Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
I am (or was, I'm now retired) a mechanical engineer by profession as well. I became well aware of the frustrations of having engineering decisions being made by marketing, management, and finance people. These are, unfortunately, the constraints we have to live with in modern manufacturing.
I do not, however, believe that the continued use of the roller crank, nor the dry sump oiling system, are anything but purely engineering decisions. Both are more complex and expensive to manufacture than their alternatives, a plain bearing crank and a wet sump. Neither are perceived by their customer base as "signature features" of the brand. Hell, I would venture that the vast majority of their modern customer base do not even know what these things are, and would never base purchasing decisions upon these features. If anything, the "bean counters" would be pushing the engineers to eliminate these expensive solutions in favor of cheaper ones. Alas, there must almost certainly be compelling engineering reasons for keeping them, at least until the designs that utilize them are superseded completely.
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There is a good chance that Harley is keeping the roller crank because they're already tooled up for them so why get rid of all that capital if you can tweak the design a little to keep everything working (sorta). Eventually they're going to have to go complete water cooled for emmissions and to make the power that the marketing people want.
If I was in charge of Harley, I'd go with a 90 deg v-twin, water cooled and pushrods with hydraulic lifters. Basically I'd tell my engineers go get a Chevy 454 and slice off two cylinders and build a motorcycle around that. it would be a 300k mile engine.
I've read somewhere this is what Motoguzzi did in the 60s when they came out with their 90 deg air cooled twin. They took a chevy of that era and used the same bore and stroke and cam profiles and geometry.