OzVMX Forum
Clubroom => General Discussion => Topic started by: mx250 on October 16, 2009, 07:59:43 am
-
.....from Erik Buell
http://www.buell.com/en_us/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iby6HPwmtvHa0aEPTtDQb0Bm5KzQD9BBI6IG0
I wonder how much this is a problem with Buell and how much it is a prob with HD ::).
Should rip out and buy a new Buell if you can find one - they will become a collectable 8) ;).
-
Well won't be missed by real Harley owners, the writing was on the wall for Buell when they tried to develop a water cooled motor, that really alienates Harley riders, like that embarrasment the V Rod that only chicks and poofy Europeans buy.
Harley themselves though have turned it around with some cool models and really gone after the custom bike market.
Harleys 3Q profit result is pretty frightening.
(http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg71/marcFX_photo/IMGP0823.jpg)
-
None of this fancy stuff, just whack road tyres on your Soft tail and you are racing. Imagine how fast this guy would on a MotoGP bike.
(http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg71/marcFX_photo/IMG_0518.jpg)
-
I don't fancy being on the outside of him in the first corner. :o
-
Dear Eric,
quit crying you big poof, here are some proper race harleys, you even built a couple yourself (XBRR).....
(http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg71/marcFX_photo/XR12.jpg)
(http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg71/marcFX_photo/ga_cl_03.jpg)
(http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg71/marcFX_photo/star-stripe.jpg)
-
I don't fancy being on the outside of him in the first corner. :o
Too true but the guy actually beat some badly ridden KTM690s home..... South Islander...say no more.
-
You would think they would just TRY & sell Buell. Shurly it would be worth somthing as a going concern.
-
Whats the difference between a harley and a cattle dog?............................................
a cattle dog can get in the back of the ute by itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-
You would think they would just TRY & sell Buell. Shurly it would be worth somthing as a going concern.
I am sure they did their sums, they can probably get more liquidating its assetts, or they may wish to retain the right to the R&D. So looks like Harley just went out of the sports bike market.
The brand names Buell and MV still exist, so you may find the MoCo will resurrect Buell or at least keep the option in case the US economy recovers. Next will be all the medium scale guys, AIM, Big Dog etc..... Victory has Polaris behind them and the MoCo is still rich, they have great products, so they can use the economic opportunity to squeeze out the others. Harley has already gone after the custom guys big time.
-
Gotta love the ironhead sportster...
OLDYZMAN
-
Well won't be missed by real Harley owners,
What's a real Harley owner ??
I've been riding HD's for 27 years.........I love my Buell.
-
Whats the difference between a harley and a cattle dog?............................................
a cattle dog can get in the back of the ute by itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
;D(http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn458/mx250syd/funnies/roll-1.gif) ;D
-
.........why do harley riders fight so much ??.........theres only so much room in the back of a ute ;D ;D ;D
..........why do they call them cattledog bikes ??........they'll go out by themselves but they come back in the ute ;D ;D ;D
Roger
-
.........why do harley riders fight so much ??.........theres only so much room in the back of a ute ;D ;D ;D
..........why do they call them cattledog bikes ??........they'll go out by themselves but they come back in the ute ;D ;D ;D
Roger
;D(http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn458/mx250syd/funnies/roll-1.gif) ;D
What/who would we pick on if there wasn't Harley's :P ;D
-
Harley was feeling the pinch before the recession hit. Harley boomed in the late 80's and 90's when all the mid life crisis guy's ran out and bought one. Well those blokes are all in their 60's and 70's now. The new mid life crisis guy's are all buying adventure bikes and touring the outback.
All the young blokes are buying or building aftermarket choppers.
I visited the Buell factory back in '91, before it was bought by Harley. It was just a small workshop down a lane way in a small town. I ended up buying a 2000 Buell Cyclone. It has the 1200 sporster motor but with shaved flywheels' lumpy cams and high flow heads from the factory. What a beast of a machine. It handles and stops like nothing else.
It's funny, back in the 60' and 70's when everyone bought an old 42 WLA for their first Harley. One that already had had about twenty previous first time Harley owners. Owners that all brought their unique four thumb no idea mechanics to the maintenance schedule. Therefore most bikes where mechanically stuffed. keep in mind that most bike where twenty to thirty years old on average, and that people were trying to use them as daily riders.
This gave them a reputation for being unreliable that has lived to this day.
The irony is, is that they are dead reliable.
-
This gave them a reputation for being unreliable that has lived to this day.
The irony is, is that they are dead reliable.
So true.........11 Harleys....27 years....I've been stranded once...(regulator/rectifier)...even my shovels were reliable.... ;D
Built my first one from a basket and rode the tits off it..
(http://[img])http://v2-forum.com/photopost/data/500//Hotham_944.jpg[/img]
-
.......its not so much that we don't like harley's, it's just that harley rider's are so easy to bag, that its become a national sport........harley boots, harley bandana, harley jacket, harley underpants (I shit you not !! ),ad infinitum..........it's just too easy ;D ;D ;D ;D
Roger
-
.......its not so much that we don't like harley's, it's just that harley rider's are so easy to bag, that its become a national sport........harley boots, harley bandana, harley jacket, harley underpants (I shit you not !! ),ad infinitum..........it's just too easy ;D ;D ;D ;D
Roger
Yeah those Hog guys are an embarassment and fools to themselves for that reason I wear T shirt and sneakers when I ride. Used to hire a few welders so got to know a few patch bros so mostly ride with them if I ride with anyone at all.
I also built my own bike from bits rather than just write the cheque....
-
Expletive Deleted: The Broken Man
by dean adams
Friday, October 16, 2009
I suppose Buell's announcement that they will cease operations was, for a lot of people, shocking. I'm not among them, frankly. I'm saddened for anyone who works at Buell and for Buell's small, but vocal, group of passionate customers and evangelists. Sad, but not shocked; not at all.
Since the beginning, the addition of Buell to the Harley-Davidson company has been an odd mix, both in Milwaukee and on the dealership floor. Inside Harley, Buell has always been a weird stepchild few at "The Motor Company" embraced. For many years, and it still may be true today, if you wanted to get your jaw wired in place for six weeks, a great way to have that done was to walk into any bar near a Harley-Davidson assembly plant and proclaim that Buells were Harleys because they share the same powerplant. Pow! Inside the Motor Company, there were Harley people and then there were the Buell outcasts. To say that it was any other way is simply not truthful. On the dealer floor, dealers that I know who carried both brands were confused; many times the Buell models just sat and seemed to gather dust as a parade of Harleys were sold and serviced.
Harley stuck a fortune into Buell, in buying it and in fixing all the early recalls and then trying to build it into a brand--although I always wondered what that brand would be, or could be, with such a dominant parent company. Most expected that at some point Buell would become Harley but it never did. When times were good at Harley and quarter after quarter of record profits rolled in, the money that Buell cost them was just a blip, a few sentences worth of mention on an investor conference call. Those days, I'm afraid, are gone.
The video on the Buell Web site of Eric with a K telling the tale that Buell was finished was sobering to watch even for me, someone who wasn't Erik's biggest disciple in the press corp--Lord knows there were enough of those. Buell, broken, ashen-faced, and seemingly at times on the verge of tears, spelled out that the company that he'd spent a lifetime building would be no more.
Just because he's gutted, it didn't stop Buell from spinning his company's saddest accomplishment. In the video, Buell says that, in 2009 "... in competition at the highest level, the Rossmeyer Geico team took the AMA Pro SportBike championship, competing against the much larger, factory-backed teams from Japan and Europe, proving to all that (Buell) innovation and technology is world class."
There was, of course, no mention of the fact that the Buell is 1200cc while the Japanese brands entered anemic 600s, bikes so slow that one factory rider termed his 600 not just the slowest 600 he'd ever ridden, or the slowest race bike he'd ever ridden, but, in fact, the slowest motorcycle he'd ever ridden. Let's be real, the bias in the DMG Daytona Sport Bike rules destroyed any chance Buell had at racing credibility in 2009.
I've said this privately for a long time: Buell Motorcycles would have been more successful if Erik had retired and left the company in the hands of someone else. The PR spin on Erik is that he was focused and passionate, the great defender of the Buell crest. Another perspective might see it differently: Erik could also be divisive, and on a personal level, you were either with him or against him, it seemed. Anybody who didn't join Erik's special little club "had an agenda" and was frozen out.
That method of dealing with people is tolerable if your products are absolutely kicking ass in the marketplace. You can be as mercurial as Steve Jobs when your products fly off the shelves. You can re-wire an entire industry when the re-wiring results in business success. But, for whatever reason, Erik's bikes remained machines with a small and cult-ish following. The technological tangents that Erik became so passionate about--fuel in the frame, goofy brakes, and all the rest--were they the best use of Buell's resources?
I understand that Erik wanted to solidify his legacy in the motorcycle industry. But in all honestly, just because you use your own press releases to call yourself a "visionary" doesn't make it so.
I think, if Erik had left the company and ten more years passed-- enough time to see the retirement of most of the old guard at Harley who didn't like it when The Motor Company acquired a stake in Buell in the early 1990s--and a newer generation of people who only knew Harley as being attached to Buell came on board, then Buell might have seen some real success.
In a wider scope, Buell folding up shop signals another bad business decision by DMG. Here is where they sit after sticking their index finger into the eyeballs of the Japanese manufacturers. All that conflict, all that turmoil, while they stood shoulder to shoulder with Erik Buell against those "Japanese factories' barely disguised race bikes".
DMG sacrificed all remaining credibility when they allowed the clearly illegal Buell 1125 Superbike into the Superbike class and bristled at the suggestion that it was anything but legal. All that skullduggery, and for what? All for the champion in Daytona SportBike, DMG's star class to now be riding a motorcycle made by a defunct company. All those relationships burned willingly, almost gleefully, by DMG so they could pledge allegiance to their pace bike, the Buell, which is as of today, no longer being produced.
Daytona Sport Bike champion and Buell hero Danny Eslick told Cycle News that he expects to go racing in 2010, to defend his title, on a Buell. Would anything more profoundly demonstrate DMG's efforts at running a series into the ground than to have the number one plate in the "Daytona" class be on a motorcycle made by a defunct manufacturer?
Will Buell's demise be the shockwave that forces DMG to mediate a peace with Honda and the rest? Please. With the press conference at Laguna Seca fresh in my mind, I feel that this is not how DMG operates; there is no admission of mistakes made and a plea for forgiveness. There are more companies to use as a pivot against the Japanese--Aprilia, BMW, etc.--and more double-the-displacement-against-glorified-vacuum-cleaner rules and enemies lists to compile.
Supposedly, there are no second acts in America. And, while Erik Buell looked like a broken man in the video, I have a hard time believing that the closing of Buell Motor Company will finally silence Erik Buell.
http://www.superbikeplanet.com/2009/Oct/091016expldeleted.htm
-
.......its not so much that we don't like harley's, it's just that harley rider's are so easy to bag, that its become a national sport........harley boots, harley bandana, harley jacket, harley underpants (I shit you not !! ),ad infinitum..........it's just too easy ;D ;D ;D ;D
Roger
Even more ironic, the bikes get bagged because of the people who ride them. I know what your saying, I do my fair share of Harley rider bashing as well. Even though I've been riding them for 31 years.
-
So true.........11 Harleys....27 years....I've been stranded once...(regulator/rectifier)...even my shovels were reliable.... ;D
Built my first one from a basket and rode the tits off it..
(http://[img])http://v2-forum.com/photopost/data/500//Hotham_944.jpg[/img]
[/quote]
That looks a lot like how my 79 lowrider looked back in the day. Still commute to work every day on a Harley. Can't find a more practical low maintenance, reliable commuter bike.