Some attribute this new “look” to the success of the Easy Rider movie, with two disaffected young men taking off on a cross-country trip on a pair of customized Harleys. Davidson, took charge of the styling department and designed the factory’s first “custom” motorcycle, the 1971 FX Super Glide, essentially a Shovel FLH with a Sportster front end. Good because young Willie G., the grandson of H-D founder William A. The public stock was bought back, and the factory began a dozen years with the AMF label on the tank, a mixture of good and bad years. The company was struggling financially and executives were talking with possible buyers, notably American Machine & Foundry, which decided to buy in. In an effort to bring in more cash Harley went public in 1965, though not very successfully apparently the family style of management could have used a hard-nosed MBA to sort things out. That had not gone too well, as the influx of Japanese models underpriced and outperformed these pseudo-Harleys. Harley had invested in the Italian Aermacchi company in 1961, hoping to get its share of the small-bike market. More changes were going on within the company structure than in R&D. 1978 Harley-Davidson 74-inch FLH Shovelhead. In 1970 the generator gave way to an alternator, with the points in the old-fashioned distributor disappearing inside the new timing case. The head was the only really new piece to this motor, as the company kept the iron barrels and bottom end of the previous Pan, as well as the generator. The FLH engine, the hotter version, was rated at 60 horses at 5,500 rpm. Instead of just being a cover, the new Shovel design was the actual cylinder head, with rocker-arm pivot-points engineered into the casting. Nothing drastic, but in 1966 the 74-incher got new aluminum-alloy “Power Pac” heads, which Harley claimed gave an increase of 10 horses …and looked vaguely like the back end of a shovel. As the Pan got heavier with changes in suspension and the addition of an electric starter, the factory decision to increase power was in order. The Harley engineering department had always been ploddingly methodical, taking care of problems as they arose, never rushing to be the firstest with the mostest. The Pan enjoyed the maintenance-free aspect of hydraulic valve-lifters, a necessary advancement since it took a while for the iron cylinders to heat up and match the expansion of the new aluminum heads. Squint your eyes and that early Harley iron cylinder-head looked vaguely knuckle-ish, while the subsequent one had shiny chrome rocker-arm covers which did indeed resemble the pans one might find in a kitchen. The nickname, according to historians, had to wait until 1948 when the next generation came along and people wanted to differentiate between the two. When the first Harley OHV twin appeared in 1936 nobody called it a Knuckle, it was just the E-model, or the 61-for cubic inches. The Shovelhead was the third rendition of Harley’s OHV V-twin, following the Knucklehead and the Panhead.
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