If you've made it through the last few posts, you know all about where we went on our trip, but I thought before I was done writing I would take a bit to talk about my riding impressions after my 969 mile test ride.
Now, I need to start by saying that overall, I had an absolute blast on this trip, and my comments here are in no way intended to lessen that, nor personally malign anyone who has chosen a Harley, Chris and Heather especially (since it was their generosity that allowed me this experience in the first place). To each their own. I am just saying that after having ridden one for that long, it confirms what I had originally thought - it's a nice place to visit, but I'll likely never own one, nor can I understand why they're so popular with people my parents' age who don't have as much tolerance for abuse to their joints. Below are some reasons why this is my opinion.
Chris and his wife both have Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. I rode Chris's bike, which is an XLR. It's fuel-injected, has dual front disk brakes, and has the "peanut" tank (3.5 gal). He rode his wife's, which is a Custom. It has single disk front brake and is carburated, and has a slightly lower seat height and the larger fuel tank.
Ergonomics: Riding a bike for 6+ hours a day, or even an hour at a time will tell you a lot about its ergonomics. When it comes to riding position and rider comfort, the Sportster's are not good. I mean, a lot of sport bikes have stiff suspension and punishingly uncomfortable rider triangles, but usually this is because they are more focused on maximum performance (and to some extent with the Italian bikes, styling) and rider comfort is a secondary part of the discussion at best. I know that it's not performance with the Harleys, so I can only guess that it's styling. Personally, I think if I ever bought a bike that was this uncomfortable to ride for any length of time, it would be a Ducati, because at least then I know why I'm being punished.
The riding position is just like most other bikes, in that no one element makes a good or bad riding position - it's a combination of several different things and their relationship to each other. The Sportsters have that standard cruiser feet-forward riding position, which is actually pretty comfortable if you're not doing it for more than 30 minutes at a time. However on this specific bike, for someone of my height, the foot pegs aren't far enough forward for me to have my legs straight out in front of me, and the reach to the bars is too far forward, meaning that you're sitting in this awkward clamshell position with your lower back hunched forward. Even if you had a backrest, you'd be hard-pressed to use it without having handlebars that extend further back, or longer arms. When we were on the highway, we'd occasionally rest our ankles on the foot pegs, which would stretch our legs out straight, but that was really only workable on straight roadway, because this put our feet about 6 inches from the road - not good if you have to lean. Also, because these bikes have no wind protection, the wind becomes the limiting factor in your speed. At 70 mph, no problem unless you're following a truck and getting wind buffeting because of turbulence. But a lot of the highway that we rode the first day had a 70 mph speed limit, meaning that keeping up with traffic meant running at between 80 and 85. At that speed, the wind is literally trying to blow you off of the bike, causing you to have to hang on for dear life, so your hands and arms get tired quickly. But worse than that is the effect on your legs. Because of the wide seat and engine plus the distance to the pegs, you're sitting with your legs in a fairly open position, and the inside of your legs is the leading edge that catches the wind. This means that the wind is constantly trying to force you into a full split. So you expend a considerable amount of effort trying to keep your legs more together, which tires out your thighs and hip flexors.
Even if you put the standard cruiser riding position aside for a moment, I really don't understand why Harley thinks it's ok to equip these ($10K!) bikes with such unbelievably uncomfortable seats, other than to ensure that they sell expensive accessory seats that make it possible to ride for more than 30 minutes without your keister going completely to sleep. With the pegs out in front of you, all of your weight is on your tailbone, so the seat matters a lot. Whenever we were not going to be braking or shifting for a while, Chris and I ended up using the passenger pegs (which happen to be almost directly under the rider like a standard center-control bike) to shift ourselves forward and take some weight off of our butts, as well as use more of the natural cushioning God gave us. This also helps to change the position of your legs and torso so that the wind is not catching your legs as much and you're able to lean into the wind and use it as a support. The main tradeoff is that you can't see out of your mirrors anymore.
Soo... there's a reason why most touring bikes have center controls and then people put highway pegs on, rather than the other way around.
The switchgear and displays are pretty intuitive. This is the first time that I had ridden a bike that had separate turn signal controls on each handlebar (vs the single multifunction turn signal on the left grip), and the fact that the right turn signal was right next to the kill switch had me accidentally almost pushing the kill switch on more than one occasion. The turn signal was a horizontal button, and the start and kill switches were a pair of vertical buttons above it. There was no color or texture difference, so it wasn't something you could tell without looking. I'm willing to chalk this up to an unfamiliar bike and a lack of muscle memory, because for a while I'd hit the horn instead of the turn signal on my bike too.
Engine and transmission: I normally ride a 600cc air/oil-cooled four cylinder that is making around 70 hp, but it makes that at 10K RPM. The Harley twin makes about the same HP, but at 5500 RPM, and it makes nearly double the torque. This is somewhat like the difference between the driving experience in my old Acura RSX Type-S vs my Pontiac GTO - it matters a lot less what gear you are in with the Harley, while on my bike, it likes to be wound out, and has no margin for being in the wrong gear. This makes the Harley a very easy bike to ride - you twist the throttle and it'll go. That said, the transmission on the Harley was smooth, shifted easily, and by the second day I was even able to pretty consistently do rev-matched downshifts. I kept trying to shift into a nonexistent sixth gear, because the bike really isn't geared for cruising much above 70mph without seeming overly busy. That would have improved fuel economy as well, because we noticed a pretty significant drop in mileage when we were cruising at 80+. I will have to say that I was pretty impressed that the bikes seemed happy cruising for more than an hour at these speeds, despite the fact that this means that the engine is turning north of 4000 RPM in top gear (redline is 6K). I guess that I shouldn't complain about the ~100 mile cruising range that Chris's bike had, since that was also about the limits of our cruising range given the ergonomic problems I mentioned above, but it does require careful attention to fuel stops when you're not on the interstate.
The rubber engine mounts work quite well at reducing the vibration, and really the only time I noticed it was at idle or if I was in the wrong gear (below 2000 RPM). The engine throws off a lot of heat, but again, it's only noticeable when you are stopped. The fuel injection makes it so that the bike nearly always fires on the first try, and the only fuel mapping niggle that I noticed was that when the bike was cold, if you blipped the throttle and then let it come back to idle, the FI would sometimes have trouble and would drop the engine to a near stall before recovering and bringing it back to normal idle.
On a related note, these bikes both had stock exhausts. I guess you can file it under more things that I don't "get" about Harleys, but I thought that they sounded great, and were plenty loud enough. Even with earplugs and a full-face helmet, I was always able to hear the exhaust enough for it to contribute positively to the riding experience without it being obnoxious. I was even able to hear the crackles and pops on overrun when I downshifted. I guess maybe if you've been riding for years with an open helmet and no hearing protection, you can't hear it unless it's louder because you're half-deaf already.
Handling and dynamics: While the Sportster does outweigh my bike by nearly 100 lbs, I didn't find that to be as noticeable in terms of the handling as the rake and trail differences, and the differences in weight distribution. The front wheel carries a lot less weight than in a standard or sport bike, and so you don't favor the front brake nearly as much - I definitely tried to lock up the front wheel more than once until I learned this. The other thing that I had to learn pretty quickly was that unlike my bike, the low-end torque is quite capable of overwhelming the fairly skinny rear tire, especially if there is any lean angle. This is an order of magnitude worse if it's wet. So you have to be fairly careful with the throttle lest the bike fishtail or do other scary things. Wet off-ramps or other sharp turns should be high on your list of things to avoid on a Harley.
On dry pavement, it does require more work to get the bike to turn than mine, primarily due to the long wheelbase and the long rake, and so even though it's not particularly top-heavy, it still feels like it's falling into the turn, but once it's in the turn it's pretty stable.
The other learning experience for me was the riding philosophy. If you go into riding a Harley like it's a sport bike, or even a sporty standard (like mine), you'll just be frustrated. As I've gotten more comfortable with my bike's handling limits, I now occasionally drag the pegs when I'm riding close to those limits. With the Sportster, you don't drag the pegs if you come into a turn with too much lean, you drag... the frame! While better than dragging the expensive chrome exhaust, still not something that I want to do on a my best friend's motorcycle, and not too forgiving as a method to warn you that you're being a bit overzealous - my pegs move if I need just a little more lean angle. Frames - not so much...
However, ratchet the riding back a couple of notches, from say 9/10ths to 7/10ths, and it becomes a very enjoyable experience again. Curvy roads are still fun, and actually become relaxing, because you're not concentrating so exclusively on every little bit of your riding technique being perfect, nor worrying about an unknown road or hazard creating a problem that you don't have enough margin left to correct for. You still keep a brisk pace, but you can enjoy the scenery as well!
The one big negative for the handling column, just like in ergonomics is in rider comfort. The Sportster uses a pair of outboard shocks/springs instead of the single inboard shock that is more common in modern motorcycles. I don't know if there's a tradeoff there or not, but I get the impression that the suspension on a Sportster is not really intended for someone of my weight, especially with the extra weight of luggage from our trip. I can't imagine what it would be like with a passenger- maybe that's why the pillion seat is such a joke; it's not actually intended for use. Anyway, as I mentioned before, most of your weight is on your tailbone, meaning that impacts from road imperfections that aren't absorbed by the suspension telegraph directly up your spine, instead of being able to use your legs and butt to absorb some of that impact. Couple that with suspension that was far too prone to bottom out, and things like frost heaves and expansion joints are simply painful.
After doing this ride, I have a lot of trouble believing what I see on motorcycle shows on the Discovery channel where Jesse James and Kid Rock jaunt off to Mexico for several days on one of his rigid choppers, or the Teutols go for a joyride on their latest creation. Quite likely, they ride for 20-30 minutes for the cameras, then put the bikes back on the trailer and head for the next photo op. Based on my experience, real distance riding means wind noise and buffeting, bugs and rocks hitting you (often in the face), and comfort is a big deal. I simply can't imagine doing that ride in an open (or no) helmet and no hearing protection. The amount of bugs on our helmets at the end of the day alone would be a deterrent. Maybe I'm just not hardcore enough. ;-)
Other things I noticed - ride height makes a big difference. I am high enough on my bike that I can at least see through the windows of most SUVs, and I can see over top of many cars. This makes it much easier to see far ahead even when you're following someone in traffic. Not so with the Sportsters, and this makes it quite a bit harder to ride defensively because you can't scan way out ahead for obstacles, curves, etc.
Lastly, I hadn't realized until this trip how much I use my helmet lock. Even if you have an expensive helmet (I don't) that you're not comfortable leaving unattended, it serves as a very useful place to hang your helmet when you need your hands free after you've taken your helmet off. For lack of a better place to set my helmet, I put it on the gauges. It was not a secure place for a helmet, because my helmet fell off and hit the ground on two separate occasions, which translates into me needing to replace my helmet now. This would be a pretty significant annoyance if I rode a bike like this all the time.
So concluding a long post, it's a Harley thing, and I don't understand. I'm glad to have done it, and I think that everyone should ride a Harley at least once in their lives, because it's definitely an experience. I learned a lot about what I personally do and do not want in a bike, and that is definitely going to be helpful as I look for a new bike in the future. There's no doubt in my mind that I'll be doing something like this again, it's just a question of when.
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