fine German engineering

 

I think Indians' recent marketing strategy is asinine, targeting the way upper middle class to wealthy with their over priced rides. I agree, they are fine looking bikes, but in this economy, I don't see them surviving, but they might know something we dont....

 

Well I ride a Harley and my wife is part Indian so I RIDE BOTH!!!!

The OP has a good point. Some folks should do a little reading up on the history before they speak.

 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't really miss the days when you had to know tour bike, how much throttle etc to get her to fire. Sure they were tempermental, that's what made a harley a harley. Before we know it there will be electric jiffy stands and what not!!! TOTO take me home, I want to be back in Kansas.

 

HD will be the first American bike with an electric jiffy stand and then Indian will have to catch up before they go out of business again. The cycle continues..

 

It's coming, auto dimmer for headlites, anti-lock brakes-we now have, what a joke. Are we as motorcycle riding people able to decide when we need to apply the brakes or to let a system that is prone to failure overide our inate intuition as to when and how much brake to apply. Hey, I was fine and dandy with drum brakes before they came out out with disk brakes.

 

Well having grown up looking at radial airplane motors it was pretty obvious to me the H-D was derived from a similar idea. The H-D two cylinder V-Twin is one segment of a radial engine that usually had 7 cylinders arranged in a circle at its most developed. They also stacked multiple banks of them but it seems like an odd number of 5 or 7 cylinders around the single crank was pretty well accepted. They worked with a master rod that had one crank throw and all the other connecting rods were pinned to the master rod. Indian and H-D either had the same idea or adapted it from the early airplane pioneers like Curtiss and Wright.

 

Exactly, and from what I've read Indian ain't the first to drop a v-twin in a motorcycle.

 

I don't think the question of who did it first is relevant except to trivia jagoffs. It may never be known who was FIRST because ideas seem to have a time and several people come up with similar results. Electricity was of two schools DC and AC with different proponents, for example.

Who made the V-Twin commercially successful is what I consider most relevant to our view today that the V-twin is the only way to go. At least that is my view.

 

1903 Harley didn't use the v twin. It wasn't used until somewhere around 1909. in Harley bikes.