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Putting my Ten-Pen'orth into the Harley saga ... for my money Harley haven't been the same since the demise of the Shovelhead .... and like the British bikes before them a big chunk of their 'shortcomings' derive from them being a simple bike you can fettle yourself that survived into a time when less owners had the skills for that and the competition was designed to be exclusively 'Dealer-maintained' .... it was noticeable as a Triumph/BSA rider that as soon as the Japanese bikes fell down the food chain into the hands of riders who couldn't afford to buy new and have every detail coddled by dealer workshops their reliability advantage quickly disappeared.
K
Yes the shovelhead for many is the watershed, I'd go as far as to include the early evo's before moving from leaded to unleaded fuel and pre the introduction of fuel injection. The increasing sophistication of the mechanicals and electronics is also a result of the growing cleaner emissions lobby/requirements of places like California and for European spec. bikes Switzerland. Of course as we became more affluent, and move out of the 50's and 60's where the motorcycle loses its 'raison d'etre' as a cheap mode of transport for the working classes, and the need to understand how things works is no longer driven by the financial imperative of little or no funds. We moved from a society of 'mend and make do' to consumerism and lost for many the basics of how to maintain, coupled with increasing sophistication of mechanica/electrical components not allowing repair but requiring replacement, when mechanics became fitters.
