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Harley-Davidson's Lost Past
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Original Harley-Davidson designs
Paul Garson
03/01/2006
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Photography by Scott C. Hall
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The Dark Deed
It may not have been dark and stormy that night in 1978, but deep
within the bowels of Harley-Davidson’s Juneau Avenue factory, strange deeds were
afoot. Fahrenheit 451 was being played out; roaring flames were licking at a
staggering 40,000 arcane parchments, curling them into ash and cinders, the
Motor Company’s legacy literally going up in smoke. And all in the name of
“modernization and streamlining.”
 Tasked with the onerous job by scions of
the company (then owned by AMF), anonymous souls wore thick gloves, their faces
masked against the heat and smoke; they stoked the conflagration, shoveling in
hundreds of pounds of original engineering and design drawings stretching back
to the company’s early days, circa 1908, through the mid-1970s. Ever hungry for
more kindling, the red hot maw of the furnace swallowed up ream after ream of
one-of-a-kind renderings marked “pre-teen V-twin”, “JD”, “Flathead”,
“Knucklehead”, “Panhead”, “Shovelhead” decades of innovation and motorcycling history disappeared in a cacophony of crackle and snap, rose up the
thick brick chimney and were then carried away by the winds blowing across
Milwaukee. (Click image to enlarge)
The Rescue
Not all was lost. One pair of courageous hands,
intent on saving at least a fragment of the collection, braved the flames—and in
the process rescued some 250 drawings from oblivion. Carefully sequestered away,
for decades the documents lay in yet another dark place, forgotten, in an attic
far from the light of day—until 2003, when unearthed, poetically enough, during
Harley-Davidson’s 100th Anniversary celebrations at a location a scant three
miles from the Juneau Ave. plant itself. To motorcycle purists, the discovery
could be compared to that of King Tut’s tomb or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
 Full scale 1:1 drawing (28 x 21 inches) of the 1916 F-head V-twin
motor innovation that doubled the horsepower of the 1911 version. (Click image to enlarge)
The Light Of Day
The story of discovery begins with Scott C. Hall one day
while surfing the Net. The eponymous founder and owner of Hall Industrial
Services, located in Wichita, Kansas, Hall worked his way up from mowing lawns
to supplying boatloads of heavy construction equipment to oil fields. He is an
impassioned collector of antique motorcycles, literature, memorabilia, parts
and—as his business card states—“Fun Stuff!” His collection focuses on rare
American marques including Indian, Henderson and, of course, Harley-Davidson.
Hall also has, perhaps, the largest private collection of British-made Brough
Superiors.
He always has a sharp eye out for the unusual, as he did the day
he chanced upon a single item among countless thousands posted on eBay—something
about an original Harley-Davidson design drawing. Intrigued and inspired, Hall
began his own odyssey, eventually calling upon the expertise and partnership of
his friend and fellow antique bike connoisseur Mike Smith. One of America’s
premier motorcycle restorers and a highly knowledgeable historian, Smith owns a
shop in Oregon City, Ore.
 A rendering of the H-D bar-and-shield logo, one of the only original examples in
existence. (Click image to enlarge)
First Contact
Together Hall and Smith tracked the source of the document
being offered on eBay to a tiny hole-in-the-wall gift shop in Milwaukee. The
pair promptly booked flights and made their way to the doorstep of the store.
Meeting the proprietor, they learned that a close friend of his who had been
employed at Harley-Davidson in the 1970s had acquired several drawings and was
now interested in testing the waters to see what they might fetch on eBay’s open
market. Thus, Hall and Smith were able to meet the owner of the cache of
documents, who explained that the destruction of the mountain of original
documents had been instigated to “get rid of a bunch of paper taking up space;
for the sake of making room for more offices.”
The AMF plan had been to use
the then-new technique of microfiche recording to make copies of the original
design drawings, and to eliminate the bulky originals via the company furnace.
The plan apparently backfired (no puns intended), as more recent queries now
indicate that H-D cannot seem to find the microfiche files they had made!
Recognizing the importance of the original drawings, Hall and Smith struck a
deal for the entire motherlode. Now for the first time, Robb Report MotorCycling
has an up close and personal look at these unique and historically significant
drawings.
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