FXS Low Rider Words & Pics: Andy Hornsby It's all very easy to take a bike like the 1977 FXS out of the context of its era, so close a resemblance does it pay to current models, but when introduced, it predated most first generation litre bikes from Japan with the exceptions of Kawasaki's Z1000 and Honda's naked GL1000 Gold Wing. In flagship terms, the Triumph Co-op were making the T160 Trident at Meriden, BMW were in their second year of the world's first fully-faired production bike, the R100RS, and in Italy, the 180-degree crank Jota sat alongside Guzzi's T3 California and a range of garage-happy Ducatis. A sports bike was a 'special' and things like the GPz, GSX, FJ were still a generation or two away.

BACK THEN, WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE R100RS and embryonic Gold Wing, a motorcycle was a blunt instrument, raw engine power was everything and sophisticated frames were not standard factory fare. Actually yes, put the GL1000 into that group.

Set against that background, the original Low Rider was written off by a press that viewed it as anachronistic, but strangely enjoyed riding it. Too heavy, too old-fashioned and not for the faint hearted: sounds like my kind of bike. Odd then that it has aged exceptionally well. At least a part of that must be that a new Low Rider is not much more modern now, in terms of style, and that the goalposts have moved substantially.

In 1977, as the motorcycle industry was modernising, the FXS was anti-fashion, and as such it caught the imagination of its target market: the custom world. Granted, it was never at the cutting edge of the custom trend, but that's another reason why it's holding up so well now, because few things date more quickly than state-of-the-art anythings.

And there's something else too that makes this bike timeless, and it's easily visible in this example of the breed. The cone motor's timing side conjures up the Evo to a whole generation of Harley enthusiasts now, and with the blacked out barrels disguising their base material, and non standard black masking the shape of the rocker boxes, its overall shape hints at a Dyna. There is no coincidence in that, as the 4-speed FX provided the basic shape from which the Dyna was drawn. Just as a Heritage Softail harked back to the Hydra Glide of 1949, and the Road King to the Duo Glide that replaced it in 1958 (or more accurately the 1960 model with its new headlamp nacelle if we're counting rivets), the Dyna Low Rider is unashamedly based on this: its granddad.

If you weren't aware of its importance as a model - and younger riders and recent converts might well not be - you might well just see another Low Rider, but give it more than a casual glance and you'd see the technology of two and a half decades ago, notably the chain drive, relatively skinny rear tyre and willow-thin front fork stanchions. A concerted dose of looking at reveals primitive switchgear, mechanical trip and odometers, and a more haphazard, almost random approach to idiot lights than recent models exhibit.

It didn't fool Rich and I for a second when we spotted it on the hillside at the Rock & Blues, even though it was cunningly disguised as a drying rack for damp riding gear. Having already remarked on the number of Shovelheads and iron Sportsters that were round and about, to spot a bike that had captured our imaginations quarter of a century earlier was a rare bonus indeed, and especially one that was so obviously what it was, still resplendent in its original paint and tank graphics. Dave, the owner, was off somewhere doing what people do on a wet weekend in Derbyshire … well, what they were doing on that particular wet weekend in Derbyshire, but his significant other, Debbie, was on hand to explain that it was not only the model that I'd always coveted, but had been the bike that Dave had bought as being the right bike too, although she didn't mention how long ago that was. And she also mentioned that it was for sale as Dave was looking for more of a touring bike now, for intercontinental travel. I gave her a business card to pass on to Dave, partly with an idea of a feature but also potentially a trade with my Electra, and I went away dreaming my boyhood dreams of Low Rider ownership all over again.

Within a fortnight there was an email, followed by a quick chat with Dave which suggested he was still thinking about selling it, and that he just might be interested in my Evo Electra Glide, and that we could certainly feature it.

A few phone calls later, I pulled into Abergele on the Glide and finally got to meet the bike's owner of what turned out to be some twenty years, and to find out exactly what it was like to live with a Low Rider.

What should have taken an hour took four as we went through the bike's known past - and as the bike's only long-term owner, there was plenty to know.

Dave picked up the bike for the right money from a company specialising in bringing bikes in from the States, and it was bought on the strength of a photograph that he still has pinned to his garage wall. Still a current model, though a year into its run, the 1978 1/2 1200 Low Rider was the right bike at the right price, and would have been better still had all the bits still been on it when it arrived. It wasn't a good start, but then it hadn't had an especially auspicious start to its life in the US. It was cheap because it had mechanical issues.

At some point early in its life, a circlip from the piston had made a bid for freedom, and it would have made it but for the fact it was ground away to nothing twixt piston and liner, judging by the scouring down one side of the bore.Well, either that or else it had been left out by a previous mechanic or, God forbid, the factory.

Careless, you'd think.

Lesson learned, you'd hope.

Ahh.

It would seem not. The scouring on the one side was but a mere scratch compared to the trench that had been dug from the other. It seemed to indicate that some enterprising spanner had gone to the lengths of taking the head off to investigate the first problem and, having discovered the problem, lifted that barrel, removed said piston and either refitted it the other way round - not a problem in this case as the valve cutaways are symmetrical - and then slipped the barrel on again. We'll never know whether they reused the old circlip, the wrong circlip or just didn't bother with one at all but there was certainly no trace of one in the wreckage.

It beggars belief

The fact that the engine ran at all bears testament to its over-engineering and ability to work within imprecise tolerances, but it wasn't going to do for much longer without some remedial work, so the process of sorting the Shovel began.

Missing metal from any internal surface of a motor doesn't just go away, sadly, but is distributed freely around the motor carried by the oil, and whether it gets caught by the filter depends on where it starts its journey. To dig a trench so deep meant it must have been grinding for a while so the damage was fairly widespread but, thankfully, Shovelhead parts are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive. The pre-requisite bits to sort out the bottom end were sourced and duly dispatched to Byron's in South Wales, where the second surprise was waiting to be discovered: the 1200 bits that were provided were wrong.

For those who thought "1978 1/2" was some sort of bizarre mistyping that sneaked past our ever so diligent proof readers - I knew there was someone missing - the 1/2 doesn't represent the switch from 1200 to 1340, which was phased over the 1979 and 1980 model years, but instead alludes to the change from points to electronic ignition mid-way through the production year. So a 1200 it should have been, but it wasn't. The frame and engine numbers said it was, but the crank disagreed and the crank had the casting vote. It is often thought - and I'm desperately trying to remember whether it's a trap I've fallen into recently - that the 1340 was a rebored 1200, but it wasn't. The 87.3x100.8mm of the 1200 motor was bored and stroked to the now familiar 88.8x108mm to gain the extra capacity. There was a significant reworking of the piston at the same time, with a revised crown height as much as anything, so there isn't a halfway stage of 1200 crank and 1340 barrels and piston. The 1200 barrels, interestingly, are identified by having one more fin than a 1340cc - ten as opposed to nine, against all logic. Any further misgiving about the engine were immaterial, as the repair work undertaken would sort out all the issues, and a few that hadn't yet been discovered.

I lost track of the order of events after that, from our conversation, but not what was done, and as the bike was going to provide day-to-day transport during the summer months - to justify its existence - there wasn't a chance that the much documented, and frequently hyped Shovelhead problems were going to get in the way of its use as reliable transport.

Don't go getting carried away with the idea that a Shovel can't be as reliable as an Evo, or even that a Shovel is massively better than a Pan. Any engine is as good as the last set of spanners that were laid upon it - and that includes the factory - but in the case of older engines a lot of time and expertise has been concentrated on fixing the bits that slipped through the original design. It is fair to say that new stock bikes are built to significantly finer tolerances than ever before, and that there were quality control issues at times in Harley-Davidson's past, but get a Shovel fettled and you've got a solid, robust motorcycle that will keep pace with its successors without problems, and without a lot of the legislative restrictions of later bikes. And so the job of fettling was undertaken over the ensuing winters, while Dave's car took on the role of daily transport.

The most obvious deviations from stock are the twin plug heads - extremely popular on Shovels for easier starting - and spotted easily by the plethora of HT leads coming from of the twin coils, which also points to a single fire ignition system. It may have started life with electronic ignition, but it has been switched back to points: high tech digital systems are all well and good, but if you're handy with a fag paper and a fine dressing file, and if you know what a condenser's for, there's not much wrong with the mechanical solution if the bike will support it.

What is less obvious is the rest of the head work. It makes little sense to go to the lengths of removing the heads and drilling them for a second plug when you know they'd benefit from a little porting, and there are few stock Harleys - some would say none - that wouldn't benefit from some porting. The job was entrusted to Boz Engineering during one of its winter lay-ups, and the easier-starting, sweeter running, freer breathing motor was reward in itself.

Porting is only part of the equation though, and fuel metering was entrusted to a Mikuni carb tucked away behind an S&S air filter, while an anonymous, matt-black pair of unbalanced taper mufflers keep the noise to sensible levels without suffocating the motor.

Only other major complaint about Shovels is the amount of heat they generate and there are three ways round that.Wrinkle black paint was the chosen route, and it is more than cosmetic: black is a good conductor of heat, and the wrinkle texture increases the surface area of the cooling fins, thereby creating the effect of bigger fins. It is the standard finish on the cases, barrels and heads. On the nose cone and rocker boxes, however, it replaces the silver paint finish of the stocker - which you can still see on the primary chaincase. The other two ways to keep it cool? Fit an oil cooler - ideally a thermostatically controlled one that kicks in when needed rather than slowing down the warming-up process - or recognise that it was meant to run hot: it was designed to cover vast distances in a substantially warmer climate than we're likely to experience, unless global warming really kicks in.

So, the motor's sorted out, and running nicely, what about the rest?

Seventies shocks on just about anything will be impersonating pogosticks by now, regardless of who made them, and we'd only be fooling ourselves if we got hung up on the idea that Harley's FX shocks of the day were state-of-the-art items, any more than they are now. Progressive shocks at the rear are matched to Progressive fork springs in those anorexic 35mm forks - in case you wondered why they looked long and skinny, Dynas and Sportsters are 39mm and you can add another 2mm for FX Softails and FLs from the Hydra Glide to date beneath that tin.

And there's always the old chestnut about Harley brakes, and it isn't without some foundation, especially when you're going back to the seventies. Standard brakes on original Low Riders might have been them new-fangled disks, and a pair of them at that, but the front ones really weren't up to much and weren't highly regarded even when new. The back "banana" calliper was up to the job, and with the amount of weight carried, the rear brake was more useful than we'd come to expect on this side of the water. Decent brakes were certainly high on Dave's shopping list when he was running round the country, but he couldn't have accounted for the way he solved it. Pulling on to a campsite for a small rally in the New Forest, the guy on the gate took one look at the bike and announced that he had a pair of callipers that would go straight on … and he did. It cut the trip short because they cost Dave the rest of his cash for the journey, but the chance of happening across another pair without shelling out a wad was so remote that he couldn't turn them down. It's worth mentioning that the brakes were redesigned in the early eighties, hence the reduced odds. The banana rear calliper was replaced by a Grimeca item on a one-off bracket, and it, together with the Billets grip the original disks, now drilled.

Most of the rest is personal taste, good engineering practice or surprisingly standard.

In the surprisingly standard category comes the combination of electric leg and kicker which was a standard item on the FXS and remarkably few other models, the flat bars on pullback risers and much of the sheer class of the overall bike. I think the derby and points covers reinforce the 1978 registration, as that would make it a 75th Anniversary model and could make them standard parts - my '78 Anniversary Electra had them too.

Personal touches are the FLH-based forward controls - the stock bike would've had mid position footrests and controls, with cruising pegs for stretching your legs on long runs - and the seat.

Engineering solutions include the massive numbers of nuts, bolts and anti-vibration washers - I reckon sixteen sets - that now hold the front mudguard on, seeing as the original rivets vibrated themselves out, and a reworked swing-arm that solves the problems of flattened box section through an over-tightened rear spindle. The next challenge is to refit a tacho that doesn't vibrate itself to pieces, in place of the voltmeter that occupies its home in the fore and aft console on the unusually small, stock, 3.5 gallon Fat Bobs: he's got the original instrument, and the guts of a more recent Sportster's tacho to play with, so it might even be done by the time you read this.

It all adds up to more than just a well-sorted, practical, everyday motorcycle because it is a working piece of history, and an important entry in Harley-Davidson's timeline. To me it is the quintessential Harley-Davidson, largely because it was the only one I really wanted while I was going through my British twin years.