I am enjoying this thread a great deal. I look at the old Knuckleheads that some of the members here own, and while I never rode a Knucklehead, it brings a sense of a different era. It was a time when riders worked on their own bikes a lot more than these days. It was also a time when riding a motorcycle was perhaps more of an adventure between bad roads, hard tail frames, and engines that required more attention than today's motorcycles. I read an account of a trip made from Torrington,CT to Florida and back on an Indian Scout in 1945 in the Antique Motorcycle Club's magazine. During the trip, the writer, George Yarocki, recounted that the Scout, ridden two-up (the author/bike owner and his buddy) got 70 miles to the gallon and only a few hundred miles on a quart of oil. This was aboard a Scout in good repair, as George Yarocki was an apprentice in a machine shop and had overhauled the engine and done it to spec. Some of their other adventures included having the big end bearing on one cylinder wear partway through the crankpin journal. With no money to pay mechanics, the Yarocki and his buddy tried to buy parts from an Indian motorcycle dealer in Cincinnati. The dealer would not sell them the parts, and insisted on either getting the whole repair job or nothing. So, Yarocki took the head off the cylinder which had the bad big end and worn part of the journal. Yarocki and his buddy then rode two-up on the Scout to Louisville, KY. There, the Indian dealer was only a little less mean than the one in Cincinnati. He sold them the parts but refused to let them work on the bike on his lot. fortunately, one of the dealer's mechanics got the boys aside and told them to meet him early the next morning at the shop, before the boss arrived. The mechanic did some of the disassembly and assembly on the crankpin and big ends and rods which required a press. Yarocki and his buddy got the engine back together in an alleyway, and rode home.
Yarocki goes on to say that the metallurgy used by Indian in the Springfield plant left something to be desired. With a low compression side valve engine design, Indian could get by with looser tolerances and some compromises in the metallurgy. I am surprised to read about what I'd consider to be ridiculously high oil consumption, though.
I know there were all kinds of corporate machinations at Indian in Springfield, and the result was the company was not financially healthy for quite some time prior to the final closing. I think it was a kind of "catch 22": Indian was in the hole financially, so could not put money into R & D and retooling for some new models that were more in step with the times. Paul DuPont, when DuPont had a controlling interest in Indian, had been experimenting with some radical (at least for Indian) new prototype designs. One of those designs was remarkably like what Moto Guzzi adopted in the 70's- a fore-and-aft mounted vee twin with shaft drive.
I thought DuPont was probably on the cusp of saving Indian if he'd prevailed and they brought out the production version of the prototype bike.
Unfortunately, DuPont's prototypes never got any further than that stage. Other attempts Indian made, using British engines and transmissions, or re-badging British bikes were probably too little too late. Harley had moved the curve ahead when they brought out the Knucklehead engine and restyled their bikes. By the early 50's, H-D was building Panhead bikes and had brought out the K bikes- a sidevalve engined predecessor of the Sportster. H-D knew that after WWII, riders who had been exposed to British bikes during the war would want something that handled a bit better than the heavier bikes, and had better suspension and foot shifting. The K bike was the first step by H-D in this direction. Harley tended to "evolve" in their motorcycle development, building on what they knew worked.
form the K bike, in 1957, it was not too much of a stretch to build the first Sportsters, and HD had probably been working on the Sportster engine design for some time prior. H-D managed to build a hot side valve engined bike in the K bike, and long after it was out of production, it was still winning races.
Indian, while a classic machine in its own right, was more of a tractor. I've seen a number of original Springfield-built Indians, and the look is classic and incredible, but the actual mechanics of the bike is another story. According to George Yarocki, who is probably well into his eighties and has spent most of his life working on and riding Indians, the Scout was the best design and best handling motorcycle Indian ever built. Indian discontinued the Scout before WWII, going more for the larger engined models.
Trying to re-capture the old Indian motorcycle in a new incarnation is just not going to happen. A modern overhead valve engine with rods on individual crankpins and fuel injection is not what the old Indians were. The old Indians had exposed copper tubing lines for lubricating oil and fuel, made up with flared fittings.
There were exposed linkages and springs for working the shifter and clutch. The generators (for battery charging and lighting) were often belt driven. The old Indian generators and lighting were never much to start with. I know some of the Indian riders who hung onto their Springfield Indians used to retrofit 12 volt Volkswagen generators to them and convert the electrics to 12 volts. An old Indian, even when fully restored to "factory new" condition, looks like it was built in a farm machinery or truck shop. Add the "valenced" fenders, a deep solo saddle dished like a tractor seat, and large gasoline tank, and the combination is vintage Indian.
I remember as a kid in the 1950's, going to Coney Island with my parents on warm summer evenings to see the fireworks. Coney Island would be crowded with all sorts of people. Sailors and soldiers on leave, often with their dates were on the sidewalks of Surf Avenue, as were families, young kids with dates, and young punks looking for action of one sort or another. Traffic crawled along Surf Avenue as people cruised for parking places and avoided pedestrians who tended to wander into the street- often intoxicated. The snail's pace of traffic was great for watching the motorcycles go by. In those days, you saw two kinds of bikes:
Harleys or Indians. Most were "full dressers". In those days, the bikes were done up with chrome plated studs on the saddlebags and sides of the saddle, and there were leather fringes on the saddle and off the ends of the handgrips. Most bikes sported "fishtail" pipes. Loud pipes or straight pipes had not become remotely popular. The real show came after dark. Some of the riders went over the top with their bikes, and added chrome plated rails and trim to the front and rear fenders, and then had numerous small colored running lights on the chrome rails. Every so often, a full dresser would roll by and everyone on the sidewalk would remark about it. The reason was the rider had put running lights on the wheel spokes, and had rigged up a slip ring and brush to get power to it. Seeing the circles of light in the rims of those bikes always intrigued me when I was a little guy. The other over the top thing some riders did was to wear a kidney belt. Most kidney belts were simply studded with chrome studs in various designs, and might sport a few reflectors. Every so often, one rider would cruise by with a kidney belt that was plugged into the bike's electrics and had running lights on it.
The flathead engines of the day were ideal for the kind of cruising in slow traffic that happened at Coney Island on a summer evening. Putting along at a slow speed required an engine with low end torque and one that would not overheat. A side valve engine with low compression was ideal in that application.
Years passed, and Coney Island as a popular amusement spot deteriorated. Rides and attractions closed for good. A much rougher element took over, and Coney Island was not a safe place for a family to be walking around on a summer evening. Somewhere in all of it, the heavy full dressed motorcycles disappeared from the streets. Motorcycles were always rare in Brooklyn. Not too practical in city streets, and people did not have the space to garage a bike or the extra money to maintain one. The only time we really saw motorcycles, aside from the police department, was in Coney Island when I was a kid. When Coney Island changed for the worse, it seemed like the motorcycles- which were the original Indians and Hogs of the 40's and 50's,- seemed to vanish from Brooklyn.
When I came of age to get into motorcycles, my parents, similar to Duckfarmer's mother, laid the law down. Mom had lost a boy she was friends with to a motorcycle accident. Mom;s brother had piled up a WLA Harley when he was in the US Army in Europe during WWII. It cost him one ball, and put him in a military hospital for a bit. He kept on riding and stayed on in the US Army for the rest of his life. My parents laid the law down and said if I rode a motorcycle, I had better not come home. So, I learned to work on bikes and ride them on the QT, and once I was out of the house, started owning and riding motorcycles. My parents carried on plenty, but I was a grown man, in my 20's, had a degree as an engineer and a job as an engineer, so about all they could do was rant and carry on but if they ever had any leverage (such as threatening to throw me out of their house), they had lost it. Over time, my folks came to accept the fact I rode motorcycles, and Mom, at age 96, is actually quite supportive and encouraging about it.
