Boy, am I sorry I ever started looking at triple trees.
I went through all the parts books, and came up with
a table listing what the parts books say. There are a whole bunch of them! Before trying to map these to "what came originally on what", we need to agree that all these things did actually exist.
OK, here's the legend that really should have been on that web page.
White Background = reported by parts book and appears correct
Red background = reported by parts book and appears IN-correct (and I may be wrong about these !!!)
Green background = my proposed corrections (and I may be wrong about these !!!)
Gray background = not reported. P/N is what one would have assumed from previous year's book. i.e. If a supplement didn't report a change, then one would assume the part listed in the previous year's book would be used.
There are two distinct groups. The raked trees have a -52x part number, the parallel trees have a -54x or later part number. The raked trees and parallel trees cannot be mixed. I believe Harley made some errors regarding the upper tree for the 1954 split, and kept repeating the error year after year.
Going through the table, it looks like we have all these different versions! What could the differences be?
"RAKED TREES" - 1952 & 1953 & 1954 up to s/n#2250 Upper 45738-52 (first mention in 1952)
Lower 47501-52 (first mention in 1952)
47501-52A (first mention in 1954)
47501-52B (first mention in 1956)
"PARALLEL TREES" - 1954 s/n#2250-up through 1969Upper 45738-54 (first mention in 1954) ("natural" version, and re-worked early version)
45738-54A (first mention in 1955)
45738-59 (first mention in 1959)
45738-62 (first mention in 1963) (used on late 1962)
Lower 45701-54 (first mention in 1954 2250-up) ("natural" version, and re-worked early version)
45702-57 (first mention in 1965)
45702-67 (first mention in 1967) (used on 1967 XLH only)
45702-57A (first mention in 1968)
HELP!