sss

O'Brien Harley-Davidson's War Eagle

NASA and Harley-Davidson on Low-Road Part IV

End of Apollo program and hard times at Harley-Davidson

It was July16, 1969 when our launch crew sent up Apollo II to the moon. Then came Apollo 12 on Nov, 14 of that year and we were on the fast track. Dick had called me about a month after Daytona and said he was approached by a representative from the Honda Motor Company and was offered a job as manager of all there racing programs in US. I asked how much money and he said a blank check. I asked him when he was leaving and he said "I’m not going work for these______ Jap ______, I lost to dam too many friends during WWII". Dick did not have a personal relationship with the Lord and found it hard to forgive.

From this point on, Dick seemed to be at war with everyone and, most of all, with the British and all the big four Japanese manufacturers. Not to far behind came the AMA as well. His wife Joyce had to be put in an institution, and his daughters never spoke to him again, not even when he was on his deathbed. He isolated himself and the whole racing dept in a defensive mode from the outside world. What they didn't see was that the enemy was the Harley-Davidson pride mind-set. The Aermacchi DOHC 750 was out, the down stroked Sportster (cast iron) XR750 was in.

It would cost $400,000 to build the 200 XRs needed to comply with the AMA ruling of the day. For the first time Harley-Davidson would also be racing a bike they were not selling for street use. It would not promote sales of its big brother, the XLCH Sportster, because it no longer was the bad boy on the block. What became the bad boy, and I do mean bad, was the Kawasaki 500cc two-stroke triple and its later 750cc version. I didn't know how bad the cast iron XR750 was until I came to Talladega, Alabama for the 200 mile road race in 1970. My wife and I went there for a “vacation” and to get away from the Cape. The Apollo 13 mission went up on April 11,1970 and almost didn't come back. There would be no more Saturn 5 built and the Huntsville plant that built the Saturn rocket was shutting down. People were leaving the Cape like mad, they knew that, after Apollo 16, it was over for NASA for many years.

I missed the Daytona 200, which was a disaster for H-D. The 200-miler was won by a Honda 750cc 4-cylinder OHC ridden by National Champion Dick Mann. I have no doubt in my mind that if my brother had taken Honda’s offer, Cal would have been riding a Honda and then, been on his way to a FIM World Championship in later years. Our three-day “vacation” at Talladega was bummer from the word go. The new XR750 cast iron top end would not disperse heat but rather retained it. The engines did overheat at Daytona but now, in super hot Alabama, the heat was taking out pistons like popcorn.

On Saturday night before the 200-miler, Dick, Walt Fulton, another H-D rider, and myself were rebuilding Calvin’s and Mark's XRTTs. Just from practice and qualifying alone their clutches and pistons were gone. I looked over to see Dick grinding a bent valve off Mark's bike on a bench grinder. As I was about to comment, Dick just said, "Tell anybody you saw me doing this and I'll kick your little butt”. I got back to the motel at 04:00am to a not so happy wife saying something about like "some relaxing vacation this is!” Sunday was an even bigger let down! It started off with practice and Mark blowing both pistons on his bike. It was three hours before the start of the race and Dick told us to rebuild the engine and we did but the bike blew again before it reached the 100-mile mark and so did Calvin's bike. The new Triumph triple 750 won, but what they didn't knew was that Triumph, BSA, Matchless and Norton were soon to become things of past.

Goodbye NASA, Hello Harley-Davidson

2000 others and I left the Space Program and I went to work for a H-D dealer in Fort Lauderdale for six months building his son's race bikes. I then got a call from Dick who asked me to come up and go to work for the factory. So that winter I came to Milwaukee just in middle of a 12" snow drop. The kids loved the snow, but my wife was ready to leave me. I told her Milwaukee was not like Florida and that it was a dry cold and not so bad. When it got to minus 20 degrees, she called me an Irish liar. I spent about six months in training in all departments. Engineering, Design, Sales, Parts, Production, Quality Control and answering service calls. My territory was to cover 120plus dealers in 13 states covering the Midwest.

I would visit the dealers in summer and spend part of winter teaching service school. I had to teach and service all bikes, snowmobiles, golf cars, both gas and electric. It was when I was working in quality control that I knew Harley-Davidson was in big trouble. The QC manager also worked at the Cape and came to H-D a couple years ahead of me. He had me inspecting parts and overseeing machining. Before long I'm scraping what seems to be a heck of a lot of parts. He came up to me one day and said, "It's not like NASA, is it?” I asked him how much stuff is being scraped and he said about 70% that is if we can't rig or patch it in order keep the production line going. My first run, of all things, was with Dave Mortin who was John Davidson's Nephew. I just finished doing a magnaflux on 250 flywheel pinion shafts for the Sportster to see if there were flaws from heat-treating and they all had cracks and had to be tagged scrap. About this time, this guy is tearing my tags off the box so I asked him who he was and what authority gave him the right to remove those tags. He told me he was production line manager and they were out of pinion shafts on the line... I informed him that these shafts could break and send the flywheels flying out of the crankcases and cost the dealers a lot of money. He then loaded up the cases on a dolly, turned around, looked at me and said "Nuts on the dealers, we'll sent them replacement parts”. The QC manager walked up to me laughing and said, "welcome to real Harley-Davidson".

Teaching Service School is hazardous to one’s health…

Teaching service school at Harley-Davidson was a test on one’s nerves. The room was about 40 feet square and had five workbenches, for 6 people around each bench on stools. One bench for FL, one for XL, one for Aermacchi, one for shop practice and last, one for electrical systems. You couldn't talk loud for disrupting other benches and at the same time you could hear the noise from the experimental dept’s dyno, humming down stairs AND the racing dept’s dyno, right next door!!! To top this, the room was cold and there was the constant dust from the pipes high on the open ceiling. We use to take the students (mostly dealer’s mechanics) on factory assembly and production lines tours until they noticed the union production line people were not properly assembling the engines . When we got back to class, the students asked if they were to do as we taught them or as factory did it? From that point on we skipped the tours...