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  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    2 years ago
    Quoting Timmy on 15 Apr 2022 01:00 PM

    Lol,  I stay in 2nd gear a lot.  Then a short 100kmh run between villages… sometimes I get stuck behind a tractor 😂

    You make it sound as if your in the high country in Papua New Guinea!
  • steelo
    steelo
    2 years ago
    Was going so say south Australia but the tractor threw me. Sounds like Tasmania. 
  • brucefxdl
    brucefxdl
    2 years ago
    germany....
  • FBUser214
    FBUser214
    2 years ago
    Quoting steelo on 16 Apr 2022 12:05 AMedited: 16 Apr 2022 12:12 AM

    Was going so say south Australia but the tractor threw me. Sounds like Tasmania. 

    Doesn't take us long to get around a tractor.
    Not so much the mainlanders that visit, they seem to have trouble staying on the bitumen.

  • obisteve
    obisteve
    2 years ago
    Quoting obisteve on 13 Apr 2022 08:42 AMedited: 13 Apr 2022 08:53 AM

    Took the first step in fixing the gear linkage on the Sportster, put a cable tie on the clutch lever and rolled it out of the shed to pressure wash it. I swear I could see it blinking, it hasn't come out for a year.

    Here it is in all its rat glory, with its hillbilly single seat conversion done with a bread knife and duct tape, Fat Bob front wheel on the back, 21" front with '70s Superglide chromed mudguard over it, Oz made 4 piston caliper on the front, home made sissy bar, no ignition box behind the battery, mismatched mirrors, single throttle cable, battlescarred flame paint from '92 on it, short shocks from a '90s Dyna with Ikon Sporty springs on them, 10 litre tank with battered chromed brass cap off something '30s and British, God knows what else.
    I should have it running again next week, then might muck around with it a bit more. Sprung saddle? +2" fork tubes? early Street Bob limp dick tail light on a shortened mudguard?
    Anyone on here have one of those spare and wanna sell it?


    20220413_153058.jpg
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    Back in the shed snuggled up to the big girl.
    Quoting paulybronco on 14 Apr 2022 09:38 AM

    Many of a memory there Steve......look after that old girl.

    Hell, I plan on flogging the living daylights out of it like I've always done  and fixing what breaks. 
  • obisteve
    obisteve
    1 month
    Quoting paulybronco on 13 Jan 2016 01:55 AM

    Met the owner today Steve , who has done 400000klm on his Sporty. Yes that is correct 400k! I did read about the bike sometime ago on the forum but cant find the article. Morgan and Wacker had the bike and story on their Facebook as well i am told. If anyone can steer me in the right direction to find the article i would be apprecitive. Lovely man who rides a victory now very quickly!

    Hey PB, spent some of the last few months since I got crook organising old records, and have found the HTML scrape I pulled off the Morgan and Wacker website from 2014 with the pics from the professional photo shoot they organised of the Sporty, and the words I wrote for them about its life and hard times. I won't be able to add the HTML on here, but if you still wanted to read its history I could post it as a Word doc. I think I've put most of the pics on here over the years anyway.
    So, still wanna read the words?
  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    1 month
    Quoting paulybronco on 13 Jan 2016 01:55 AM

    Met the owner today Steve , who has done 400000klm on his Sporty. Yes that is correct 400k! I did read about the bike sometime ago on the forum but cant find the article. Morgan and Wacker had the bike and story on their Facebook as well i am told. If anyone can steer me in the right direction to find the article i would be apprecitive. Lovely man who rides a victory now very quickly!

    Quoting obisteve on 16 Jan 2025 11:29 AM

    Hey PB, spent some of the last few months since I got crook organising old records, and have found the HTML scrape I pulled off the Morgan and Wacker website from 2014 with the pics from the professional photo shoot they organised of the Sporty, and the words I wrote for them about its life and hard times. I won't be able to add the HTML on here, but if you still wanted to read its history I could post it as a Word doc. I think I've put most of the pics on here over the years anyway.

    So, still wanna read the words?

    Absolutely Steve! Its a great bit of history and deserves to be revisited. Hopefully your on the up yourself....
  • obisteve
    obisteve
    1 month
    OK, I'll post it next time I've got the laptop out.
    Yeah, pain levels are starting to drop the more blood they suck out of me, a bag, 450 ml every fortnight, as the body sucks the iron out of wherever its been storing it to build up new red blood cells. That could be in muscles, joints, the liver, the lining of the brain FFS.
    So if anyone is ever told they have Haemochromatosis do something about it. It sucks, Not so much the physical pain, been riding bikes for 55 years +, so pain and I are old acquaintances, but when the body is storing it in the brain lining it feels like someone is putting the extra iron in there with a nail gun. 24 hours a day, no let up. It's been over 3 months for me, and only now is paracetamol starting to have any affect at all.
  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    1 month
    Not what i was hoping to hear Steve...seems like you may just be starting to win the arm wrestle. Looking forward to your next post but only in your own time mate, no rush.
  • obisteve
    obisteve
    1 month
    Nah mate, feeling so much better than I did amonth ago, just having any improvement noticeable has lifted my mood and got me being more active despite the pain. 3 km is the walking limit so far, but that will get back up there. Wouldn't be able to ride the Vic bagger at the moment, but going to ride the Sporty to Kilcoy for a blood test on Friday.
    Of relevance to another current topic, been out dancing with a cane knive in the back paddock, slowly getting back arm and shoulder strength. Dancing through katas really. I like cane knives, cut back a lot of lantana with this one over the years, still got the muscle memory of it. Mine is a 50 year old Sheffield made one, lovely steel. Takes a great edge, and I keep the hook on the back sharp too, let's you work backhand. I have a bit of an overgrown jungle garden, and I keep the cane knife handy in case I get the sudden urge to do some pruning at 3am.
  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    1 month
    That's the spirit Steve....never picked you for someone who would just roll over.
  • obisteve
    obisteve
    1 month
    A bit of background first. You probably guessed I like Sporties already. I came off Norton Commandoes so when I bought a Harley I wanted the fastest, best handling, lightest and best braking one available.
    I liked it, rode it, fixed it when it broke, kept riding it, didn't even think about getting something different.
    When I started seeing pics online of the new Sportster 72 in 2012, it was the first Sporty for quite a few years that I liked the look of as stock, so on one ride to Rollies for more Andrews gearbox parts I called in at Morgan and Wackers to look at them.
    Salesman came over, seemed a nice bloke, figured if I was looking at Sporties I was new to Harley, asked what I currently rode. I told him a 1200 Sporty that I bought new there 22 years before. He was a bit gobsmacked, came out and had a look at it. He loved its look, and got me to roll it into the showroom and park next to some 72s. He took a few pics, posted them on Wacker's Facebook page where they apparently got a lot of likes and comments.
    He rang me about a month later, asked if I would like to be part of a professional photo shoot by Matt Black. I'm not a shy bloke so agreed and rolled up to the studio. He had arranged for about 8 customers to take part, put on some beer. It was a good afternoon, hey free beer and some good company, and later asked me to write some words about the bikes storey. 
    A bit later it turned up on another page on Wacker's website called This is our Family. That page finally got taken down after Wackers changed hands in 2017.
    When I met actually PB later rather than following him or leading him in a sedate cruise up a mountain road on my way to work, it turned out he'd read the original web page.

    This is Our Family: Steve’s Sporty Story

    The Essence of 23 Years.
    I bought my new Harley from Morgan & Wacker on 20/4/1990. Today I rode it to work. And yesterday. And the day before that.
    Last year I rode it out to Come By Chance. A few years ago to Cape Tribulation, then up to Cooktown then out to Laura and home.
    It was the bike I lusted after as a young man in the 1970’s; a couple of my mates had Ironhead Sportsters while I rode around on a BSA. I got there when I was 37, after riding Nortons for a dozen years.
    I drove down to Morgan & Wacker with a couple of mates and ten grand in my pocket. Pre-delivery had not been finished so I shouted them lunch at the Breakfast Creek Hotel and they tried to convince me to spend the cash in other interesting ways.
    I rode it out of the shop and put in on the highway home to Obi Obi and yes, I admit it, “Get your motor running, head out on the highway” was running through my head as I reached up to the bars and opened the throttle.
    Twenty-three years and over three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres and it still puts a smile on my face every time I fire it up. It has been a constant presence in my life during that time, wrapped around the memories of all the good and bad times of a life.
    Winning the top street bike class at the eighth mile Aratula Dirt Drags in 1990, standing on stage holding up the trophy and shouting “Sportsters Rule” to a big crowd of mostly committed big twin owners, six of whom I had beaten on the strip, one of them twice. First on his Panhead, then when he went and got his Softail, shutting him down again. The shout was greeted by stony silence. The brass plate from the trophy is riveted to my air cleaner still.
    Or on the road at midnight on those times when the black dog seems to be chewing at your life and soul, with the words of every sad song that Ben Nichols ever wrote and sang sounding in your brain until the lazy rhythm of the motor and the road and the glory of a full moon over a peaceful country landscape oozes into your heart. And while life has not changed, you can make peace with it and turn for home again.
    The quiet times of taking my daughter Jess on the school run every day, after her legs grew long enough to reach pillion pegs and she graduated from being a sidecar passenger in the old Honda four outfit I also had then, singing along with her as we covered the country back roads to school or home.
    Or on now rare trips to the city, playing in the traffic with 1200 cc of torque to make everything easy, while the high bars and flame paint and manic grin improve all round presence in the traffic stream, bellowing along with long dead Jim: “Driving down your freeways, midnight alleys roam….. LA woman.”
    Did I mention that I had a wonderful time in the seventies?
    Or the memories of the long trips and the many miles, the anthill country along the road to Laura, the looming rainforest on the Daintree to Bloomfield road, the golden afternoon light as Jess and I followed the path of the Ben Hall gang, from Ben’s burial plot at Forbes to the quiet village then full of ripe plums on the street trees where Flash Johnny Gilbert rests in the grounds of the derelict police barracks; the sand country along the Darling near Louth where every metre was a struggle to hold the bike up, almost as much of a struggle as the trip to Fraser Island was.
    The flame paint job arrived for my fortieth birthday and has acquired a lot of patina in the twenty years since. A hefty dose of patina arrived in February this year when I miscalculated crossing a local flooded causeway on Kidaman Creek at night in heavy rain and was washed off. I have crossed that road with water over it every summer for the last thirty years, but forgot that since last time I had fitted a Fatboy solid wheel to the back, vastly increasing the water pressure against it. It is a metre drop off the edge of the crossing onto jagged rocks so I kicked clear as we went over the edge, bidding the old friend good-bye as I bounced off the bottom of the creek, laughing under water thinking “A bloke could drown doing this”, coming to the surface and swimming for the bank. Boots, leather jacket, waterproofs, oilskin coat, helmet and backpack do make swimming at night difficult. After climbing out into overhanging tree branches and making my way back upstream to the road, I stood in the dark looking at the creek and wondering just how far the bike would be dragged.
    Then walked the three kilometres home in the dark and rain.
    Three days later the creek had dropped far enough to see the tip of a handlebar peeping up bravely above the water. It was half buried under a gravel bank that had built up around it. See the rescue photos taken by Dennis Woodford. A crew of good mates assembled and got it out and back home for me and three frantic days of work followed, flushing out the crankcase, primary and gearbox, hosing out the switches, solenoid and speedo, drying everything out with compressed air. I put 4 litres of WD40 through the spray gun and three days after it emerged from the water, the engine roared in defiance again, followed by four oil and filter changes in quick succession.
    So many memories. Some of them are highpoints of a life; some of them are just the everyday background. But all intense, owning a Harley Sportster is about intensity after all. There is nothing bland about them.
    By now it is like an old dog you can’t bear to have put down; it needs me to take care of it as no one else would bother. It has bent me to suit its needs. After reaching to the one bend of handlebars for 23 years, for at least an hour most days, my arms don’t hang straight by my sides anymore, the rotator cuffs in the shoulders and the tendons hold them bent.
    I live down five kilometres of dirt road, with a steep dirt track a kilometre and a half long for a driveway, so it’s always covered in mud or dust. I live on tank water, so it doesn’t get washed a lot. I can live with that. I generally put a big Superglide front mudguard on in summer when the mud is around, and a smaller one for winter. The twenty-one inch front wheel makes it steadier on dirt roads.
    Morgan & Wacker did a full engine rebuild on it in 1999 at 220,000 kilometres. I stripped the gearbox out of the cases, carried the engine into the workshop and said “Fix whatever needs fixing, send me the bill”. The engine they built was a screamer, with hot cams, and enough power to cause clutch slip as the revs rose.
    By now it’s getting tired again. I could throw a thousand dollars at it without seeing any difference. A couple of lifters are a bit rattly when hot, there is more piston slap than I like. The top end rebuild to fix these will cure a couple of oil leaks, and tell me if the cams are worn. If they are, throw more money at it for cams and cam bearings and bushes.
    After so many years the aftermarket has a firm grip on it, S and S this, Barnett that, Andrews, Vulcan Engineering, Crane, Willbrook Racing, they all own a piece of it, but the soul of it is still pure Harley Sportster.
    Sportsters got better and better as the years passed. The latest ones are brilliant. The 72 is the distillation of everything I wanted mine to evolve towards.
    A big motor, small tank, small seat, a couple of wheels and not much else. All loud and proud. This is all cliché that has been said since 1956, but is still true. If you want a knuckleduster engine, the art and science of making Sportsters go faster is well established, starting with Screaming Eagle and going up to almost 100 horsepower if you pour in the money.
    Sixteen inch rear wheel, twenty one front, high bars, I’ll have one like that thanks. Supersize it to 1200cc, a side serve of flame paint or big metalflake and chrome. No, I don’t want fries with that, only the lean meat.
    Take a test ride on one. If you don’t like it, make a medical appointment and have them check for signs of life.

  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    1 month
    Many thanks again Steve for taking the time to repost the story. A great tribute to the old girl and a life well lived on the road oh and the creek! Perhaps that "sedate trip up a mountain road" should be best explained as being on a "closed course" as Mr Hill may describe it.
  • STEAMER
    STEAMER
    1 month
    58,580km  stage 1,  2011 fxst
  • paulybronco
    paulybronco
    1 month
    See Your 58,580km and raise you ....to 82k,  2012 Street Glide.....but like most of us maybe a million miles on countless bikes.
  • GGUser260
    GGUser260
    1 month
    Very hard to measure, but hours in the saddle is the real benchmark for riding. Ever done 300kms on a highway in about 3 hours? Of course, we all have. What about 300kms that takes 7 hours because it was through mountains and hairpins etc. Just saying the whole counting k's thing is a bit askew. (especially if you habitually seek out twisty roads)
  • Hilly
    Hilly
    1 month
    Bit of a wordsmith there Steve, good yarn, one of the things I liked doing since I was a young fella is getting old fellas to tell me yarns, some real interesting people around if you can get them to talk.
  • Humbug
    Humbug
    1 month
    Quoting Hilly on 23 Jan 2025 11:27 AM

    Bit of a wordsmith there Steve, good yarn, one of the things I liked doing since I was a young fella is getting old fellas to tell me yarns, some real interesting people around if you can get them to talk.

    But now we are the old fella's Hilly
  • Hilly
    Hilly
    1 month
    Quoting Hilly on 23 Jan 2025 11:27 AM

    Bit of a wordsmith there Steve, good yarn, one of the things I liked doing since I was a young fella is getting old fellas to tell me yarns, some real interesting people around if you can get them to talk.

    Quoting Humbug on 23 Jan 2025 11:31 PM

    But now we are the old fella's Hilly

    Very true haha
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