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27 January 2010
The Telephone Call

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A telephone call out of the blue ended a ten year absence of one of my best friends. Now we do screen telephone calls here at the "Hovel" and I won't answer calls from numbers I don't know or recognize. That's why I have an answering machine. It seems that there are a lot of companies out there who disregard the do not call list.

Flo told me that there was a phone call from Pennsylvania identified on our caller ID; so out of curiosity she answered the phone. As it turned out she was surprised by the voice on the other end.

Meanwhile I was out spending some time with Mike, my MV and the folks at Steelhorse as I usually do on Saturdays. As soon as I got home she dialed the phone and handed it to me. I'm not a telephone person. I hate the damn things, I prefer to talk face to face; but when I heard Sam's voice on the other end I was pleasantly surprised. It didn't take long before we were trying to catch up on ten years that we had missed.

Sam and I started out our friendship about thirty years ago. We were both on active duty and assigned as instructors at the Navy's Cargo Handling Group in Williamsburg.

Sam and I traveled the world together enjoying exciting places like Diego Garcia, McMurdo Station Antarctica; just to name a few. We both were avid hunters and fishermen and of course we managed to spend a lot of time outdoors doing those things. Anyone you spend time with hunting and fishing you tend to know pretty well. Just imagine how long you and your worst acquaintance could stay in a12 foot john boat…. It takes someone special to spend a day with, never mind years of fishing in that little boat.

We have removed hooks from fish and each other, gotten wet and dragged deer out of the woods together; suffered through many days hunting and coming home empty handed; but, still smiling because it was always a great day outdoors with good friends. Not to mention the many days of fishing where one of us would catch fish while the other just got exercise casting. Or one would catch a lot of fish while the other caught one, the biggest one.

I have laughed at him while out hunting when he put his body in a precarious position to relieve himself (the call of nature) and the wind not being fully co-operative, blew hard and dropped a rather large limb on him… Good thing there are lots of leaves out there…

Of course motorcycles were not out of the question either. Our first motorcycle trip was to Canada. Flo and I trailered up my Fat Boy and her Sportster to Pittsburg, Sam's home. Then we followed him on his 82 Shovelhead to Buffalo and then into Canada.

The day Sam bought the 82 Shovelhead, another friend of ours Klaus and I, drove up to Pittsburg in Klaus's Toyota truck and loaded that non running 82 Harley Davidson Shovelhead up and brought it down here to Virginia. The plan was for me to get it running and make it street safe and legal.

It had been lying in a garage rather dormant for many years. There were lots of parts missing, or they just didn't work. The original owner had passed away and some son in law tried to get the bike started. All they managed to do was lose parts and screw up the engine timing and by the time Sam found it the carb was toast.

With the bike up on Klaus' truck we stopped at the car wash and tried to knock off years of garage dust and as much grease and dirt as possible. What we didn't notice was the primary cover had a hole in it and it was leaking oil. This we didn't notice until we were just about across the border into West Virginia on the way home. For weeks afterward Klaus' truck's tailgate leaked oil. Somehow all of the oil that leaked out of the Shovelhead wound up inside the tailgate. It only leaked when the tailgate was in the up position…

After a couple days Klaus and I had the old Harley running. Running as well as any old bike needing a complete rebuild, which it would get the following year. We did manage to mount up the old headlight from my Fat Boy, along with some turn signals and sorted out the electrical system. Sam came down and loaded the old girl up in his truck and carried it on home. Not until we did some riding in the area to make sure it did run.

But on that, the run to Canada parts fell off. Flo and I were following behind Sam in our Jeep pulling the trailer with our bikes onboard. Flo was hysterical with laughter; for a while there I had to pull over and collect parts as they fell off about every few miles. Nothing of importance fell off but Flo and I wondered if the old bike would ever make our destination in Canada.

It did make it to our friend's house in Saint Thomas; but we ended up spending the first day there bolting parts back on with some generous application of Lock Tight and fixing the rear brake system.

The rear brake locked up bank vault tight within two blocks of Sam's house. On the side of the road we had to crack open the rear caliper's air bleeder to release the locked up system. A stream of brake fluid shot up about six feet in the air as soon as I cracked it open. The rear brake released and Sam continued the trip keeping the rear brake for emergency or a real panic situation.

The rear brakes master cylinder's bleed back hole was closed by some dried up brake fluid. We had to auger out the hole to get it to work.

Sam somewhere on the road in Canada

That old Shovelhead was as ugly as any motorcycle I had ever seen, red paint faded, engine covered in oil film and the lower part of the bike was full of Oreo cookie dough; road dirt mixed with oil and grease. All of the aluminum parts were a rough grayish color and anything chrome was rusted too.

When it ran it belched smoke, and leaked oil so bad that we didn't want to ride behind him, because you would wind up with oil spots all over you and your bike.

Later that year Sam came back down and we pulled the engine and transmission out and the frame and body work went north with Sam. While he would get the frame and body work painted I would rebuild the engine and transmission.

The engine was pulled apart as completely as the Shovelhead Diary's engine and gone through and painted. For some reason Harley Davidson had decided to black power coat the engines' nose cone and pushrod tubes.

A much better looking motorcycle by any standard

Rocker boxes, pushrod tubes, nose cone all got polished. We did a lot of unique things to this engine. The pushrod tubes are steel and when we removed all of the power-coat and polished them; they were striking. The 82 Shovelhead engine had an oil problem; the oil would build up on the cylinder walls and wind up getting past the oil control rings.

So the Harley engineers added a hole at the bottom of the cylinder and connected it by hose to the lifter blocks. The low pressure of the nose cone area would pull the oil down where it could be returned to the oil tank. It was plumbed with a rubber hose from the factory, we used stainless steel tubing which was also highly polished.

The actual engine rebuild was completed in little over two weeks. The bike returned in the spring and a week later and with the help of several friends the bike was out running around taking Sam where ever his little heart desired.

Working on a very limited budget including the cost of the bike it was done for a total of about $7000.00. One look at the picture and you won't believe it.

The total is just parts, the labor costs would have pushed the cost way up. But we all enjoyed the ordeal of the rebuild. But then what are friends for….

Sam trying out the old Beemer...

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