I'm keeping my FatBob, but I just picked up an old 1980 FXWG shovelhead, so I'm going to need to spend some time in the Shovel forum to learn about these old beasts....looking forward to it!

 

Looks really clean, I like it.

 

Man that's a cool bike, Shovel head, Wide glide and a kicker. Old school....

 

First year of the Wide Glides and basically the precursor to the Dyna - it's a pretty sweet thing and has been well looked after. Less than 20K miles in 36 years.

It's just a shame it doesn't have the original black paint with flames. But I guess I can get that fixed easily enough.

 

How I love old iron; that Wide Glide is simply beautiful! Fantastic find

Yea, I'm jelly, the sound of a Shovel is like nothing else...

 

Very nice - congrats!

 

Awesome!

How does it run? Do you have to do a lot to it?

 

That scoot looks to be in great condition. Enjoy riding that classic and post more pics as you go.

 

Robby,

I haven't really ridden it yet as it's pissing with rain here and there's loads of salt on the roads. I want to keep this one pretty clean if possible.

But, the motor runs great, sounds really nice and strong. I need to do a compression and leak down test on it to see what I am dealing with, but my first impressions are really good. Looks like a real low mileage garage queen.

As for what I need to do to it - not much, but maybe a lot. I am toying with just riding it or maybe stripping it down completely and doing an "as new" restoration. I think I am leaning towards the second option.

Cosmetically, it's really good, but the cases could do with vapour blasting and polishing or some other finish. In which case, the engine and tranny is out of the frame so at that point I might just have to look at the top and bottom ends and well....just go through the whole thing. I'm not really sure yet what you can do to hop these old things up....but I hear the words "stroker" a lot ;_) so maybe I'll look at that, a bombproof bottom end and get the heads and valve train all dialed in. It's an 80", but as far as I know you can take these old girls up to 96" or so.

There's a few bits of chrome that could do with replating - but it's really minimal. Clutch lever, cam chest cover and if I was being REALLY picky, the front fender and even those is just me being ****.

Anyway. New project - yippee! I was running out of things to do to the FatBob apart from the front end...

First things first though - I need to go over it with a fine tooth comb and check and reset all the specs and tolerances. Carb, oiling, valvetrain, clutch, primary etc... and shovels are quite a bit different from twin cams, so there's a lot to learn which is awesome!

 

Please put her back to her original paint! Please, please, please

She's look so incredible with a proper sissy bar as well...