This year has been nuts. I don’t know what got into me. At the first of the year we set a code to cut down on events and projects and take it easy. Here’s the glitch. We thought, mistakenly, we’d just build a bike to ride to Sturgis then take it to Bonneville. That V-Bike, the first Sportbike Panhead turned into two bikes, then three with a V-rod from Phoenix.

The plan seemed simple enough in the beginning. I caught the glitch in my prognosis and fortunately ducked out on the V- rod. I was down to building two bikes by myself, riding to Sturgis, joining the Hamsters again and riding home. Then three weeks later we would ride to Bonneville and get our salt feet wet at the Bubs International Speed Trials. Hell, I thought this was a breeze, just hit the salt once a year.

I’m not complaining. It’s all fun. I looked forward to the 2000 mile Hamster ride into the Badlands. They know how to do it, and have a blast along the way. The Hamsters take a lot of yuppie heat, but a great number of the 270-strong, group of custom bike enthusiast, ride. They ride a lot. I’ve known the core of the group over 25 years. In most cases many of the members are apart of this industry. Okay, so with a week to go before riding out, my V-Bike Panhead engine hadn’t arrived and it looked like a no-show.

Berry Wardlaw of Accurate Engineering recently completed a Biker Build-off with a fellow Hamster, Kim Suter, of KC Creations and Gypsy. His order desk was piled too high. A brother Hamster was due to arrive in a day or two to straddle my King and head out. The King was ready, but what the hell was I going to ride. I could jump aboard the Shovelhead from last year, but the aluminum tank started leaking again. I have a 1948 Panhead with dual carbs… Sin Wu suggested I contact Harley and see if they would like a long distance article on a new 96-inch 2007 King with a six-speed.

Give her a couple of margaritas and she sprouts her finest thinking. I contacted H-D and within an hour arrangements were made to compare two Kings while blasting to the Sturgis and back. Dale Gorman arrived in LA from Cape Cod and threw his duffle bag in the Bikernet Barracks. So there you have it, two 230 pound, plus, men heading out of town on two Kings. One a bone stock 2007 King, sporting a radio with XM hook-up, windshield and hard bags.

My King is a blacked out 2003 classic, 100th anniversary, with soft leather bags, Screamin’ Eagle heads, Screamin’ Eagle mid-range cams, a Screamin’ Eagle air cleaner, an H-D tear-drop air cleaner cover, Screamin’ Eagle, two-into- one exhaust, H-D blacked mag wheels, a Street Stalker front fender, highbars, no windshield, and one more, non-Harley performance accessory, a Keith Terry closed-loop fuel injection tuner. It’s still a pure 88-incher.

We packed light, no tour-packs, just what we could squeeze in our bags and in one Bandit’s bedroll apiece. I planted mine on the glide front-end nacelle as a windbreak and strapped it to the 16-inch highbars. Dale attached his behind him on the seat with crossed bungies and we rolled into grizzly Los Angeles traffic.

It's been five years since I rode with the Hamsters to Sturgis. Seemed like a lifetime. Dale and I rode to Sturgis at least three times. I was looking forward to a comfortable, weeklong run with some old bros, partying all across the west. Dale and I would shift from King to King noting our impressions. Our first stretch was the Mad Escape from Los Angeles to the home of Daytec and Atlas frames in Hesperia, California, some 98 miles into the Devor pass leading most weekenders towards Vegas.

Dale rode the ’07 King first and noted the 80-90 mph chassis walk on the interstate. Rubber-mounted dresses seem to flex at speeds and it’s generally due to the lack of rake and the driveline movement, with the swingarm attached to the transmission between two rubber biscuits. There’s a solution, the True-Track system designed be Wil Phillips.

This system adds another Heim joint under the transmission preventing driveline side-to-side motion. It takes a measly 10 minutes to install, and adds 80 percent more confidence to the ride. I installed one on the ’03 a couple of months prior and it dialed handling completely.

Dale also commented on the gearing. “It was hard to know what gear I was in,” He said. “All the gears seemed taller and I didn’t hit sixth until I was rolling along at 90 mph, but it’s cool.”

The ’07 appeared to be the virtually the same as the ’03 from a structural standpoint. Except for the 96-inch mill and the 6-speed transmission, they were the same bikes. The all black ’03 rumbled up the highway feeling fine except for the Aeromach highway pegs I installed. They were too close to my foot controls and I caught my boots between them. I need to adjust those suckers.

Here’s my thing about Kings. I tried to ride a customized dresser a few years back. The bike was killer, but it was a dresser. I grew up on choppers. I couldn’t handle it, but I can a King. Let me try to explain. It’s like a ’36 coupe guy driving a bus. A King works, like a hot rod aficionado in the seat of a ’59 Cadillac. It’s still cool. You can still pack your shit, and rock n roll, especially with apes. I actually think the factory could take Kings a step further and offer apes, a slightly stretched frame for bigger guys and stretched tanks for lowered ’59 Impala class. Something like Lake pipes slipping through traffic or across the country in style. Shot of Kings

So Dale and I slipped through traffic splitting lanes into the desert under a partially cloudy sky. The radio with the XM Satellite connection was a rush and a safety factor. Since no matter where that bike was the reception was as clear as a bell, so Dale wasn’t forced to precariously tune channels and volume surrounded by thundering 18-wheelers.

For some reason I haven’t been able to pump 13 psi of pressure into my H-D air adjustable shock for a while and we threatened to fix it on the road. No chance. We started checking fuel consumption at every gas stop as another comparison. In Hesperia after a tour of the Daytec plant and dinner at Phil Day’s estate we gassed up. We covered 117 miles with 3.1 gallons for 38 mpg. I was expecting more. I checked the oil temp with my digital dipstick gauge and came up with 221 degrees, which is bitchin’ for my twin cam. They run hotter than Evos and it’s a good notion to run an oil cooler. I wanted to compare it with the ’07 but the dipstick wouldn’t fit into the 6- speed case. I’ll bet he was running 20 degrees hotter.

Daytec produces 7,200 frames a year, with 200 employees, in their 50,000 square foot facility on the edge of the Mojave Desert. As we drank whiskey in Green Valley Bar with Clyde Fessler, an ex H-D VP, we watched the weather report, pointing out the ensuing heat wave and warning to avoid heat stroke by curbing alcohol intake or coffee. We ordered another round, and coffee was our first morning beverage, then more whiskey.

Let’s ride. We jumped up in the morning, grabbed a pot of steaming coffee, plus breakfast and lined up for the “Wind ‘em up,” call. We rolled from Hesperia behind Phil Day the back way, 70 miles into Yucca Valley, where the notorious Bob T. lives with the Chop N Grind racing team, in a tin shed. They were the sister team to our 5-Ball Racing crew. Dale and I gassed up. The girls with the rest of the Hamsters demanded breakfast, so we peeled out toward the Joshua Tree National Park, to avoid those sand snortin’ bastards in the Chop N Grind team. We had covered a brief 70 miles and both the ’07 and the ’03 took exactly 1.6 gallons for 43.7 mpg. That’s more like it.

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