Dynasty? Franchise? Legend? Yes! The Honda Gold Wing was born "naked" in 1975 as Honda's first liquid-cooled model. The entire Cycle World road test issue said "Gold Wing" only one time but now it's the name that everyone associates with technical luxury touring and t he Gold Wing has won an amazing 25 CW Ten Best awards since its introduction. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer talk about how the Gold Wing entered the market and how the consumer drove its evolution into the full-rig luxury mile-eater it is today. They'll even tell you about the box truck with seat factory that was used to make new seats overnight during development!
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00:00 Welcome back to the CycleWorld podcast. It launches every Wednesday.
00:04 If you haven't subscribed or clicked the bell or any of that stuff, go ahead and do that because
00:10 it just keeps coming. This week, Kevin Cameron, technical editor Kevin Cameron and I are talking
00:17 about the Honda Goldwing. Every time I start these I say something about the legendary whatever,
00:24 whether that's Kevin Cameron or the bike we're talking about. And I wasn't going to say legendary
00:29 about the Honda Goldwing, but how can I not say legendary about the Honda Goldwing?
00:33 Absolutely.
00:34 Introduced, we were just joking that it was born naked in 1975 as the GL1000. It had no fairing.
00:41 CycleWorld's road test of the bike, you know, was very gentleman's express. The entire issue
00:48 said the words Goldwing one time. It wasn't even a thing. It was just a GL1000. It was a new super
00:55 bike. It really wasn't a touring bike. But look at us now. Other remarkable statistics since that
01:04 introduction in 1975, the Honda Goldwing has been named to CycleWorld's annual 10 best bikes list
01:12 a remarkable 25 times. It's the most. It's a franchise. It's a classic. It's
01:24 evolved in so many ways. And here we are still going strong in its latest iteration with DCT.
01:32 It introduced airbags to motorcycles. It had a four cylinder that grew and grew and then had a
01:40 six cylinder. And it still has a six cylinder with some really neat technology we hope we have time
01:45 to talk about. And with that, Kevin, I'll let you say something now.
01:52 Okay. I've been back and forth with people talking about what the intention of Goldwing
02:00 was on Honda's part. And I think that it's interesting to note that the steering head angle is
02:07 one degree more raked out and an inch more trail than the CB750, which was Honda's
02:21 first real super bike. And so that gives us an inkling that this motorcycle was designed
02:30 as a compromise between a sporting setup in which you want rapid response and a touring setup in
02:39 which you want stability. And you can sniff that out by looking at the rake and trail.
02:47 And then this was Honda's first liquid cooled engine for motorbikes. And I think
02:58 we might trace this back to the Clean Air Act in the US of 1970,
03:06 which basically said, "We're coming to get you polluters, all of you, when we get to you."
03:16 And that might have made it a good idea to build a water-cooled motorcycle, because you would
03:24 learn, you'd get advance notice on what you could and could not do emissions-wise.
03:30 Another thing is if you're building a big, heavy motorcycle with a substantial engine,
03:36 a very important point is how the motorcycle feels when you're standing still at a stoplight
03:46 or maneuvering at low speed. And what's important there is to have weight low enough so that if the
03:53 motorcycle begins to lean, that you don't have a lot of weight up high that creates leverage that
04:03 fights against your ability to keep it upright. It was a 600-pound motorcycle. Yeah. So a flat four
04:16 not only has the crankcase at a normal level, but also the cylinders are at that same level.
04:24 Whereas an inline four, the cylinders are sticking up, they're higher.
04:28 Another thing that was done in the interests of setting weight lower was to make the cover over
04:37 the engine's induction system as a dummy and move the fuel back and down underneath the seat. Now,
04:45 nearly all high-powered motorcycles today use this type of construction, and it is universal
04:51 in MotoGP. They want to put the heavy masses on the horizontal line of the center mass,
05:00 which makes it easier to change direction with the motorcycle. So that technique was really pioneered
05:09 with the original GL1000 Goldwing. And since that time, if you look at the spec sheets,
05:20 which you can compile endless wonderful details, when were the hydraulic tappets adopted?
05:33 You can find that there is a steady trend toward stability and away from the rapid response of a
05:44 sport bike over the entire 49 years of this motorcycle's history. And the reason for this
05:52 is something that at least some people at Honda are proud of. And that is that product planning
06:01 has in large part resulted from the market itself. And one of the principal proponents of this was
06:11 Shuji Tanaka, who is, I'm told, no longer with us. But he was the man who came to the US,
06:20 learned English, and spent years trying to understand the market so that Honda product
06:28 planning would not be simply sending new ideas into the void only to find that some of them,
06:36 well, some went, "Whoop." So there are a lot of personalities involved in this story.
06:44 But what is continuous through it is to bring engine RPM down so that you don't have that
06:52 buzzy feeling on the interstate at naturally 60 miles per hour, nevermind that everyone's going
07:00 85. And that the pulsing of the cylinders as they fire and the starting and stopping of the pistons
07:10 do not impose vibration that will make your day in the saddle into punishment rather than
07:21 the best time of your life. And this work has been carried out
07:27 in stages, but it has never deviated from this trend, which is toward lower RPM,
07:37 smaller pulsing from combustion, and less interference from starting and stopping of
07:48 pistons. Consider the fact that in a flat four, which is two boxer engines,
07:54 that two pistons are at top dead center while two are at bottom center. And this kind of thing
08:03 means that there is an inertia torque. Every 90 degrees, the pistons accelerate from a dead stop
08:12 at top or bottom dead center to a maximum speed. And in the next 90 degrees after that, they
08:19 decelerate again to a dead stop. And that energy, those pistons weigh something. That energy is
08:27 treating the crankshaft as a bank. It takes the energy to accelerate the pistons and the crank
08:36 shaft slows down. And then the crank shaft, the pistons stop, they give the energy back to the
08:42 crankshaft and it speeds up. So there has to be some kind of torsionally flexible element in the
08:51 drive, or there has to be a big flywheel. And it turns out that the early fours had a substantial
08:57 flywheel. And I think that was there to deal with some of that piston start and stop business.
09:03 Everyone on Spotify appreciates your sound effects.
09:06 Yeah, absolutely. The six, the latest six is one of the great motorcycle engines. We've
09:17 talked about it on the show many times, but you're looking at more than a hundred pound
09:24 feet of torque at around a thousand RPM. And it peaks, I think torque peak is 108 at 1200 RPM.
09:33 Which is making it a spectacular engine for just gliding away. And it's doing it with six
09:38 cylinders and it's impeccably smooth. It also makes it incredibly suited to the treatment with
09:45 DCT, the seven speed automatic. It has seven gears, ratio shred is the same as the six speed,
09:51 but they add another gear to smooth that one, two, three, because usually first and second's a bit of
09:56 a gap and they can make the ratios narrower so that the shift is smoother. And it is really smooth.
10:02 And in fact, about 80, 80% plus Goldwing buyers are taking a DCT. So it's a, it's a successful
10:12 package. I do want to talk about the origin and what you were saying about the evolution
10:18 of the motorcycle, because it did start as a naked motorcycle and it was sort of Honda's,
10:24 people called it a super bike. It was the new super bike. It was liquid cooled. It sort of had
10:31 Honda was really flexing its technical muscles, you know, from, from this period forward,
10:37 certainly launched by the CB 750, but they started to really do a lot of interesting things.
10:42 CBX, for example, you know, an inline six, I mean, crazy, awesome, crazy and awesome. And,
10:51 but the GL 1000 came out without a fairing. It wasn't really pitched as a long distance touring
10:57 bike. And indeed touring was kind of owned, you know, by what Harley Davidson, you know, and then
11:02 people put in wind jammers on kind of whatever they felt like it. But that's what happened is
11:07 that this bike was suddenly really outfitted and people started using it this way and did direct
11:13 to the, the development of it. Because at one point, I believe the Goldman came from the factory
11:18 with the wind jammer, and then it evolved to all the other true factory in, you know,
11:26 initial design concept, having all of this stuff integrated into the motorcycle,
11:32 not a motorcycle with a fairing put on it, but a design that integrated all of that.
11:36 So that, that continuous evolution had a big, had a big step in it when they decided what to do next
11:53 after GL 1200. Because the original motorcycle, the pistons were all 250 cc. And by the time they
12:05 got to GL 1200, the pistons had grown to 300, the cylinders, individual displacement was 300 cc.
12:13 And there was a, there was a question as to how to go forward. And the six cylinder
12:22 was an inviting pathway because the prototype on which the concept of a flat motor
12:32 with shaft drive was originally tested. It was a six. And that we've all heard the story about how
12:45 the six cylinder people were there in the, in the shop in the evening and the fast food wrappers were
12:53 underfoot. And here comes the old man. And he looks and says, what's this? And the people sort
13:04 of, well, you see, we've, we've been exploring, trying different, where are the keys? I want to
13:12 try this. And he rides off into the night, leaving them all quivering with fear because they know the
13:20 thing handles like shit. And because it's this, this big prototype motor in an existing chassis
13:29 that was never built for it. It's got a BMW final drive unit. It's, it's a cobbled up test piece.
13:39 And supposedly Mr. Oguma was there and he supposedly referred to the, to the flat engine
13:51 as a Volkswagen. I think probably sarcastically because he had his own ideas about all these
13:59 matters and he was a very unconventional person. >>So that was a near a majori project. Was it not?
14:09 Though the engine? >>Sure. Yeah. >>Yeah. So it's, so each year, uh, Air Majiri is, you know,
14:14 uh, the legendary Grand Prix, Grand Prix motorcycle engine designer and CBX leader. And, you know,
14:21 >>They brought him in and threw him in at the deep end. They said, here's the 50 CC twin with these
14:28 two little pistons and it won't, it won't win races. So fix it. And he did, they managed to win,
14:38 I think the 1965 50 CC championship with it. And he learned a lot from that about engine friction.
14:45 So I think he, he turned into a wonderful all rounder and was given all these projects.
14:53 But when they, when they got to 1200 and they needed more power because these motorcycles
15:03 have to keep up with traffic, they're building more interstate highways all the time.
15:08 At that time, and people are riding farther and faster. The question was, how do we deal with the
15:15 pulsing from these growing cylinders? Originally, uh, they bored the engine out, uh, three or four
15:24 millimeters to make the 1100. And then they, for the 1200, they, uh, managed to squeak another
15:31 half millimeter on the bore and got the rest of the increase from stroke. They went to 66 millimeters.
15:37 But there are limits to that. When you get your motor starting to get a lot bigger than it was
15:43 planned for, uh, it's hard to keep it smooth. And of course it already had this big flywheel on it.
15:51 So the idea of the six was a natural one. Why didn't they go with a six to begin with? Because
16:02 they were nervous less the market should say, Oh, I don't know. Six cylinders seem like an awful lot.
16:08 And actually when the six did come out as a GL 1500 people, yeah, people loved it. And
16:20 it was clearly the right way to go. They, they were able to do away with the flywheel completely.
16:28 And part of the reason for that is that you have three boxer pairs that are all phased at 120
16:37 degrees apart so that it gives even firing and you have a short, uh, rotation of the crankshaft
16:46 between one firing and the next. So that takes care of, of pulsing. And then you have, uh,
16:57 because you have these pairs at 120 degrees, you no longer have all the pistons stopping together,
17:04 starting, and then stopping again. You can do without the flywheel to try to,
17:10 that's trying to smooth that out. And the latest, uh, the generation six GL 1800 has
17:19 a marvelous collection of dampers in it for all sorts of purposes. They don't want you to feel
17:27 the reaction against the shift forks. Um, in, in, in the 1500,
17:33 they began to worry about clunking from the main bearings.
17:38 They may have even been earlier than that, but this, this clunking of the main bearings,
17:43 of course, was caused by the fact that if you've got an inline four, they're all pushing down on
17:48 the crankshaft. So the crankshaft is sitting down on the bottom of the bearings. But if you have
17:54 them pushing from either side, it's going to be able to move. So what did they do? They closed down
18:04 the main bearing clearances and they reduced the oil viscosity and they increased the surface
18:13 finish on the journals so that all the little mountainous asperities, the engineers like to call
18:21 surface irregularities, were much less tall. And this was, this was a big success all around. It's
18:31 the process for making those journals as smooth as that is widely used in the automotive industry.
18:38 Now it was originally developed in the war for breaking in aircraft engines, and then it was
18:45 forgotten. And who brought it back? Junior Johnson, the stock car racer, and the Honda Motor Company.
18:52 >> I think it's your, your aspiration to put asperities into the motorcycle enthusiast lexicon.
18:59 But yeah, it's, it is remarkable. I think one of my favorite qualities of the latest version
19:09 of the Honda Goldwing is how they've integrated the charging system and starter into a single,
19:18 into a single unit. >> Less copper.
19:20 >> And yeah, so you have one, you just have one big sort of AC generator guy that also
19:25 acts as the starter. >> The motor generator, yeah.
19:29 >> Yeah, and what's, what's neat about that is that it's, I believe it's concentric to the
19:35 crankshaft. And so when you hit the starter button on a, on a new, the 2017 and later
19:41 Honda Goldwing, it just goes bang, like it just turns on. It doesn't crank. It's not trying to
19:48 figure out what to do. It just goes, and turns on. It's, it's great. So '88 was the GL 1500. It also
19:57 got reverse. And it ran, the GL 1500, I think was a 13 year run. >> Yeah, long time.
20:06 >> Yeah, long time. >> And I think that, that this
20:12 technology stream of trying to smooth the engine out is, is remarkable because it is so different
20:23 from the trajectory of modifications in developing a sport bike, where the RPM is going up and up and
20:32 up. In the GL series, it's going down and down and down. Originally, the torque peak was at 5500 RPM
20:41 in the GL 1000. And the horsepower peak was up at 7500, which is not exactly comfortable. So
20:54 whereas sport bikes, there were 600s turning 17,000 RPM. And nobody cared if they,
21:02 if their pistons started and stopped or whatever, because everyone was hell bent for Daytona.
21:11 That's why they hired professional riders to ride those little 600s, because they sold a lot of them
21:18 back in the day. But at the same time, serenely gliding onward is the GL series,
21:24 going in a completely different kind of direction. >> Well, it's very American. I mean, it's a big
21:32 block. It's exactly what we've always wanted to do, which is increase displacement and move the
21:37 power down where your average person kind of rolling around. >> Well, I notice in the little
21:45 economy cars that I've driven lately, that when the engine gets pulled down to 1300, it shifts.
21:53 And the reason for that is you begin to feel the driveline. And I remember the first time I rode
22:01 in a four-cylinder car, it was a Saab, and it drove away from the stoplight with me in the back
22:07 seat. And I could feel that thing pulsing away, and the drive shaft downstairs was
22:12 boinging away. >> It must've been a V4, had to be. >> That stuff was real. >> Yeah. >> That stuff
22:21 was real. Torsional vibration, trying to do away with crankshaft thump. These people were madmen,
22:30 working toward an extreme result, which is what they've described as a magic carpet ride.
22:37 >> Yeah. >> Twist and go. >> Here is a madman story for you.
22:42 Seat development on one of the Goldwings in the '80s, I believe, seat development was a box truck
22:52 with a seam person, a sewing person, tailor, in a box truck with all the equipment and all kinds
23:01 of pads. And they would ride all day, and the box truck would go to where they were going,
23:07 and they would test the seat. And then they would say, "Well, I'm finding this part of my
23:12 posterior is unhappy." And they would re-sew a seat, and they would have a new seat in the morning
23:19 to try again to see how it was. And that is crazy awesome. That is like, that's the kind of engine
23:28 or motorcycle development story that just makes me want to throw it all and get into it, because
23:34 it's just, well, it's just so real. It's so real and dedicated. It's like blowing up the engine
23:39 on the dyno and having the connecting rods in the ceiling or breaking the lights or whatever,
23:44 because it's so real. >> Breaking the lights. >> Yeah, it's so real. >> Well, one of the things
23:49 they found in that seat development program was they reached the limit of the comfort they could
23:57 develop by shaping the seat and by various types of padding supporting your posterior.
24:04 And they concluded finally that it was the lack of stretchiness of the material
24:11 that was subjecting the skin of the rider, presumably pink, from
24:21 finding an equilibrium with this lack of stretchiness of the seat covering material.
24:33 So that when they included stretchiness in the material, they found that many of their complaints
24:42 melted away. So, yes, Mad Men. >>
24:55 So 2001 was the 1832. That was the 1832 CC kickup, and it really introduced a new era for Goldwing.
25:05 It, twin-spar aluminum frame, the marketing materials at that time, and the television
25:11 commercials and the print stuff really emphasized performance. There were all kinds of burnouts.
25:16 I want to say they sent Nicky Hayden out to a dry lake bed, and he
25:22 kicked his Goldwing sideways and made big puffs of dust and trails of dust and much drama, late
25:28 light, racing leathers and all that. And in fact, by the end of that run of that Goldwing, what is
25:34 it? Was that a 17-year run? At the end of that, they had kind of gotten away, gone away from that
25:42 aggressive sporting. It was back to comfort, et cetera. And so an interesting evolution over time,
25:49 but certainly a big change. In fact, we, Cycleworld, in 2001, did a lap of America
25:58 with the Goldwing starting at the press launch because they were doing that in Maryville where
26:04 they make the bikes. And we rode around the country. We did about a thousand miles a day
26:15 over handing off the bike. I went from Florida to Washington, DC,
26:19 and got a tire changed at Statesboro Honda. Shout out. Thank you for all these years later.
26:26 Changing the rear tire. And it was made easier on that model than it had been before with the
26:32 single-sided swingarm. Yeah. Well, I think that one of the descriptions that was made
26:45 of what they hoped to achieve was that dad in the front seat would have some sporting
26:55 enjoyment of the motorcycle as a motorcycle and mama on the back seat would have a magic carpet
27:04 ride. So all things to all people. It's truly one of the few motorcycles, it seems, where
27:14 the passenger got at least equal billing, if not better than the rider. And I know
27:19 executives at other companies, when they were redoing the touring model,
27:23 were forced. Leadership was forced to ride as a passenger on Harley Davidson touring bikes.
27:34 They went on whatever test facility, probably APG, the Arizona Proving Grounds. And they made
27:40 them get on the back and ride as a passenger to have some concept of what it's like.
27:45 And I think one of the great jokes is there's two ways to look at introducing someone to riding
27:54 on the back of a motorcycle on a Honda Goldwing. One is don't expose them to the Honda Goldwing
28:00 because they will never want to ride on the back of anything else. Or the other is it's a great
28:04 inducement because it is so comfortable and it makes you feel good having the back right
28:09 having the back rest. And they really did take care of the passenger in a way that other bikes
28:15 did not. Sure. Well, one of the trends that has existed for the 49 years is a longer wheelbase
28:26 from time to time and moving of the engine forward. Now, the original problem with the engine
28:34 not so far forward was where do you put the rider without having the rider's feet against
28:41 the cylinders? And a variety of clever means have been used to deal with this, such as
28:51 moving the engine forward until it became necessary to curve the radiator in order to move
28:58 it any farther forward. Looking at the motorcycle from the side, you can see that as the rider moves
29:05 forward, his seat is no longer on top of the rear tire but is starting down the hill. And one of the
29:15 things that touring riders often want is low seating position. And these things started out in
29:24 the low 30s and they're now around 29 inches. I think there are some machines on the market with
29:31 lower seating positions yet. But each when they went from the four to the six, it was a big
29:39 consideration. Where do we put the rider's feet? When they went from the fifth generation to the
29:47 sixth generation, they made the whole engine more compact by a variety of really clever means,
29:55 one of which was a change in the material of the crankshaft. This reminds me of Irimajiri because
30:07 he made the main bearing smaller and smaller on that little 50cc twin until he began to get fatigue
30:16 cracking. And then he started using higher and higher specification materials to prevent the
30:24 fatigue cracking. So in order to shorten the crankshaft, you have to either make the bearings
30:31 narrower, you have to move the cylinder bores closer together. And in this case, there's a disc
30:39 in the crankshaft that has a crank pin on either side of it that are at 180 degrees, made those
30:46 discs thinner. All these little changes added up to an engine that's 29 millimeters shorter.
30:51 And they keep mentioning that moving the major masses forward improves handling.
31:02 And I remember sitting in the engineering library at MIT when I was a technician,
31:09 reading the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, and there was a paper in there
31:16 about weight distribution motorcycles. And this must have been early '60s. Running a motorcycle
31:24 on a belt to test for stability. And as they move the engine and the rider forward, stability up,
31:31 up, up. I'm sure that's been cited many times in these meetings that go on forever.
31:38 Yeah, remarkable.
31:40 The JSME paper. But in any case, it was always a concern that there was stiction in the front fork,
31:50 which is a telescopic. First thing they did was to chamfer the bushings in hope that as the bushing
31:57 moved along the tube, that oil would see that tapered area. "Oh, that's where I'm going."
32:04 And then the following year, they went to a Teflon impregnated,
32:10 syntallic bushing to try to reduce stiction. And now in the sixth generation,
32:16 they combined the problem of how can we move the engine even farther forward with the problem of
32:24 how can we get rid of stiction now and forever by having the Hossack front end, which has two
32:32 parallelogram A arms. And at the apex of each one is a ball joint. And on that ball joint is the
32:42 front fork. So instead of sliding bearings, you have rotating bearings. And instead of the
32:51 wheel sliding up and back, which requires the engine to be farther away or the radiator or
32:57 what have you, it mostly goes just up, which allowed another little movement forward.
33:04 And somebody had to have all these details in mind all the time. And presumably some of them were
33:13 able to leave it all at work, but others sat up in bed at 4 a.m. thinking, "I've got it."
33:20 >> And so the next time you enjoy the magic carpet ride, you can think about those
33:26 engineering types who were dreaming of how to do this.
33:31 >> Well, it is a remarkable motorcycle to cover ground with and in any weather. We did a big ride
33:39 oh, six or seven years ago, and we'd done all this touring around California, and we were having
33:47 dinner on the last night, kind of wrapping up, and we were talking about all the places we'd been
33:52 and the fact that the next day it was going to be 48 degrees and rainy for 500 miles.
33:59 And we're like, "Eh, who cares?" It isn't ideal, but if you have the gear, if you have... I had an
34:08 AeroStitch I was wearing, so you've got good water repellent properties. You're wearing a fiberglass
34:13 hat, generally pretty waterproof, and gloves, eh, you know, fine as long as you have heated grips,
34:20 and we did. I had a heated seat, heated grips, and you just don't care. The wind protection,
34:25 the weather protection, you get on and you ride 500 miles in the rain, and you don't think twice
34:31 about it. The linked brakes, you know, you don't notice the linked brakes. You just get remarkable
34:39 stopping power. You get whatever they've done with that Hossack fork to... it doesn't bind under
34:47 braking. The thing just immediately drops anchor when you hit the pedal or you hit the lever. It
34:56 just stops, and it's so confidence-inspiring. The walking mode, this is one of the reasons I'm a
35:03 big fan of DCT is that, you know, they added reverse on the 6 in '88, which is great, but this
35:10 is basically a walking mode for parking lots, and you just put it into that mode, and you pull the
35:16 trigger to go forward, or you push the... whatever it is. You do forward and reverse with your
35:21 fingers, so you can go into the parking lot and back it up on gravel, move it around, three-point
35:26 turn it, do whatever you need to do. It's all about making it easy to get in the parking lot,
35:32 and keeping you in this "I can go anywhere" state of mind. You know, I can park where I need to,
35:40 and it doesn't conspire to kill my cool. Can't have that. I was looking at this layout diagram
35:51 of the DCT, the dual-clutch transmission, and I'm counting the ratios. Yeah, there's seven of them.
35:59 What's that Morse chain doing there? I'm thinking about that, and then later on, I was
36:08 reading about the walking mode, and I realized that that Morse chain is the reverse,
36:16 because normally the two shafts rotate in the opposite direction to one another. That's the
36:21 way gears are. Can't be any other way, but the chain makes the two shafts revolve in the same
36:27 direction, which means you're going to back up. And I thought, "Okay, thank you. Now I understand."
36:35 Well, that's an insight into Kevin Cameron's constant brain operation. This is how Kevin is
36:44 Kevin. I like that Morse chain. Yeah, it's cool. Same sort of thing that drives the camshafts.
36:52 That was another way to make the engine shorter. The first engines came out with toothed belt cam
36:59 drives, one for the right-hand bank and one for the left-hand bank. The right-hand bank is
37:05 slightly farther forward than the other, and the two belts are offset from one another.
37:10 The belts had to be fairly wide in the beginning, because the quality, the durability, and the
37:17 horsepower per width of toothed belts is steadily improving, increasing every year by small amounts.
37:26 So, if they were going to do it again, the belts would be narrower. But at one point,
37:31 they decided, "Okay, we're going to have to make the cam drive narrower." So, they switched back to
37:38 silent chain, which is quite narrow. Every little detail.
37:46 Yeah, and I think, you know, if you think about the marketplace that it entered and where we are
37:53 now, is it entered a U.S., you know, U.S.-dominated. That was sort of the full dresser,
37:59 Harley-Davidson booming along, low RPM, all of that, doing what it's doing. And Harley had had
38:08 a great evolution up to that point, growing with the interstate system, as you point out,
38:12 getting the engine ever larger and all of that. But the Goldwing really, the Goldwing came out
38:19 at a time where the not-Harley aspect of the market was becoming highly technically oriented.
38:28 And you were looking at 75 horsepower, 750s, and then it was by the, you know, the 80s, it was 100
38:35 horsepower, 750s, you know, it was this last year plus 5% of the market, and then it was, you know,
38:42 75% or whatever it was. And we were selling motorcycles on anti-dive and all these new
38:48 things that were happening that were meant to give us performance we never could have dreamed of.
38:55 And Goldwing did a really interesting thing in applying all that technology
39:00 to the idea of ultimate ease and comfort and unstoppability.
39:08 It was just the real technical birth of it, and they kind of put everybody out of business
39:14 in that segment. Yeah, well, that can happen. That one product prevails. Or in the case of
39:22 the GLs versus Harley-Davidson, two products. You know, there are the Harley people who are
39:29 never going to ride anything else, and then there are the GL people, and we hope that they
39:38 enjoy one another's presence. Well, it's such a different concept of riding because the...
39:44 I wouldn't... I don't want to say that Goldwing is trying to disappear,
39:50 but the Goldwing is absolutely trying to melt the barriers and... What does it have? A suggestion of
39:59 moving parts. But it is... It's so subtle, and the Harley is meant to be something else entirely,
40:05 you know, and now Indian. They're both... Indian did a really... Indian did a remarkable job of
40:12 making their engine have a beautiful, beautiful sound and to be present in the riding experience.
40:18 It's really part of it. You know, you're really... They're still rubber mounting
40:23 Harley-Davidson Touring twins because it gives you the opportunity to tune the feeling
40:31 through the chassis and give you a relationship, and that still exists. They're far more capable
40:38 than they ever were, but they're still there. Years ago, Earl Werner was chief engineer at Harley,
40:46 and he said, "Everybody who tours wants vibration done away with because it's tiring."
40:57 But Harley riders, when they are at a stop, at a stoplight, want the bars to shake
41:04 to let people know what heroes they are for being able to tame this wild beast.
41:11 Now, that's okay. That's a way to look at the motorcycle. The GL way is to make a motorcycle
41:21 that does not come to the rider's attention in any unpleasant way. You aren't thinking to yourself,
41:27 "My hands are tingling. My other parts are tingling." You don't want the motorcycle to
41:38 be singing to you unpleasantly so that your ears are ringing. And so,
41:47 the GL engineering group over these 49 years has had to consider that they are creating
41:55 a mobile environment for human beings. And it's just supposed to do what it's told,
42:04 and otherwise, to be quiet and unobtrusive. That's the magic carpet.
42:13 But there's another contrast with the whole sport bike thing. With the sport bike,
42:18 you want as much compression as you possibly can because it boosts torque,
42:22 and you want all these super performance. Everything is squeezed to the limit,
42:27 and the limit is detonation. When the fuel-air mixture in the cylinder gets hot enough that
42:34 all kinds of crazy chemistry happens, and out at the edges of the cylinder where the combustion,
42:42 the last part of the charge to be reached by the flame front, it tries to start a revolution.
42:49 Little points of light as the little pockets of mixture auto-ignite, and they burn at supersonic
42:57 speed, and they make that knocking noise. When I think of knock, I think of hitting two stones
43:03 together underwater. It has a strange otherworldly sound. Well, in GL, the emphasis has been on
43:14 bringing the RPM down, and that makes an engine more likely to knock because knock is time
43:22 dependent. You're baking this explosive in your combustion chamber, and the longer time you give
43:29 it, the more likely it is to knock. They've had to very quietly make sure that those early GLs,
43:37 which had air circulation, axial swirl, they call it, which was produced by
43:44 offsetting the intake port like this so that it created this axial swirl, that held off
43:54 detonation. When in the sixth generation, 2018 model, they went to four valves,
44:03 they had the valve area to just bring the torque down to ungodly low revolutions, like 850.
44:13 The notion of opening the throttle at 850 RPM on anything other than a truck diesel
44:22 just seems like an invitation. "Come and knock me out."
44:25 In that engine, they made use of tumble. The air coming in through the intake valves
44:35 goes across the other cylinder wall and forms a loop. As the piston comes up, that loop is
44:42 compressed into smaller and smaller space. It breaks up into little turbulent cells. The spark
44:49 plug lights a few of them, and by their rotation, they spread the flame everywhere. As long as they
44:55 can keep ahead of the process of detonation, the engine is wonderful quietness, no knocking.
45:03 This is something that they've had to give just as much attention to as any hop-up operation
45:11 trying to win the Daytona 200, but it's going in a different direction. I think that's
45:17 unappreciated. I wanted to bring it to your attention.
45:22 Yeah, well, we've clearly appreciated it. On to Goldwing here.
45:26 Anything else you want to stuff in in the last moments, Kevin?
45:32 Well, it's just that again and again, things crop up in the... I was reading yesterday, it said
45:42 at one point they were able to increase the rear spring stiffness and still improve ride quality
45:55 because they had brought in compression damping that had been developed in racing. Now, the problem
46:03 with compression damping is that if it doesn't get out of the way at high velocities, when you hit a
46:11 bump, you get a god-awful punch. That's really harsh. It's unpleasant and it destroys traction
46:19 because the tire may get airtime during which point it can get moving. These little details
46:29 that somebody in a meeting said, "Well, sir, what about this new compression valve that the people
46:35 over here in racing are talking about? Get those guys in here." This is important. If you have a
46:43 large organization that is investigating a great many technologies at once, how do you get the ones
46:51 you need when you need them? That used to be what they referred to as Mr. Oguma's refrigerator.
47:00 They would develop things like power brakes that motorcycles didn't need at the time,
47:05 but it would be there in Mr. Oguma's refrigerator as a starting point. If we suddenly need power
47:14 brakes, we know where to begin. There are many other technologies that are sitting in the cooler
47:22 waiting for the need to develop. Communication is one of the hardest things about having that
47:29 and getting that across the organization. I think Honda and many other manufacturers have a
47:34 fairly vigorous rotation of people. They do. They would get somebody who was familiar with
47:41 racing and then would say, "Oh, hey, over here, we were doing this." It's woven into who they are.
47:48 They don't have to discover it. It's there and they can apply it to the new problem.
47:53 Another thing that has been discovered, for instance, if you read about Lockheed's famous
48:00 skunkworks, they discovered that the best way to correct a program that is over budget and
48:11 beyond schedule is to reduce the number of engineers because of the communications problem
48:19 that you just mentioned. If you can get them in the room together and they can have a conversation,
48:25 there's a good chance that they can iron out their problems.
48:29 Another project that I remember in the motorcycle world, I won't identify the manufacturer.
48:37 The racing motorcycle was broken down into areas. Each area was given a study group. The study
48:45 groups presented their reports and nobody was saying, "This is a motorcycle. Every part affects
48:55 every other part. Who's integrating the system?" Oh, nobody. We didn't have the budget.
49:05 Yes, I think internal communication is a very important thing. That's one of the reasons why
49:15 Mr. Oguma, who was a prominent character in the '70s, when he had a group of engineers in a foreign
49:26 country, he would make them go to the museums of technology, such as the Deutsches Museum in Munich,
49:32 and look at the displays and discuss what was there because it's all too easy to just
49:43 fall into a groove. "Oh, it's nice and comfy in here. Please turn out the light and go to sleep."
49:51 And that's why Frank Whittle invented the jet engine without ever having worked for an engine
49:57 company. And the manufacturers of aircraft engines never invented the jet engine because it was just
50:04 too different. So get those crazy guys talking and gals and see what pops out.
50:14 Well, it's a real big thing because if you have a business that's doing all right, that's where
50:19 your resources go. It's very hard to peel that off. It's very hard to start a new department
50:26 that doesn't just go like, "Well, if we put a dollar into a jet engine, what are we going to
50:32 get back from that?" Big deals. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We sure appreciate
50:46 the feedback in the comments. We've really enjoyed the comments since we started this.
50:50 I went to Moto America last weekend, which will be two weekends ago by the time this plays for
50:57 the first time. But I went to Road America, Moto America, lots of America. Bagger Racing was back.
51:04 It was spectacular. Indian got, oh, I want to say four podiums. And then Kyle Wyman did a
51:12 beautiful draft pass to take the victory. A wonderful stimulation for something that
51:20 hasn't existed for a long time, the Harley-Davidson Racing Team. They have shirts and jackets that say
51:29 Harley-Davidson Racing Team. I hope that the dear departed Dick O'Brien is listening because
51:38 I never thought I'd see it, but here it is. And it's helping those guys with sales.
51:49 Troy Herfos, our Indian-Australian Superbike Champion, is just a really great guy and an
51:56 incredible rider. Did well in the rain. And given the amount of track time he had,
52:04 he did a pretty darn good job of setting lap times. Anyway, it was particularly fun to show
52:12 up at that race and have people say, "Hey, hey, hey you. You're doing that podcast with Kevin."
52:20 I'm like, "Yeah, I sure am." Like, "I recognize your flannel," which is an indication that I'm
52:25 not wearing a flannel today precisely because I've got to get new flannels to wear. But we
52:31 appreciate the communication and feedback about the podcast. We enjoy doing it.
52:38 - Well, we were just talking about communication being necessary inside of an R&D organization.
52:44 And we're trying to develop content to present to you in the future. So communicate.
52:52 - Yeah, let us have it. - And we will present it.
52:54 - Let us have it. So thanks again for listening. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and of course
53:01 here on YouTube as well. And we'll catch you next time. Thank you.