Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

I. I' ~ E QO 0') ILeft! The King of the Roed. H.....y·Davldaon·. Tour Glide. ha lots to offer the long distance rlder.IAbovel Cycle News/East'. ~nt Editor Tom Mueller tries the "glide" on for size. Looks neturel. Tom.IBeiowl The heart of the beat. the tried and proven V-twin. look like any other car, and your friend across town had a Hudson that. .. Harley riders have something going for them that is as different as the motorcycles they ride. To a man/women they are motorcyclists. Not just a small or,targe percentage of them. All of them. Does anyone know a Harley rider who bought his "Made in Milwaukee" V-twin for economical transportation or because he wanted to find out why people rode motorcycles? Harley riders are motorcyclists. For years the folks in Milwaukee (and York. Pennsylvania) have been selling 50,000 (more or less) Harley-Davidson motorcycles every year. That places them a distant fifth in sales behind the four Japanese giants, yet they rank first in really "big bike" sales. Let's take an objective look at Harley-D's top of the line bike, the FLT Tour Glide Classic. Touring performance ratings Safety 8 Although the Tour Glide Classic weighs in at well over 700 pounds, the three disc brakes (two 10" front, one 12" rear) bring it to a stop adequately. We had to "lock up" the wheels to avoid one interstate near-disaster and the bike slid to a stop in a predictable and controlled manner. The twinheadlights provide excellent lighting and the abundance of lights on tbe re.ar section (bags and fender) make the FLT as visible as a car for those approaching from the rear. The tires, 6-ply big, and we mean big MT90-16T Goodyear Speedgrips provide excellent straight line stability and gripped the road in turns just as well. The tireS do transmit a wiggle when crossing parallel indentations such as the groove between each lane of an asphalt highway. Performance on rain grooves (of the type found in Georgia) was acceptable. Over 450 pounds of rider/passenger/gear can be added to the 725 pounds of dry weight and that is more or less the norm for today's touring bikes. The only drawback, safety wise, is the position of the hom button on the left side control pod. The operator must all but totally remove his hand from the handgrip to operate the horn and a rider without a bunch of miles or hours on the bike will fail to find the button in a "react quickly" situation. We also feel the horn should be louder. The turn signal lights are also pushbutton operated and to operate them also requires a bit more ambidexterity than it should. particularly when downshifting while using the frontbrake. A Harley-Davidson. spokesperson says the hand controls (turn signal buttons, horn etc.) are/have been under discussion in Harley's engineering department. Again, one gets used to them, but initially they are so different than those on most other bikes that they cause a problem. Handling 8 An article by PooJ. O'Rourke of National Lampoon fame which appears in the current Car 1I Driver magazine, refers to the Tour Glide as a "portable-theme-park bike" and as a "Rolling Motel." But O'Rourke found out, just like we did, that the Tour Glide handles one helluva lot better than one would expect. H-D claims a ~5-degree lean angle and we took it beyond that with only the warning sounds of a floorboard scraping stopping us from KRing it even more. As mentioned earlier, straight line stability is execptional -- that's why you see Tour Glide riders riding down the highway with both hands occupied with doing something other than gripping the bars. Comfort 8 The Tour Glide Tri-Mount chassis houses the engine, transmission and swingarm as a single unit and isolates them via three elastomer (rubber like) mounts -- two at the rear, supporting both sides of the swing arm and the rear of the transmission, and the other at the front of the engine. We're not engineers and will cop out by quoting the purpose of this system directly from a H-D tech manual. "Working in conjunction with the elastomer mounts are two aircraft-type balljoint stabilizers. The stabilizers are on the same plane as the crankshaft allowing the elastomer mounts· to absorb road shock from the chassis while maintaining suspension alignment. At the same time, engine torque and mechanical harmonics are dampened by the mounts in a plane parallel to crankshaft rotation. This allows the engine to 'react to torque on its natural plane and freely expand and contract with temperature change, reducing undue stress on engine cases and the chassis. ,', Got it? Seat of the pants observation tells us that tbe Tri- Mount chassis does isolate the engine in that vibration is reduced to a point that in most e.-ery case the vibes are not objectionable. Compared to some Harleys we've ridden, the TriMount chassis' equipped Tour Glide doesn't vibrate at all. But you have to see the Tour Glide at idle to really understand the Tri-Mount chassis. Sitting still at just upder 1,000 rpm the 80 cubic inch V -twin is shaking like a . 29

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