by Swedish engineer Jonas Hesselman represented the first use of direct gasoline injection on a spark-ignition engine.[10][11]
1925: Wilhelm Pape patents a constant-volume engine design.
1926: Alan Arnold Griffith publishes his groundbreaking paper Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design, changing the low confidence in jet engines. In it he demonstrates that existing compressors are "flying stalled", and that major improvements can be made by redesigning the blades from a flat profile into an airfoil, going on to mathematically demonstrate that a practical engine is definitely possible and showing how to build a turboprop.
1926 - Robert Goddard launches the first liquid fueled rocket
1927: Aurel Stodola publishes his "Steam and Gas Turbines" - basic reference for jet propulsion engineers in the USA.
1927: A testbed single-shaft turbo-compressor based on Griffith's blade design is tested at the Royal Aircraft Establishment.
1929: Frank Whittle's thesis on jet engines is published
1930: Schmidt patents a pulse-jet engine in Germany.
1936: French engineer René Leduc, having independently re-discovered René Lorin's design, successfully demonstrates the world's first operating ramjet.
March, 1937: The Heinkel HeS 1 experimental hydrogen fueled centrifugal jet engine is tested at Hirth.
July 18, 1942: The Messerschmitt Me 262 first jet engine flight
1954: Felix Wankel's first working prototype DKM 54 of the Wankel engine
[edit] 1960 to present1986 Benz Gmbh files for patent protection for a form of Scotch yoke engine and begins development of same. Development subsequently abandoned.
1999: Brothers, Michael and Peter Raffaele file patent application seeking protection for new form of Scotch yoke engine known as the Slider Engine. [12]
2004 Hyper-X first scramjet to maintain altitude
2004 Toyota Motor Corp files for patent protection for new form of Scotch yoke engine. [13]

[SlingVTR]

What, pray tell, do you think is going to happen?

Too early to tell, but I'm half expecting a sort of haters vs apologists kinda thing to start popping up. Although since it hasn't happened in half a decade and 22 pages (man, this is an old thread), maybe its unlikely then.

I hate Harleys with a passion, they are utiliterian transport in the most basic way, and I apologise for saying so