Harley dealerships are coffee mug and t-shirt boutiques nowadays.
A sneaker expert seems appropriate.  

Weirdly, I have 20-25 pieces of motorcycle related crap (yea mugs, t shirts, pens, caps etc) and the singular IMHO most stellar piece of bike swag I have is a Suzuki boulevard pen. Nice steel pen, open the cap and write, close it and it closes with a nice click pen, all metal, and it has a jotter type refill with a spring on the bottom. Excellent pen, excellent all around, no moving parts, no plastic parts and simply put, plonk down $2 and get a brand new lease on life refill.
HD crap is garbage, so is nearly everything else motorcycle related. That pen bought ~2004-05 is simply my favorite motorcycle related device ever that isn't bolted onto a motorcycle.
Has a shoeii RF 1000 hayabusa branded helmet I liked for a log time though. Not its crapped out, so the pen wins.
Cool.
Srinath.

oldNslow wrote on 02/29/20 at 08:40:06:



Is he the one who killed Buell?

You may be right oldNslow .   I know a bunch of guys who think HD's are the only bike there is or should be.   I tease them regularly about their Monster Machines   .   Some of them can actually keep up when we get into the twisties , but most don't.  

I've got a Harley story that says a lot about Harley :

So , my first Harley was a 2004 1200cc Sportster in Roadster form.   It was Quick and power to weight ratio was good.   But ,...
I had a really hard time keeping up with the Savages in the mountains.
So , I ran it like a Jap Bike (2-4K rpm -- up and down the rpm scale) to keep up best I could.
Well , it wasn't long before the the crank-shaft and the primary drive worked loose.
I discovered several things while fixing it:
The splines were 95% gone.
The Crankshaft itself was made out of Doe-ball-steel with Case Harding.
The Splines were straight not tapered , so there was nothing to tighten up too/against .
..................

I grabbed a welder in one had and a dremel tool in the other and rebuilt the splines with a slight taper on them and tapered the front primary drive to match.  
Well it worked good after that , but , the more I thought about them idiots using Case Hardened DoeBall Steel on a crank-shaft the more pissed-off I got .   I bet the main shafts in the transmission are made of the same stuff !  
.......................

Bad engineering ?   Well , perhaps Harley aren't made to run like the Jap's , Italian's , Indian's , Brit's , etc , build their bike to run like.

Hay oldNslow , just don't run it like a Jap bike and all should be well !  

Now you know the 883 has a lower geared primary than the 1200 does ?

Yea the 883 red lines 5th about 118mph and the 1200 red lines more like 140mph.   Maybe that lower primary drive will save you from stressing everything but the back tire ?  

A few years after selling the Roadster , I got to missing my Sportster then I came across a low millage (3K miles) 2007 fuel injected 883 XL , and bought it.   I kept it till it started weeping oil --- about 50,000 miles .  
Well , after having them both :  I developed the idea that Harley built the 883 and got it perfect ... then as an after-thought put them 3.5" pistons in it.  
My belief is that they screwed it up when they did.   The 883 was a lot smother , and the power level of the 3" pistons seemed more in tune to the strength of the crank shaft too.  
...................

I've got Guzzi's version of the 883 now and love it.  Its about 120 lbs. lighter and 10 HP more.  Its called a V-9 (853cc) Roamer (55hp).
The newer version is called V85TT (853cc) and has almost double the HP of the 883.  
I think your right - Harley is in Real Trouble !  
https://bikez.com/motorcycles/moto_guzzi_v9_roamer_2018.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwud-2RKwA0

Just an 8 minute history of HD.

Best regards,

Went to a very large and fancy Harley dealership yesterday and was amazed at how many parts/accessories  of  bikes are painted black as opposed to chrome in Harleys up until now.  Crash bars is one big example...exhausts are another....I realize "black" is a craze to some extent these days among all manufacturers.....My take is it is to cut production costs by eliminating chrome and calling it "style."  I also saw NONE  of the very small bikes that have been introduced in the past few yeas.  But what  main impression lingered in my mind was the style of the bikes which I would describe as "Everything you wanted in a bike in 1960."  The antiquated style of the parallelogram shaped saddlebags as being the most glaring example.