Rim brakes, under-engine exhausts, extreme frame geometry, Harley-Davidson engines--so much has happened with Erik Buell and the motorcycles he's made, from Buells and its closure by Harley-Davidson in 2009 to reborn EBR and its partnership with Hero Motorcycles only to close again. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer talk about Erik Buell the AMA Expert road racer in the 1970s and his move to build his own two-stroke Formula 750 race bike to take on the mighty Yamaha TZ750 in the 1980s and all the way up to the present day. Buell is responsible for real innovations and ultimately built an American sportbike competitive with the world's best.
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SportsTranscript
00:00Welcome back to the Cycleworld podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief, and I'm
00:05with Kevin Cameron, our long-term, long-time technical editor, former AMA
00:11tech inspector, scientist, studier of truths, and tester of assumptions. You
00:23know him well. This week's topic, we are we're going to talk about Buell. And when
00:29you say Buell, what does that even mean? Well, it means motorcycles, and it means
00:34irrevocably tied to Eric Buell, the man. And what a story it's been, you know, like
00:41he's a motorcycle maniac, road racing, what did he have? He had a
00:48Ducati twin. Started on a F5 Kawasaki in 1973. Yeah, crazy. And then an
00:58RR250, which he wasn't happy with. I was gonna say, can we pause, starting with
01:03with what you just said, is like the ultimate underdog move, and is that not...
01:07His way. It's his way. Yeah, that's, well, see, we're done. Eric was an
01:15underdog. Click. We finished the podcast. No, it's really cool, because, you
01:24know, who among us hasn't dreamt in some ways of making our own motorcycle? Like,
01:30you take all the bad ideas that you've seen, and you're like, I can fix
01:34all this, and wouldn't it be great if we could just, you know, make this like this,
01:39and have these ideas, and execute them? And Dan Gurney was good at that, right?
01:43Purity, purity, excellence. Yeah, and, but it's just not that easy, and a lot of us
01:50have ideas, and they never get executed in, you know, any form. Like, you
01:55don't even, you hardly finish your own project bikes, or whatever, and yet, you
02:00know, after all the decades that Eric's been at it, how many, how many motorcycles
02:06did he end up with, with his name on them? 137,000. Yeah. How about that? Not a
02:15project. Oh, I'm going to take it racing. Oh, well, I broke my leg, and I lost
02:21interest. 137,000 built, and sold. So, the man has persistence, and each time that
02:34something, something discouraging has happened, he bounces back like one of those
02:40inflatable toys that has a weight in the bottom of it. You give it, biff, pow, socko,
02:46and it falls over, but then up it comes, good as new, and that's what we've seen with Eric. He,
02:56he just keeps making motorcycles, and the times since 2009 have been unkind to him,
03:07and to many others, but he's been pushing projects one after another, and of course,
03:16investors are, I mean, if you were interested in investing in something of this kind,
03:23you will know his name already. He doesn't have to go knocking on your door.
03:30So, it's really quite a, quite a score, and he started out, he went to night school,
03:38he went to university, he got his engineering degree in 79, and went to work for Harley-Davidson.
03:44He supposedly decided to apply there because he thought, if I take a job with one of the
03:53Japanese importers, I will never rise above one of those technicians that's riding in the back
04:00of a windowless van, taking data from a bike that you can, you can hear is behind you,
04:09and he didn't want that. He didn't want to be a data taker. He wanted to be a maker,
04:17and so there he was at Harley-Davidson, and while he was there, he got involved with this
04:24Barton affair, which was an outfit in the UK making a 750 square four disc valve two-stroke.
04:36Well, Eric had got his AMA expert license in 77, and he, next year he had a TZ750,
04:50and so this looked like just the thing for him. Here is, here is a project of manageable size,
04:59can build a chassis for this, we can have this wonderful engine, and just
05:06distinguish ourselves, like young officers, eager for distinction.
05:14Harley-Davidson said, well, we can't be involved with that. We'd love to help you,
05:21but we can't, and so he quit the company and embarked upon a single-handed operation to build
05:30Buell motorcycles. Well, yeah, I mean, he got Barton, and basically bought a Barton,
05:36as I understand, and tried to make it work, and found it was perhaps a little more substandard
05:42than represented in the catalog. I think it started life as a 500, because the crank pins in it
05:49are wee little things, like a TD2 crank pin, and then they swelled it up to a 750,
05:55and then for Class D sports cars, I think, it went out to 850, and all the time with that
06:04little crank pin, oh, please don't, Mr. Piston, I can't take it. Yeah, that's what Eric had to
06:13work with that was available to him. Well, he acquired the assets of the company, I think,
06:19and then he started. That's when he embarked on, I'm going to build this.
06:24Built two of them. One of them went to, what, the American Machinists Union?
06:28They had big plans to go racing with it, and well, our plans are off gang of glay,
06:40and but Eric always seems to have an alternative plan. He has a B plan and a C plan,
06:49and so in this case, it was, I can't spare the time that I'm spending at Harley-Davidson,
06:56so I'll quit that job, and I'm going to focus on this project, and I went to, I had a visit
07:04at his farmhouse. One of the things that happens in the Midwest is Archer Daniels Midland comes in
07:10and they buy all the land, and the farmhouse, and the barn, and the silos, and the workshop
07:18are just sitting there on a little postage stamp of land, and he bought one of those setups,
07:23everything but the land. The barn was big enough to fly model airplanes in there. It was just
07:30an incredible volume, and his workshop, people talk about it being a barn, but it was a one-story
07:36height structure, nicely lit. He had a full-scale drawing board in there, and he was set up
07:44to do some serious work, serious design work, so talking about working in a barn, no. Eric wanted
07:51to work in a drafting office, and that's what he built for himself, so
08:00he quickly switched plans. He found that Harley-Davidson had some XR1000 engines
08:09sitting somewhere unused, and he bought 50 of them. You know, those run pretty good. I just
08:14raced against the Team Obsolete XR750, and I made power, man. It was hard not passing it on
08:25the straightaway. A lot of people worked on those cylinder heads, get the air in and the smoke out,
08:34so he built 50 motorcycles. Eric always has focused on certain ideals that he holds to be
08:52fundamental. He's a constitutional man in that way. Wheelbase will be 52 inches. Mass will be
09:01centralized so that the motorcycle will more resemble a 24-pound cannonball than it does
09:09a 24-pound 10-foot ladder. If you've ever tried to suddenly change direction while carrying a ladder,
09:17you'll know what I'm talking about, and he has carried these principles with him
09:25religiously. Well, if we're talking about religion, we have to talk about the rim brake
09:29too, the inside out. Oh, well, that's a show in itself. Well, the thing is, when Harley-Davidson,
09:42when Harley-Davidson, of course, acquired a share in Buell in 93, and he got set up in a
09:55plant in McWanago, and it was a regular production plant, people assembling motorcycles. It would
10:03just look tremendous, and it was well lit. You can bet that it had 140 lumens per square foot
10:09as per OSHA standard with XYZ. But among all of that apparatus,
10:16he wasn't just talking about mass centralization as if it were eternal life, which has not been
10:24observed. He wanted to observe mass centralization, so he had a full vehicle mass properties rig.
10:35You put the vehicle on there, and you, for example, you're checking yaw, so you have the
10:42yaw axis vertical, and there are springs on this turntable. You pull the table back and let go,
10:50and the motorcycle will go. And the number of cycles per second plus certain other compensations
10:59tells you what the polar moment is in yaw, so he could work toward reducing those values.
11:07It was not a slogan. It was a fact. He had a second machine that was just for the wheels,
11:15and he wanted to make sure that the front wheel did not unnecessarily resist the rider's attempt
11:23to steer. Now, we all know that when it comes to flywheels, the greatest effect
11:32comes from the greatest radius. That's why old-time two flywheel crankshafts,
11:39the rim is a solid ring, and the weight that's missing for counterbalancing is on the inside
11:47faces of those flywheels cored out, so they're putting as much mass at the largest possible
11:54radius. And that's to increase the polar moment of the crankshaft for good idle and smooth
12:04operation at low RPM. But what he wanted was to get rid of mass that was out near the rim,
12:14and he looked at brake discs, and he said, why do there have to be two of them?
12:21And then he thought about it again, and he said, there's excess structure here. I can get rid of it
12:27because a conventional brake, the caliper applies its pinch out at the rim, out at the OD of the
12:37brake disc, because you want leverage to stop the bike. Then that force is transmitted through the
12:45disc carrier inward to the hub, across the hub to the spokes, then out the spokes to the rim.
12:56Why not bypass the middleman and attach the disc, one disc, to the rim? Turn the caliper
13:04the other way so that it grips the disc from the inside.
13:09And as his long-serving engineer at that time, Abe Askenazy, said,
13:17this is an excellent brake for a street bike.
13:22Usually. Yes. I would say in practical terms and through the evolution,
13:281125R and 1125CR, which was the 60-degree, it was sort of Eric's first sport engine that he got
13:39under the Buell name. And that brake, I would describe it as a self-servo effect. So when
13:48you're trail braking, and you're trail braking out of the apex, and you're not just having a single
13:54pull, you're releasing, as you're turning the bike in, you're releasing the trade braking force
13:59for cornering force. Yep. Which is where all the magic is, which is where, you know, Mark Marquez
14:07beats us all a long way. And you need good control there, trail braking, that brake on that bike,
14:18self-servoed. So as you applied it, the coefficient, I think it was heat-related,
14:23I think the coefficient of friction of the pad possibly changed as the temperature changed. Yes,
14:28that's quite common. And boy, did it really apply the brakes for you. So you'd be trail braking,
14:34and you're releasing, and you're trying to release faster to compensate, like two-stroke
14:40power band. Over, yeah. And boy, it made you feel a little queasy track testing it,
14:46because it was doing that. And then one night, leaving on our test bike, I'm zipping up the
14:52freeway at night, dark, wintertime, zinging along, and I'm following a car. And the car
15:04suddenly darts left, and we're going 80, and I can't see through the car. And it starts left,
15:12and there's stopped traffic. And I'm going 80. And I applied those brakes, and that thing
15:18stood up on the front wheel. I thought I was going to end up watching Little Mermaid in the
15:22back of that Ford Explorer with the kid, because I could actually see the video screen in the
15:28vehicle. And it braked, and it pivoted up, because it just grabbed right away. But they later fixed
15:34that. The EBR, the 1190SX, and the RX were pretty darn good. Well, that happened with
15:44carbon-carbon to begin with, that it had a very steep temperature coefficient of friction.
15:50And they had to reorient the fibers in the preform to enable the surface to warm up
16:00quickly when the brakes were applied. And you may recall seeing MotoGP bikes with
16:08shields over the discs. The purpose of those shields is to retain more heat so that the disc
16:16can come up to temperature and stay there. You don't want to get to the end of a straightaway
16:22after all that 300-foot-per-second wind blowing on the discs and find that they don't have any
16:30friction when you apply them. Yeah. Well, that point, as you say, 300-foot-per-second wind,
16:38you know, all that airflow, that's one of the issues with the rim brake and racing. When they
16:42were racing, they had the HERO effort, the EBR HERO, and they were doing that superbike stuff.
16:49A lot of times they couldn't finish a race. And the disc is not in the wind. The disc is
16:55in the shadow of the rim when it's mounted like that. So you don't have 320-millimeter
17:02discs sitting out in the breeze being cooled. Well, in December of 2005,
17:11I was invited to attend the Buell pre-Daytona test. And I was given some background on this
17:19by Big Stevie Wonder. And I learned that somebody had made a few calls and that a substantial sum
17:31of money had been provided to Buell to run their 1340 Harley-powered bike as in the 600
17:43Supersport class. Now, 1340 is what? 2.23 times 600 cc. So only a rules maker could find a way
17:56to interpret that rule that way. But it was done. And they had a stack of those rim brakes
18:07that were beautiful. They were fresh off the Blanchard grinding machine. They were smooth and
18:13lovely looking. And they were replacing discs rapidly. Now, bear in mind what Mr. Askenazy said
18:22about it being an excellent brake on the street. I'm talking about racing at Daytona,
18:29so we mustn't confuse those two. We wouldn't go superbike racing with stock street brakes
18:37in any case, one disc or two. And the discs were distorting, I gather. And they were moved from
18:49the shiny pile to the black pile, one after another. One pile got shorter, the other pile
18:54got taller. And I think in the end, Jeremy McWilliams was able to qualify one of those bikes
19:02ahead of the privateer 600s, but behind the factory-entered 600s. So it was an interesting
19:12exercise. And of course, I think it's a very difficult thing to separate one's emotional
19:26responses to something like, let's build a Harley-Davidson powered sport bike, because
19:34that's basically what Eric has continuously tried to do. Although on one occasion, I remember him
19:41saying, well, I'm learning that what the customer wants is not often the same thing as what I want
19:50to build. Customers want to be able to carry a passenger. They want a well-behaved engine that
20:00isn't all cammy and everything on top. So he's had to moderate his desire to build the perfect,
20:14completely rational sport bike that he's always... I'm sure that he wakes up at four in the morning
20:23with ideas about this and has done all his life. So people have bought these bikes based on the
20:32idea, well, it sounds great. I always wanted a Harley or something like that.
20:39I've owned Harleys before. I thought I'd give this idea a try.
20:43But it ends up being a difficult compromise, because while the sport bike builders are able to
20:52say, tear off a big clean sheet of paper and design some 175-horsepower monstrosity, and then
21:04lay it out for production so they can get the costs down and all the things that big factories do,
21:11whereas Eric had to start with a Harley-Davidson V-twin, a sports engine, basically, and come up with
21:26enough power to make it interesting, but never enough to make it competitive with,
21:32competitive with, straight up with sport bikes.
21:36So in a way, it's like the early days of Ducati. The motorcycles were fast, but they weren't as
21:44fast as Japanese motorcycles. And you had to satisfy yourself, well, but it has European flair.
21:53And that's enough for some people. They want to look at every little detail and say,
21:58oh, this is really nicely made. This is rewarding to look at. I've had those feelings.
22:06But then the present CEO of Ducati, Claudio Domenicali, said at one point,
22:15let's be done with this European flair nonsense. We're going to compete with the Japanese
22:20straight up. We're going to build the fastest as well as the most styled and designerly.
22:28Yeah. 2007, 2008, when the 1098, that was the first bike, certainly the first Ducati I'm aware
22:37of where they didn't, you know, super bike, they normally were gearing those bikes for top speed.
22:43They would find the ideal gearing that would achieve the highest top speed. And that's how
22:47they did their gearing. And with the 1098, they said they stopped with a lot of hocus pocus about
22:54dry weights, like all manufacturers. It's why we have a scale in the shop here is because
23:01there's so many different ways that people want to interpret the weight of their motorcycle.
23:06Ducati at that time said, no, we're, we're going to do real weights. They, I think they dialed that
23:10back a little bit because it wasn't, you know, not, not everybody was dealing with the same
23:16truth there. Um, but what they did was gear the bike to, to go, to make a time in the quarter
23:22mile, like to gear it, to compete. And then they made a lot of power, uh, with that new,
23:29new motor. So, and the new design, um, and that's always been, that was a, that was a very
23:35interesting time for Ducati. That was a big change. Yeah. And what was the sort of no excuses.
23:43Yeah. We're just going to do it. It's no more, you know, um, European flair is still there,
23:50but now it's fast. It's really fast, really fast before is there something else? It's a
23:57completely different riding experience than other motorcycles. Um, so, so this was a problem for
24:06Eric to deal with. And eventually he was able to get in the sense, his own engine, no more air
24:15cooling, no more 45 degrees. Um, no more limitations that have been inherited from
24:24generations of motorcycles past. Uh, so I visited the McGowan to go, uh, operation at the time of
24:361125 hour. And I could see that Eric had tremendous optimism because at last he had his hands on a,
24:44on a competitive engine, double overhead cam liquid cooled. Um, when you're liquid cooled,
24:51you can raise the compression up high without imagining that you're going to damage the engine
24:57from overheating. Um, it had a wider V angle to allow more room for the arrangements between the
25:06cylinders and a six speed transmission. So this was the old motor company getting real in the
25:15same sense that you were describing, um, Ducati getting real, uh, in that time period, uh, 2007,
25:262008. Well, that, that was the, uh, that was the cover line, uh, for the 1125 was no excuses on,
25:34on a cycle world magazine. It said no excuses. Um, that being said, you know, we started with
25:43the XR 1000, that was the marrying of the, you know, American engine with the form of tube frame
25:49that he'd built, uh, for the square four two stroke. And then, uh, you know, we ultimately
25:55got what we affectionately called it, you know, the tube frame fuels and lightenings and all that.
26:02And they were charming bikes to ride and they were, you know, I think he kicked, he kicked
26:07compression up to 10 to one or something on the, on the sports to variance. And, um, it's a really
26:14neat motor. Uh, and the two frame bikes, I wrote a few of those. They were, they were a lot of fun.
26:19We had problems, you know, predating my time, but in the mid nineties, we had an S2 and, um, it,
26:26it did scatter some parts and break some things and, uh, so forth. They, you know, they were,
26:32it's, it's still the Milwaukee vibrator as a, our friend Joe, Joe Scalso used to say,
26:38even, even with, uh, you know, mounting hocus pocus and all that, but they vibrate a lot. So,
26:45you know, um, but they were charming and they ran well and you could make pretty good power
26:50out of them. And, and honestly, for a, a street sport bike, it's actually kind of power that you
26:57would want to have. It's really fun. It's right there. You just drives hard off a corner. It's
27:01not going to rev to 13, five or 14,000 and, and, and do inline four sport bike things, or even in,
27:09you know, between Ducati things, but they were, they were good. They were fun. And he was working
27:14on his business, you know, like the engine's kind of bulky. So let's, that's where the shock,
27:20you know, the pull shock under the engine came from. And it's, you know, they were,
27:26he was centralizing mass. He put his mufflers under the engine, which that's a very important
27:31point. I remember at the time that I, I asked him about that. I said, this reminds me of a world
27:37war two torpedo plane, that big thing under there. And he turned to me and said,
27:43but the performance is good. And of course he was constantly referring all of these designs
27:53to his principles. He wanted low polar moment. He wanted that thing to be able to change direction
27:59quickly. He wanted right now steering no more of this. Well, we gave it 27 degrees and foreign
28:08foreign and eight, uh, 21 folks, 21. And I think some, some of the trails are in the high two
28:15inches. So this is a man who is living his religion. He wanted 52 inch wheelbases. That's
28:22what he built because the shorter the wheelbase, the quicker that check direction changing,
28:30because what happens is when you steer the front is starts off in a new direction, the speed at
28:36which it generates sideways motion is that sideways motion is using the rest of the frame
28:43as a tiller to steer the rear wheel. You make the tiller shorter, a given sideways motion
28:50turns it through a larger angle. So it all, he, he lived his, his ideals.
28:59And that's not an easy thing to do as we all know. So this is something, well,
29:09at one point, uh, they announced the, the trilogy of tech and the trilogy of tech was
29:18mass centralization. Um, Oh, what do we got here?
29:27I've failed to memorize the trilogy of tech. Help me out here.
29:34Well, the mass centralization, I want to, I don't want to just wander off from the under
29:38engine muffler because it's part of that package. Everybody ended up doing, you know,
29:44everybody, I mean, Ducati, Ducati's variously had, and everyone, you know,
29:50now that we need a lot more muffler volume, uh, we're getting those. And then we're getting
29:55secondary, uh, silencers and pipes coming out of those, but people are stuffing them under the
29:59motor and everybody, we all just sort of like, are like, what's that muffler doing down there?
30:05You know, dual outlet thing, but it's in there too. Yeah. Everything is in there to deal with
30:12the exhaust. And this is an idea that has spread all around the world. Yamaha's doing it. You see
30:18all these motorcycles that have this big stainless thing under the engine and it is dealing with the
30:24exhaust. And then a couple of pipes come out as much as to say, yeah, it is an exhaust system.
30:32That's the, they're the only clue though. Yeah. So we got to give them credit. You know, I mean,
30:37that was, um, at the time the under seat muffler was, you know, very popular when becoming popular.
30:45So everybody was putting mufflers under the, under the tail section and learning to cook
30:50their riders and doing thing. You know, it's, it's like the worst place to put them
30:55a silencer up high and at the back of the bike. Yeah. But we liked it. You know, I mean,
31:00it's hard to argue with a nine 16, which kind of popularized that it was,
31:05it looked pretty good. It made a, it made an impression and it was off copied, but not for
31:10good reasons. You know, that was, uh, so that's a victory. Eric, Eric wins that one tick. You did it
31:17question. No question. Yes. And the bikes, you know, the, even the tube frames handled great.
31:22They were charming to ride again. We did have, you know, the long-term test bike I was reading
31:28up on that and it was breaking brackets. And I think in the one, at one point in the story,
31:35I said, you know, we, we thought we'd better bring a trailer to pick up all the parts
31:42flown off of it. Um, but you know, to his credit, they just kept grinding away. And the XB series
31:48was, was really good. I mean, I think, you know, you had the XB 12 and XB nine and the nine 80,
31:53I think it was a nine 84. I actually liked the nine 84. So that was the, the next step for them
31:59on the, that engine, uh, the sports are based and then they moved the fuel into the frame spars and
32:05the oil tank was the swing arm in the swing arm. You know, it was a, it was a tank and swing arm.
32:11And that's neat. I mean, that's the, that's very cool. Uh, it's also good for leak detection.
32:18Yeah. Uh, the two other items in the trilogy are chassis stiffness and low on sprung weight.
32:28Low on sprung weight is, uh, basically you want the wheels, the moving part, this,
32:35the, uh, part that is not sitting on top of the springs to be as light as possible. Absolutely.
32:44Because basically that becomes a projectile, which a bump kicks toward your motorcycle.
32:52The lighter that projectile is, the easier it will be to make it stay in contact with,
32:59uh, the undulating surface of the pavement rather than getting airtime, airtime in corner bad
33:07because it makes your bike step out. And if you're not ready for it, it's a bad surprise.
33:16Yeah. I would say all the hundreds of thousands of miles of motorcycle testing that I've done,
33:24the single best thing you can do to a motorcycle is lighten the wheels. Almost. I mean, it's,
33:31uh, carbon fiber wheels on, on any motorcycle. They take your conventional cast aluminum,
33:40man, whatever, put some carbon fire wheels on a different motorcycle completely. And so that's,
33:45those are, those really are the goals. You know, Malcolm Smith, weight is the enemy.
33:51Yes. You know, that's a, what a fundamental thing to live by. And that's really,
33:55you know, what weight you have should be in the right spot. There's your mass
33:59centralization and then reduce the rest of it to as little as possible, particularly on the wheels.
34:06And this is so, uh, easily experienced by riding something with a very heavy,
34:14uh, front and rear wheels, such as a Honda, um, CB 900 F.
34:22And then riding any of the, uh, peach era, 600 sport bikes that have a front wheel that is
34:30just so much lighter. And, uh, aluminum is roughly one third of the weight of steel
34:41and magnesium is like 70% of the weight of, uh, aluminum and carbon fiber is
34:51half the weight of aluminum. So, uh, we're going from heavier to lighter. And in the case of carbon
35:01fiber, we're adding a lot of strength provided that the fibers are oriented correctly and,
35:07um, everything is whetted out nicely. Yeah. It's hard to get folks to pay for
35:11that on the showroom floor though. So we're stuck, you know, I mean,
35:15Buell was using aluminum and they were rationalizing the design and that was
35:19the motivation for the rim brake was to make the front wheel lighter.
35:24Because all the spoke had to do was support the weight. It didn't have to,
35:28the spokes didn't transmit torsion, zero torsion.
35:39So I think the, the XB bikes were sort of the, the radical step.
35:48This is what he'd had in mind for a long time. And when, uh, he had McWanago and Harley Davidson,
35:57um, as the, as the mothership, he could, he could implement his ideas more fully.
36:07The transition from tube frame to, uh, aluminum beam frame with the fuel in the frame and the
36:15engine oil in the swing arm. Uh, these things are, they make good sense because
36:23a beam becomes stiffer as you move the material of which it is made away from the center.
36:32And the supreme example is the fuselage of a commercial airliner, which is quite thin
36:38and 20 feet in diameter, good torsional strength, good bending strength.
36:46And, uh, the more you move the material away from the center line, the more you have a large volume
36:54inside that makes a person like Eric Muell, Muell think, I'm going to put the fuel in there. There's
37:00plenty of volume. So why have a separate, a separate tank? It's just like he got rid of
37:08spoke mass by directly coupling the torque from the, from the brake to the, uh, wheel to the tire
37:19and didn't have to transmit it down into the hub, cross the hub to the spokes out the spokes to the
37:26rim. Well, it's so interesting to think of the company as a cottage industry where you're doing
37:32what you want and you're buying tubes and you're welding them together. And, you know, I have a
37:36shop, I got a mill, I got a lathe and I got to take welder and I can envision building a chassis
37:42out of tubes and I could even machine a steering head or cut the steering head off a motorcycle
37:47and put add tubes to it. That's cottage, but making a structural fuel tank, that's where
37:54your deal with Harley Davidson and your deal with, you know, in some ways it's the deal with the devil
37:59only because you know, Eric Buell obviously functioned in a corporate environment, how well
38:07that was or what it was like in the boardroom with him is hard to say, but he obviously functioned
38:13and survived, but you're also making a deal with a giant company and their suppliers and
38:20you have, you know, you get certain things, but you probably are giving up some of the agility
38:26and freedom that you may have had as a cottage of welding tubes together, you know, with a smart
38:33guy on a TIG, you know. Well, the terrible thing here is that waiting for you is the accounting
38:39department and they're saying, you might be interested to know that we're selling our product
38:45below cost if we figure in all of our costs. So you might want to think about that. That's
38:52happened in corporations time and again. You're working against a very tough influence, which is
39:02that the materials cost money, changing the shape of those materials to what you want as parts cost
39:08money, everything costs money and you have to, you have to have a product that sells in the quantity
39:17which when multiplied by the per unit profit will actually pay your bills. You can't just
39:24get on the internet, hey, let's crowdfund folks, form a crowd and then we'll collect the funds.
39:32It's a very serious business and there are idealistic designers who don't want anything
39:40to do with it. They want to design beautiful parts. They want to design highly effective parts.
39:47That, but that's why corporations have a product cheapening department. People come in and they
39:53question the cost of every part because they have to. Yeah, well, you got to have a business and
40:00you know, I was talking to a product development person in Honda a number of years ago and
40:05he said they would have knockdown drag out battles over half a cent. Yeah, I've heard of that too.
40:12The fellow worked for, he worked for McCulloch Chainsaw and they were trying to beat down
40:18the injection, the cost of the injection molded blower housing.
40:23And they were talking about fractions of a cent because the number of units they plan to move
40:30and of course they were applying the same treatment to every other part
40:34because it's a necessity. And then you, in the background you have
40:42old man Deming saying an increase in quality is an increase in production
40:47because instead of being scrapped for failing to meet quality standards, you make good parts
40:54which you sell and earn a profit possibly. So I think I'm thankful for those serious thing.
41:01I'm thankful for all those, for all those people. Yeah, I'm thankful for all those people. I like,
41:06I like the, I like the cosmic ideas and no expense spared.
41:15Well, that's the appeal, one of the appeals of racing. That friend of Jim Allen's, Jim Allen,
41:24the former Dunlop tire technician of many years, this friend asked him where
41:31he should watch a race at Mosport near Toronto. And so Jim started telling him where the
41:43passing would be and where people would be doing this or that, direction changing.
41:49And the guy said, no, no, no. He said, where can I see the best accidents?
41:53So people have, have different motivations for this stuff. Some people just, I see people who,
42:02who don't like racing because they say it's boring, not enough happening, change the channel.
42:09Eric remained driven by the ideas that he saw working in motorcycle racing when he started
42:21doing it himself in 1973. And instead of doing the same thing that everyone else was doing,
42:29which was, I bought a TZ, I put in gas, I aired up the tires and I went racing.
42:34I went to the starting grid. He was thinking about every part and he was trying to see what ideas,
42:45trying to see what ideas, what underlying ideas might be false, such as the duplicated
42:52structure idea. Why send the stress this way only to send it back that way?
43:01So later, of course, you can bet that people are, are tugging on Eric's elbow and saying
43:10electric, what about electric? I mean, electric's got to be the coming thing. I mean,
43:14batteries, batteries are, are improving by leaps and bounds every week. This is,
43:20this has got to be it. And I'm sure that he knew better, but it was a way forward,
43:30a possible way forward, this fuel company making electric, electric bikes.
43:39Yeah. Electric bikes and a, you know, commuter style motorcycle.
43:43And the trouble is that this is an extremely difficult era because it began with 2008 and 9,
43:51which changed everything. It gave motorcycle sales a terrible whack in the face.
43:58And the question at the time that people were asking, is this going to be a V-shaped recession
44:05where it dips and then it recovers? Or is it going to be a step where it just drops to a lower level?
44:12And we're finding that some products that are optional in human life are not doing so well
44:22in this era when people have lost some of their savings and things aren't necessarily
44:28hunky-dory for all Americans. But as they say, stuff happens.
44:36Yeah. I mean, that was, that was when Harley made the choice to end operations of, of Buell.
44:45Yeah. And, uh, that, that video still burns, uh, into my, my brain of Eric, you know, reading the
44:54statement and just as you would be, you know, with the company that has your name on it and
45:01Harley's shutting it, shutting it down. And he read that statement and he just, you know,
45:05he looked punched out and beat down and, but then here comes EBR, you know. Absolutely.
45:15I'd say, you know, from the riding perspective, I enjoyed the XB12. They were fully fledged. They
45:21were not cottagey and they were not hucking parts off in the same way. They worked great.
45:27XB9, that 984, that was a, I liked that engine better because it, it didn't have as much mass
45:34in the flyway. It was revvier and it had more interesting, for me, it had more interesting
45:38power than the 1200. Uh, they made a model called the city cross that, that was a really charming
45:46combination of stuff. And they had like this translucent blue tank cover and it was a really
45:52good, really interesting character, rich, fun bike to ride, but it wasn't a competitive
46:01super bike. And I think, you know, if you look back at, at Eric's history,
46:06you know, he wants to, he really wants the tip top. He wants to build a super bike and that we
46:11got that 1190 kind of prototype-y thing in 2012 up at, uh, up at, um, Utah Motorsports Complex,
46:23formerly known as Miller. Yes. It was a really, it was great. You know, it was really fun to ride
46:29and it was, you know, it was a track bike. It was 44,000 bucks, all kinds of carbon fiber,
46:34worked great, really fun. Uh, was, you know, it was say built in a shop. It wasn't a
46:43refined production, but in 2014 we had the, um, EBR, uh, 1190
46:51RX. And, uh, that was a competitive motorcycle. It was rough around the edges a little bit. It
46:58wasn't as smooth and refined feeling as the Panigale, the equivalent Panigale. They were
47:03both the same price, uh, 18, 18, nine, nine, five. So, you know, EBR was definitely like,
47:10what's our reference. That's the reference. It was the Panigale same price. And, um,
47:16Panigale was like one 67, 167 horsepower at the rear wheel and 85 foot pounds. And it was
47:26more top ending, you know, the way that it ran more top end, the EBR was 161
47:32and 87 foot pounds. And it actually started pulling pretty well at 6,000. So we did a track
47:39test. That's why I have that reference. Uh, as we did a track test, which I wrote and tested the
47:44bikes with Don Kine. And it was really, it was competitive. It didn't, you know, it didn't blow
47:51the Panigale out of the water. We kind of, we, we gave the wind to the Panigale by an edge because
47:56it was smoother. Um, you know, the clutch pull was a little lighter. Uh, it was just a more refined
48:03package and it had better, you know, kind of more complete electronics and a quick shifter,
48:09but the lap times were really close. I actually went about a half a second faster on an EBR and
48:13Don, you know, Don, Don did something like 0.15, uh, faster on the Ducati, but, you know,
48:21we had a problem with the brake, you know, the thing wasn't surfaced properly and we got it out
48:27to the track and it started vibrating. It either hard spotted or it wasn't completely flat. The
48:32finish on it was wrong and it influenced how we could ride the bike. We still had good lap times,
48:38but you know, sort of the race starts when it starts and the parts are on the bike and
48:44you got to show up and we had that trouble, but it was, it was a competitive
48:49motorcycle at that time and they were working with hero. Um, here it was really saying all
48:56these things about how they're moving forward and they're going to, you know, the heroes,
48:59hero money, I think got them into world super bike and, and then they were coming to this
49:05date of funding and then hero said, nah, like I don't think they, I'm not sure. It's a little
49:11foggy. It's hard, hard to get that exact information of what happened, but essentially
49:15that's, they had an expectation of funding that was not met. Yeah. And then that was EBR. And
49:22then two years later we get to the modern iteration of what is now called again, Buell
49:28EBR assets were acquired, um, by Mr. Melvin and Bill Melvin. And I think, uh, his father
49:38and they're still, they're still doing basically what looks like the Rotax motor and they're
49:42building, you know, versions of that bike in Michigan. And they have the super cruiser,
49:47which is, you know, um, FXR style. It's like the influence of the,
49:52of the club style Dinah is very clear. Um, but you're starting with
49:57lightweight and, um, 175 or whatever horsepower they're claiming. And, uh, you know, they made a
50:05tube frame and they tried to put all that stuff together on it, like tube frame and, but it's
50:09still got the super bike swing arm and, um, fancy front end and rim break and all that stuff
50:15lives on. It's amazing. I want to make a given a reason why the, uh, the rim brake is a
50:30an adequate break on the street and possibly less so in competition is that
50:37something that happens is you're breaking for turn one at Daytona, you're going
50:43180 something, and you've got this much kinetic energy, you know, you're, uh, one half MV squared
50:53M is mass, V is velocity, and you're going to put that energy into the brake disc.
51:00And you're going to put it in so quickly, just a few seconds, breaking for turn one,
51:05that there isn't time for much heat transfer away from the disc. So for all intents and purposes,
51:12all that kinetic energy, motorcycle fuel rider is going to go into the front disc or discs.
51:19And you get your handbook of chemistry and physics, and you turn to the pages, uh, around 1500,
51:31where you can find, um, specific heats and you can calculate roughly how hot
51:41the disc mass will be at the end of that breaking. And, uh, when disc brakes were first being
51:52refined and they found that making them narrower made them more resistant to coning, they reduced
51:59the mass too much. And they realized that they were pushing brake disc temperature up so high
52:06that there were structural changes taking place in the metal. And that's where the hard spotting
52:12and other problems came from. And they, they had to add some disc mass to prevent the discs from
52:21over-temperaturing. So then you say, okay, we've got, um, 320 millimeter discs on a sport bike
52:29and they're X thickness, five and a half millimeters or so. You can figure the mass,
52:34or you can just weigh them on a scale. And you can make this calculation for one half MV squared.
52:43And it's a, it's a tough one because that single disc is not as heavy as the two, uh,
52:52discs in a standard front wheel on a sport bike. And there's nothing that you can do about that,
53:02except to add the mass back because the mass is now at a larger radius. It causes the steering
53:09to resist you more. So you're, you're, once again, you're having to compromise.
53:13We need a certain minimum mass to limit the temperature rise of the brake disc,
53:20but we don't want that mass out near the rim. No free ride. So yeah, no free ride.
53:28And that's what engineering is supposed to do. It's supposed to find the sweet spot.
53:33And, uh, Eric has made his argument and
53:42I think that his track record, which is to come from messing around with an F5
53:49in club races to being judged with respect to the current Ducati,
53:58that's a pretty, a pretty high mountain to climb. No, it's remarkable. It's remarkable. And if
54:08so often it said that our strengths are also our weaknesses and Eric is persistent. We have
54:15to admire him for that because when knocked down by circumstances or business or what have you,
54:21he always rises up again. And he always has a fresh plan because his mind is generating plans
54:30all the while. And if, uh, if he's come up with a couple of things that many of us would question,
54:42in the face of 137,000 machines produced, maybe we should shut up.
54:47Indeed. Indeed.
54:54So I think it's been, it's been quite a ride and I think that he has, um,
55:01mileage remaining. Yeah. I'll be interested to see what, what comes next. Yeah, me too. Um,
55:09quick note on if you ever wondered what separates Kevin Kemp from me,
55:14if you ever wondered what separates Kevin Cameron from the rest of us, when he said,
55:18you go look up on page 1500, the whatever in this book, he actually picked up the book. He has the
55:24book. So, you know, if you want to replicate, I keep it by my, uh, computer here. He's got it
55:32by his computer folks. That's the difference between Kevin and the rest of us. I know that
55:37stuff is in there and I need to, you don't need to know what, what the specific heat of this or
55:42that or the other thing is. It's likely to be in that book. Think of the boring nature though,
55:49of having to measure the specific heats of all those materials. Master sergeants, we need them.
55:57Yeah. You got to have the folks who, uh, find some kind of charm and in the tedium or,
56:04and yes, keep things together. Have to know, have to know. I just, I have to know it's so
56:09important to me. I just gotta. Boiling point of mercury. Yeah. Don't inhale. Nope. Nope.
56:23Well, that's it folks. Uh, it's probably not enough time to cover the, uh, full breath of
56:31Eric Buell's energy and persistence, but, uh, we hope you learned something. We, um,
56:36as Kevin pointed out, you know, we have admired his work and it's really a remarkable achievement
56:45to keep on keeping on. And if, uh, if that isn't enough, he released an album earlier this year.
56:50Uh, he's quite a guitarist. And, uh, so he's released an album. You can, I'm sure if you
56:56Google, uh, Eric Buell and a record album, he'll, he'll find out what it's all about. But, um,
57:04admirable work and, um, uh, a great string of, of, uh, products that people still love. There's a
57:10incredibly passionate group of Buell owners out there and people are still racing them and
57:16they're, uh, they're, they're all over the arm of paddock, you know, they're there
57:20doing it still and, uh, doing well. So it's pretty cool. Thanks for listening folks.
57:25That's another episode of the cyworld podcast. We talked about, uh, breaks a little bit.
57:30There is a breaking podcast, uh, on deck. So we'll have everything you need to know about breaks in
57:37a forthcoming episode, or it may be posted by now. We just keep firing them out every Wednesday.
57:42Join us. Thanks for listening.