Old or Vintage H-D riders - Motorcycle-Journal Forums

pitzz · 08-03-2008, 09:50 AM

After reading literally years and years worth of old threads all over this forum I get the feeling the M50 is the bike of choice around here and a lot of those metric owners spend a little too much time reassuring themselves of the innate superiority of their choices with lots of Harley bashing...far more than the Harley camp does to the metric owners. Seems odd since most metric cruisers probably wouldn't exist today if there was nothing that came before them to imitate.

As for the Harleys, everyone else seems to gravitate towards the newer models. I can remember a time when the pride of H-D ownership came from having the oldest and not the newest bike on the block. My, how things have changed! So who out there rides old iron? Let's share about those bikes for a while.

My two everyday rides are both 25ish years old, an Ironhead XL and a Shovelhead FX. Both represent the last year of that particular engine's production run. I've had the Sportster since it came out of the box and am probably the 3rd owner of the Superglide. I'll be tattooing the VIN numbers onto my arm sometime soon so that there's no doubt about ownership in the future.

I completely understand that both bikes were probably obsolete by most standards on the day they left the showroom floor. I view them as a celebration of '50s technology from the early '80s. It may be hard to understand that for some of us it's not always about the newest or the fastest, it's about a passion for mechanical things and being awe struck by the raw and primitive beauty of bikes from an earlier era.

Pitzz