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The boxer engine had been used in motorcycles for about as long as the V-twin. The design appeared as early as 1904 in what eventually became the Douglas motorcycle, and Harley developed the Model W Sport Twin, which featured an opposed-twin engine, in 1919, but it was Max Friz’s use of the design in his R32, BMW’s first motorcycle, produced in 1923, that made the engine design iconic. BMW continues to build motorcycles powered by opposed twins to this day, and it will probably continue to do so as long as motorcycles are still being built.

Even though BMW had a great deal of success with opposed-twin engines, no other manufacturer has mass-produced a motorcycle with such an engine since the end of World War II. It wasn’t until Honda introduced its Gold Wing in 1975 that any major manufacturer built a motorcycle with a boxer-type engine, and Honda’s version was a four cylinder rather than a twin. In 1988 Honda added two more cylinders to create the six-cylinder Gold Wing 1500. Then in 2001, Honda bumped displacement to 1832 cc.

Today BMW’s R-series twins and Honda’s GL1800 Gold Wing are the only bikes that use boxer engines, but these are extremely popular bikes and there are a lot of them on the road. This might be a relatively unusual engine design—and Gold Wings and BMWs are also expensive machines—but they are also some of the best and most-popular long-distance bikes you can buy. As I said earlier, for me it’s important to buy motorcycles built by American companies, but you, like a lot of motorcyclists, might have different priorities; if you ride long enough and far enough, there’s a good chance you could end up owning a bike with an opposed engine someday.

Inline Triples

Think of an inline three-cylinder engine as a parallel twin with one more cylinder tacked on. Inline triples have been used sporadically throughout the years. Right now the only company mass-producing inline triples is Triumph. The company builds a variety of triples ranging from 675-cc middleweights to the gigantic 2300-cc Rocket Three line. These are generally highly regarded bikes. Their three-cylinder engines do a good job of combining the low-end torque of twin-cylinder engines with the top-end rush of engines with more cylinders. Triumph has a long history with three-cylinder engines, dating to the 1960s.

Outside of Triumphs, you won’t find a lot of triples to choose from. Some Italian companies may or may not build them, but that’s the nature of an Italian motorcycle company. The Italians design some of the best motorcycles available, but when it comes down to actually building them, they seem to lose interest. As a result, Italian motorcycle companies are almost always in some state of receivership, what we’d call “bankruptcy” in the United States.

Because of this, I suggest staying away from Italian motorcycles. Period. You may be tempted by their beautiful styling or their high performance, but if you succumb to temptation and buy one, consider yourself warned, because you will, without exception, have all kinds of problems with your bike, ranging from untraceable electrical problems to camshafts that disintegrate within ten thousand miles.

This is in part because of communication problems in Italian motorcycle factories. Most of the managers in Italians factories are Italians who speak Italian, while most of the workers have emigrated from Africa or the Middle East and speak other languages. In other words, the workers don’t understand a word their bosses are saying. As a result, bikes are shipped with huge problems. For example, a batch of camshafts won’t have the proper heat treatment on the cam lobe surfaces, or an entire production run of bikes will be shipped with the wrong central processing units (CPUs) in their fuel-injection
computers.

A big part of the problem is Italy’s socialist government. This is not a book about politics, but the Italian motorcycle industry is an example of politics manifesting themselves in your motorcycle riding experience, so I think it deserves a mention here. In Italy, labor laws have been heavily influenced by the Communist Party. As a result, it’s almost impossible to fire someone, regardless of how poorly that person performs. Thus, people tend to rise to their level of incompetence and stay stuck in that position until they retire.

Ultimately you end up with factories filled with incompetent craftsmen who build bikes with unreliable camshafts and incorrect ignition systems. In the early 2000s Italy hired Professor Marco Biagi to propose reforms to the country’s labor laws that were intended to make Italy more competitive in world markets, but in March 2002, the Red Brigade, a radical Communist faction, had the professor killed, thus ensuring that Italy would continue building unreliable motorcycles for the foreseeable future.

Professor Biagi’s tragic fate illustrates the immense barriers to reform. As a result, we’re unlikely to see, in our lifetime, Italian industry adopt sensible labor laws—or produce reliable motorcycles. Until that happens, you are advised to stay away from anything Italian that has electrical parts. If you must buy Italian, it’s best to stick to their guns and shoes, both of which still seem to be fairly reliable.

Inline Fours

In the 1960s Harley and Triumph continued to build motorcycles that still featured the technology they’d introduced in the 1930s, primarily because they could get away with it. They had virtually no competition in the heavyweight motorcycle market, so they had little reason to spend the money needed to update their products.

But if they had been paying attention, they would have realized that the lack of competition was an illusion; they had plenty of competition, and almost all of it was coming from Japan. When Honda began exporting motorcycles to the United States in 1959, its early bikes were little 50-cc step-through machines that resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned girl’s bicycle. These were soon followed by larger motorcycles with parallel-twin engines, but the biggest of these displaced just 305 cc; none of these engines were considered direct competitors with Triumph’s 650-cc parallel twins and Harley’s 900-cc and 1200-cc V-twins.

When Honda introduced its first “big” bike, the Black Bomber, a sporty 450-cc parallel twin, it should have sounded like a shot across the bow of the American and British motorcycle industries. Sure, it was only a 450-cc bike, but it could outrun the bigger British twins and could even give the mighty 900-cc Sportster a run for its money. And the Japanese had no intention of stopping there.

The British sort of got with the program. Triumph and BSA began developing three-cylinder motorcycles, but they more or less backed into the program with little enthusiasm. The resulting motorcycles, introduced in 1969, were half-assed at best, weak responses to the next bomb Japan was about to drop on the motorcycling world: the Honda CB750.

The CB750 had all the attributes that people had grown to associate with Honda: modern design (the CB750 featured an all-aluminum engine with an overhead camshaft), convenience (the CB750 featured an electric starter that worked every time the owner punched a button), and reliability—you could ride this bike from coast to coast without doing anything other than oiling and tightening the chain. But the most amazing aspect of the bike was its number of cylinders: four of them, all placed transversely in a row across the frame, like two side-by-side parallel twins.

There had been four-cylinder bikes in the past. In the early years Henderson and other companies had built motorcycles with longitudinal four cylinders—that is, the four cylinders were placed end to end, leading to a very long, awkward motorcycle. Because of this, and also because of their complexity, which made early fours even more unreliable than early twins and singles, the longitudinal four was never very popular. In the 1960s the Italian company MV Agusta built a relatively modern 600-cc transverse four, but in true Italian fashion it imported only twenty or thirty of its four-cylinder bikes into the U.S. market over the course of a dozen or so years. Odds are you’ll never see one of these except on the pages of a magazine.

Honda was the opposite of an Italian company; whereas there were very few Italian motorcycle dealers in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, by 1969 there was a Honda dealership in just about every town with more than a thousand people living in it. Unlike exotic Italian motorcycles, Honda’s CB750 was everywhere, virtually overnight. And unlike the earlier 450 twin, which could almost keep up with the Sportster, Harley’s fastest motorcycle at the time, the new 750 four, beat the Sportster like the Sportster owed it money. Harley responded by boring the Sportster out to 1000 cc, but this only made the marginally unreliable Sportster extremely unreliable. As a response to the CB750, the upsized Sportster was beyond pathetic.

The Japanese were far from done having their way with the rest of the world’s motorcycle manufacturers. Honda’s CB750 dominated the heavyweight motorcycle market for three years, driving more nails in the British motorcycle industry’s coffin. Then in 1972 Kawasaki introduced the Z1, a 903-cc four cylinder with not one but two overhead camshafts. Not only could the Kawasaki smoke every British and American motorcycle (and also the CB750), it could hand the fastest cars their asses.

Soon all the Japanese manufacturers were producing motorcycles with bigger and faster inline four-cylinder engines. The engine design became so common that motorcycles with inline fours were called UJMs (universal Japanese motorcycles).

It’s not hard to see why they became so popular. In 1973 a rider could plunk down $1,900 for a brand-new Z1 (hundreds of dollars less than a comparable Harley) and ride off with the fastest machine available to the general public. As a result, Kawasaki sold about 85,000 Z1s in 1973, while Harley sold just 9,875 XL 1000s (in 1973 Harley dropped the “Sportster” name and didn’t reinstate it until the late 1970s). This trend would continue well into the next decade, nearly bankrupting Harley-Davidson in the process.

V-Fours

The last common type of motorcycle engine is the V-four. Honda introduced the modern V-four in the 1980s and now has two bikes available with the engine design: the ST1300 sport-tourer (we’ll get into types of motorcycles in the next chapter) and the Interceptor, an 800-cc sport-tourer. Think of the V-four as an automotive V-eight sliced in half.

This design has advantages in packaging because it crams four cylinders into a unit that doesn’t take up much more space than your average V-twin, but it’s expensive to produce because it has a lot more individual parts than an inline four. Because of high production costs not many manufacturers build V-four production bikes today. Yamaha puts V-fours in a few of its Star-series cruisers, and Aprilia recently released a V-four sport bike, but the design has never caught on like the inline four and the V-twin.

FINAL DRIVE ASSEMBLY

W
E’VE SPENT A LOT
of time discussing engine designs, which makes sense since without motors we’d just have bicycles, but the rest of the parts are almost as important. For example, without a final drive assembly connecting the engine to the rear wheel, the motor would just be a noisemaking device.

Power can be transferred from the transmission to the rear wheel by three main methods: belt, chain, and shaft. The earliest motorcycles used a smooth leather belt to transmit power from a pulley coming straight off the engine’s crankshaft to the rear wheel. Rather than a clutch and gear set, the transmission consisted of an idler pulley that put tension on the belt. This idler pulley was disengaged with a lever, a crude system that made harnessing the 2–3 horsepower that the early motorcycle engines put out a lot more exciting than you might imagine.

By the time I started riding, belts had long been abandoned in favor of chain final drive systems in which a metal chain ran from a sprocket on the output shaft on the transmission to another sprocket attached to the rear wheel hub. This system is still used on many bikes today.

Although most U.S. motorcycle builders progressed from belt final drive to chain final drive, a lot of European manufacturers developed shaft final drive systems. These systems don’t require the periodic maintenance that chain systems require, such as tightening of the chain and constant lubrication, but they are heavy and add a lot of weight to the bike.

They also have a tendency to jack the bike up under acceleration. This unsettles the chassis and has a negative impact on handling. Some manufacturers like BMW and Moto Guzzi have developed complex rear suspension designs that help minimize this tendency, but these designs bring on a new set of problems. BMW in particular has had a lot of trouble with the failure of the articulating joints it puts in its drive shafts to help control the up-and-down jacking inherent in a shaft rear-drive system.

Harley-Davidson brought back the belt concept in the early 1980s, using a toothed rubber belt on toothed sprockets in place of the chain. The system runs as smoothly as a chain system, and a quarter of a century of use has proven it to be as reliable and easy to maintain as a shaft system. It was a great idea, as evidenced by the fact that today many other manufacturers use belt final drive systems on their motorcycles, including Victory, Yamaha, and BMW.

ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS

T
HE OTHER MAIN PARTS
of a motorcycle are its frame, electrical system, transmission, and rider controls and accommodations. The frame, that part that holds the whole thing together, is made either of steel tubes or aluminum beams. In the old days we had to worry about the engine shaking frame welds and joints loose, but today’s frames are so sturdy that this has become another forget-about-it part.

There are a few exceptions—for example, in the late 1990s Suzuki built the TL1000, a V-twin sport bike that developed a reputation for breaking frames—but as long as you’re not regularly popping wheelies or doing gigantic stoppies (hitting the brakes so hard you raise your back wheel in the air), you’re most likely not going to have to worry about problems with your motorcycle’s frame.

In the old days the electrical systems of our motorcycles were constant sources of problems. One of the improvements the Japanese brought to the motorcycle industry was the concept of reliable electrical systems. These reliable electrics in turn made electric starters a practical proposition, which is what made it possible for so many new riders to get into the sport of motorcycling. This is especially true for women; it took a hefty leg to kick-start those old V-twin Harleys. The British never did quite get the hang of reliable electrical systems and electric-starters, which was still another nail in the British motorcycle industry’s coffin, but Harley did make huge improvements and today’s big Harley V-twins all have functional electric starters.