Shovel Rules!

The Shovelhead motor is perhaps Harley’s most divisive motor, certainly its most divisive big twin, and everyone has something to say about them courtesy of our good old friend ‘received opinion’.

Mention Panheads and even the most recent convert will go all whistful, and Knucks are beyond reproach, but Shovels? Oh, they’re this, and they do that, and a friend of a friend once saw someone pushing one once (it was probably me – pushing that is, not the friend) so they’re all dreadful. Do you know what I reckon it is? It’s that we think we know about them because we grew up with them: they were road-tested in the dodgy magazines we grew up with, and they were so far away from what we knew and what we thought we wanted, that we let ourselves be told that they were anachronistic dinosaurs, and got on with abandoning our own motorcycle industry to the dustbin of history in favour of performance bikes. Fickle buggers, us Brits.

Actually, I was knocking around on clapped-out Brit singles and twins, because I’ve always been a bit odd, but they did nothing for me either – too big, heavy and irrelevant for the UK – and even those who had discovered Harleys for themselves weren’t a lot better and preferred their Pans, Knucks and Flatheads – maybe accepting an early generator Shovel at a push. The pure, pre-AMF models.

Fortunately for Harley-Davidson’s buy-back management team, they had a new motor to announce in the Evolution and the world took it to its bosom, but stuck between the favoured models from the independent past and the new, improved models of the independent future, it’s taken more than twenty years for the Shovel to be recognised for what it was.So what was it?

The last of the hemi big twins, the last old school big twin, the motor that heralded the dawn of the FX range. It was the first motor to be rubber-mounted – which made a hell of a difference to how it felt – first to get a belt drive, or two, and was even the first motor to be seen in a Softail frame – even if it wasn’t a production model, or the production frame. And actually it wasn’t a bad little motor on the quiet. It was also the last of the carved motors, and if you wonder what I mean by that, look at the sculpted form of the cast iron barrels and alloy heads. They may not have been able to cool the motor as efficiently as an Evo, and they’re certainly harder to mass produce, but their shape is nicer. Define nicer?

Okay, less mass produced. The first time I saw an Evo motor out on a shop counter, I didn’t spot the obvious lack of gearbox and wronglyassumed it was something like a Yamaha: very wrongly, as it turned out, for its owner was standing behind me at the time. I was young, alright? The Shovelhead had its problems, for certain, but barring the dome topped pistons , the materials used for the top end and the production process that was used to create it, the Evo did use a lot of the principles and technology of the Shovelhead and was, at the end of the day, still an 80-inch OHV, air cooled, 45-degree v-twin.

It’s worth remembering that by the 1984 launch of the Evo, the Shovelhead was in its eighteenth year of production, and while we weren’t exactly a wash with them over here there was no shortage of them in the States, because something else that the Shovelhead motor had witnessed was a massive increase in production as modern methods were introduced. There would have been more Shovelheads on the roadfrom those eighteen years than Pans and Knucks from the previous thirty, which means that by the time the Evo came along, most of the Shovelheads problems were known and were being fixed at street level if not necessarily on the factory floor: they had other things to deal with like EPA regs, developing the Evo and securing their future.

And all that, combined with a recognition that even a knackered Harley engine can be fixed, has meant that slowly but surely, those used and abused Shovels that coughed, wheezed, banged and spluttered across Britain in the seventies and eighties are slowly being rediscovered and fixed. And if youwondered why there are so many more of them now than there ever was then, it was rumoured at the end of the eighties than the American market was sotaken with the Evo that they traded up in huge numbers, swamped the usedbike market with Shovels, and bright traders exported the problem to Europe,or rather allowed Europeans to take them away, both making a shilling onthe deal. Buy low in a crowded market, sell high where demand is strong. So, where does that take us?

Actually, to the northern outskirts of London, to a former airfi eld that isnow a fi lm studio, and an animal handler / trainer called Dave Sousa whois on first name terms with Hedwig – ask your kids. As an American, Dave grew up with Shovelheads, but as importantly he grew up with Easy riders magazine, and Dave Mann centre spreads, and if anything evoked the spiritof American motorcycles back then, they did. Over here, working on the Harry Potter movies, and not really knowing how long he’d be staying, he had the choice of bringing his bike overhere or seeing what he could find locally. With limited free time and an essential van it wasn’t a major issue but he had his friends keeping an ear to the ground in case something interesting came up, and basically this hard tailed Shovel did.

Something very special, it was originally built by a custom carbuilder, Frank Fizer (?), and featured a lot of hand fabricated sheetmetal in a style that you won’t tend to fi nd in the custom bike world,and to an exceptional standard.

It took Dave a year to arrange to see it but as a lover of rigid chops it pressed all the right buttons, was everything that he’d loved about ’70s Harley-Davidsons, and Easy Rider centrespreads, and he bought it. It arrived much as you see it here except with a tired engine and acouple of oddities – the sort of mantraps that you fall into until you are completely familiar with Harley’s way of doing things – but Dave knows his way round a bike well enough, and fixed the little niggling things that were going wrong, until he realised that they were just getting bigger and bigger. Time for drastic action.

So he arrived on the doorstep of Snobs Ultimate Customs, off the North Circular at Hanger Lane. Formerly Ultimate Performance, if you can cast your mind back that far, Snob has built up a reputation for fettling engines that goes back to the dawn of the Evo, and sitting down with Snob and talking through the problems and the remedial work he’d done so far, it was decided that the best plan would be to sort the whole thing out in one hit. The problems were typical of a hard-used Shovel, and the best way to resolve them is to build the engine to the spec that is known to work well.

Cosmetically, Dave was largely happy with the way it looked. He loved the iridescent paint on the bodywork that runs from green to blue – which will explain the colour inconsistencies in the pictures– and that was still in excellent condition, but the simple, unidentified stretched rigid frame was a little tatty so that was cleaned up and powder-coated black as part of the rebuild, which also gave Snob chance to check the full rolling chassis on reassembly, as well as to be surprised just how light the frame on its own was.

And concentrating on the frame for a little bit longer gives me chance to point out something that would have been obviously odd ten years ago, butsince the Twin Cam’s arrival looks quite normal, and which will provide a natural link to the motor.

Where’s the seat tube?

What do you mean, “What’s a seat tube?”

You know, the frame member that housed the sprung seat pillar on FLs that was redundant on FXs: it used to pass vertically between the engine and the gearbox and is still found on many custom frames, providingwelcome cross-bracing. But not here. The cross bracing is provided byoutboard frame members on the duplex frame that resemble the side plateson a Softail frame, and so don’t look out of place either.

There’s a good reason for the seat tube’s omission, which is that there’s nogap between the engine and gearbox to accommodate it, and that’s because this is a late Shovel from an FLT – the first of the so-called “Rubber-Glides”– and rubber-mounted motors are bolted to their gearboxes to create a one piece drive train that moves as one on its isoplanar bushes. Not that this is rubber-mounted. Rigidly bolted in, it has been used as a stressed member within the frame, enabling that to be correspondingly lighter.

That causes you to look again at the 3-inch BDL belt drive and realise that it is a lot shorter than it would’ve been if it had been a classic 4-speed model but it wasn’t obvious without the stubbier primary case … which makes you remember that FLT’s had a 5-speed ’box, so you nip round the other side again to check for its unlovely end cover, only to be greeted by a traditional 4-speed item and a kicker, which is when you spot that the electric leg is missing. Proper old school!

And that’s when you realise this little chop isn’t just a pretty face, but avery practical, well thought-out roadster, its only compromise being a lack of suspension, which is a personal thing.

So you look again and you see as perfect a line from the Parker one-piece alloy tank into the frame as you’ll have seen anywhere, you will to try to remember when you last saw a rolled beaded edge on a pair of custom mud guards before realising you probably haven’t and, if you’re anything likeme, you’ll wonder where you can get a set of those awesome pipes from. But I’m getting ahead of myself, we were heading back to the motor. One of the biggest problems with a Shovel – and the reason why the Evo didn’t have the same problems – was the shape of combustion chamber and more specifically trying to burn the whole fuel charge. A major problem with Hemi motors is that at TDC, the domed piston crown sits between thespark plug and a fair percentage of the fuel mixture, and if you want to get more power out of a motor, you want to burn as much of the fuel as quickly as possible. The easiest way to fix that is to insert a second spark plug, and the Shovel’s head will take it easily, and light the mix from both sides, settingup a dual flame front. More of the fuel is burnt producing more power and with less unburnt fuel in the exhaust so fewer emissions: every one a coconut! And while twin-plugging the heads, it would have been foolish not to clean up the ports.

A Hi-4 ignition system feeds all four plugs via the RevTech coil, tucked beneath a cover, while an E5 cam made a lot of sense to tailor the power delivery to the ride, rather than use the generic cam which is an excellent jack of all trades but doesn’t account for the different requirements of a Super Glide and an Electra, never mind a simple lightweight bar hopper.

A surprise casualty of the modifications was a super trick twin-choke Weber, but not as surprising as the choice of its replacement: a Harley CV carb from an Evo, complete with its original round air-filter but a freebreathing K&N element. Why? Because it runs better with the CV, and because the simple round filter looks right. There is a suggestion that theWeber might get a second chance some time in the future, but for now it’s more about riding it than spending more hours in the workshop fixing something that isn’t broken.

Unsurprisingly, the custom-made stainless headers and twin megaphone scans didn’t end up in the box along side the Weber, because they really suit the long, low lines of the bike, and like most Shovels, they are actually quiet enough not to attract unwanted attention when cruising, only really barking under hard acceleration. It’s a rash assumption, but probably a safe one to suggest they’re ceramic coated internally, because there’s no evidence of heator heat-shields on the outside.

Hey presto! One fettled Shovel motor. Now, to put the chassis back together, and sort out a few of those mantraps. Nothing too sinister, just tightening a few things up, and then a long session at the polishing wheel tomake sure the fi nished bike lived up to its full potential.

The main areas of concern were a tired set of forks and a chain that seemed determined to cut its way through the custom-made horseshoe oil-tank. By far the easiest way to fix worn fork sliders is to bin them and fit new ones, and Snob is a great advocate of not wasting hours fixing some thing that can be quickly and cheaply replaced, but when you’re talking about a pair of early FLT forks there’s a good reason for re-sleeving them, which is that you’ll struggle to find the same quality of aluminium in a modern pair of sliders – and you’ll notice the difference if you decide to polish them,which is precisely what he intended to do. And keeping the original sliders meant that the original, modest 10-inch disc rotors could be retained, together with the original build’s twin 6-pot Harrison Billet calipers, shaved of their logos: Dave’s not one for labels.

The oil tank was a more pressing issue, and was a consequence of being unaware of just how much a chain whips around under load and on the over-run. You don’t get the same problem with cars, or indeed with belts, but a chain is an unruly bugger if it isn’t in perfect tension and this one was well on its way to cutting through the steel into the oil tank with predictable and unpleasant results. Dave didn’t really want to replace it,so it was repaired without upsetting the original paint, and a nylon blockwas placed where the chain had previously been rubbing, as a slipper, and aspring-loaded jockey-wheel tensioner was fabricated and added to the lower chain stay to take the whip out of the chain itself.

And I can’t leave the back end without mentioning that spun aluminium rear wheel – a real work of art, and a world away from the aluminium disccover on the first Disc Glide – and which is imposing enough to survive being masked by a massive thirteen inch disc and Japanese caliper.Much of the rest came down to a good dose of tidying up, including making the belt and chain guards from stainless-steel rod, an extra bracket for the exhaust beneath the gearbox and tucking everything in as tight as possible to the frame, so that Dave could get the maximum benefit from the improved, and respectable performance.

Then it was adjusting everything to suit Dave – well, as far as is possible when reaching an acceptable compromise, and in this case that was between ending up with something low, long and lean or something that would go round corners: it’s not a lack of tautness in the chassis – even with that lazy rake it’ll hold its line with confidence – but it is rather limited in ground clearance on right-handers, which is more down to the exhaust than anything else, but it is an acceptable compromise for Dave, who’s not going to compromise that shape for anything. And then,of course, there is the questionable practicality of the Night Trainesque riding position with feet and fists first but without suspension to protect your back from the worst that the highways authority can throw at you.That does tend to limit Dave’s range … well, it would if he didn’t get a buzz from the sheer joy of riding the kind of bike he always wanted to own, and while he does occasionally refer to it as a bar hopper, those bars can sometimes take in a hundred mile round trip of a summer’s evening, just for fun. That’s when you know you’ve got the right bike.

And those trips will only be getting longer soon, because he’ll possiblybe heading back Stateside once the Boy Wizard has won the day in his latest epic, and if so he will be taking his Shovelhead with him, to a land with fewer brutal right hand bends, and no roundabouts. An exchange of letters with American officialdom have confirmed that it won’t have to jump through too many hoops, because of its age, and the next time you see it could be wearing an American plate, and maybe – just maybe– in the pages of Easyriders.

Words and pics: Andy Hornsby ( American V Magazine )

Specification

Bike: Dave’s ShovelRebuilder: Snobs Ultimate Customs
Construction Time: Too long

ENGINE: 1981 Harley-Davidson FLT
Rebuilder: Snobs Ultimate CustomsCapacity: 1340cc / 80ciCases/Crank/Rods: oem
Pistons/Barrels: oem
Heads: oem, twin-plugged and ported bySnobs Ultimate Customs
Cam(s)/Lifters: E4Ignition:
Crane Hi-4Coil(s):
RevTechCarb(s):
Harley-Davidson CV from an EvoAir Filter(s):
Evo CVExhaust Header(s):
Custom-made in stainless-steelSilencer(s):
Twin custom-made megaphonesin stainless-steel

TRANSMISSION: 1981 5-speed FLTClutch:
BDLPrimary Drive: 3-inch BDL
Primary Cover: Custom made stainless roads by Snobs Ultimate CustomsStarter: Kickstart only
Final Drive: Chain

FRAME: UnknownType: Stretched rigid for FLT/FXRSpowertrainRake: approx 40-degreesStretch: approx 5-up, 5 outFuel
Tank: Parker stretched alloy withaircraft filler
Oil Tank: Custom-made horseshoe byoriginal ownerRear
Mudguard: Custom made, bead rolled byoriginal owner
FORKS: FLT, sliders resleeved and polishedLength: 2-inch understockYokes/
Triple Tree: Custom by original ownerHandlebars/Risers:
PullbackT-BarsFront Mudguard: Custom made, bead rolled byoriginal owner

WHEELS/BRAKES:
Front: Wheel/Size: 40-spoke laced,stainless spokes, Akront rimTyre/Size: 90/90x21 MetzelerCaliper/Rotor: 2 x Harrison Billet6-pots on drilled HD 10-inchrotors. Black covered braided hoses by Snobs Ultimate CustomsRear: Wheel/Size: 16-inch spunaluminium disc wheelTyre/Size: 160/80 x16 MetzelerCaliper/Rotor: Nissin 4-pot on13-inch rotorHandlebar Controls: NessMirror: Ness CatseyeGrips: JayBrakeFoot Controls: Possibly Accutronix
Seat: Custom by original ownerInstruments: Errrr …
Headlamp:
BatesTaillight: Lucas pattern
Fabrication: Original owner and SnobsUltimate
CustomsFinal Assembly: Snobs Ultimate CustomsPainter: Frank FizerColour(s):
IridescentPolishing: Snobs Ultimate Customs

Thanks to: Snobs Ultimate Customs,

Dave Mann