Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

All things K & Sportster

Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby sportsterpaul » Thu Jul 23, 2015 11:51 pm

I got excited by this site and you guys so I worked on my on website for a few months straight. I just made a big table where I tried to show in the most general terms what type of components were on the various years. You can check it out here. There is a pdf file there as well, with the whole table on an 11x17 sheet.

I am sure it will change, and I welcome any corrections or suggestions. I realize this is very rough, but in some cases it was meant to be. We know that the engine had the 1972 one-year-only top end, and the speedo drive changed in '74, and the huge change in 1977, but they are all 1000cc engines so I lumped them together.

One day I hope to have the detailed part of the site built out, so that all the part numbers and every little change is obvious. That is why the "Primary" row in the chart has a link, since I have the primary cover pretty well figured out.

The table is straight HTML, I built it with Blue Griffon, and Komposer when Blue Griffon did not work. Dave H. is welcome to lift it for this site, as is anyone else that can use the code.

Paul
sportsterpaul
 
Posts: 240
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:17 am
Location: Sun City Center, Florida

Re: Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby thefrenchowl » Fri Jul 24, 2015 7:57 am

Thanks Paul,

Good outline of major changes...

Patrick
Flat Head Forever
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011184353/http://www.harleykrxlrtt.com/index.htm
I'm the one who has to die when it's time for me to die so let me live my life the way I want to...
thefrenchowl
 
Posts: 611
Joined: Sun Jun 28, 2015 4:33 pm

Re: Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby hennesse » Fri Jul 24, 2015 11:36 am

Great work Paul,

I particularly like that you cover the 1970 to 1984 models. There's a real lack of information about these bikes.

When I started this site, my motto was "do a small job well". My first thought was to cover just the K-models, but others wanted to cover the early Sportsters too. OK, well, just how early is early? I proposed extending it to cover the 6-volt Sportsters. Others suggested 1969 as the cut-off date. There are a number of "logical" dates we could have chosen, say 1971 as the last 900cc, or 1974 as the last left-hand shift.

There's a saying "If you remember the 1960s, you didn't live them." For me (and perhaps for a number of others reading this), the 1960s are kinda hazy, and my failing "little grey cells" need all the help they can get - so we arbitrarily picked the end of that decade.

The problem with Sportsters is that there's just too darn many of them. As I write this, the factory is starting the annual switchover to the 59th year of production. Searching eBay for Sportster parts, or Googling for repair information, produces billions of things, most of which we're not interested in. The Sportster is a victim of its own success.

Keep up the good work - we need all the information we can get about these wonderful motorcycles.

Dave
User avatar
hennesse
Site Admin
 
Posts: 668
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2014 11:28 pm
Location: Warrenton, Virginia

Re: Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby sportsterpaul » Fri Jul 24, 2015 5:33 pm

Thanks gents. I was up until 2:00 AM finding mistakes, so I was up to rev 3. This morning I saw I had mistakes on the XLCR and a couple other places, so I just fixed that. While I was at it, I did add text to the 1000cc engine cell to show those changes, so people will know it is not the exact same engine all those years. So now we are up to revision 4, and I am sure I will find more mistakes tomorrow morning.

I am getting fired up now, so I want to do more data entry into the detailed sections. My first attack will be the transmission, since it is easy-- it hardly changed in the whole model run.

I have also made an automated table that shows the contents of each subsection, and after a few more days of style-sheets and Movable Type markup code, I will change all the "category" pages in this section so it will be much easier to navigate.

I also linked to this post on the BOM table page, I hope that is OK, if not, let me know Dave, and I will take it off. I once tried to have comments on my pages, and I got so tired of spam and captchas that don't work, and people hacking in code, I just tore it all down and now I have only static pages. One black-hat SEO outfit figured out how to hack my wiki pages so that their 20 or 30 urls did not show as visible, but Google could still "see" the links in the HTML. I took down the wiki. As Frank Zappa said, "If there is a Hell, it waits for them."
sportsterpaul
 
Posts: 240
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:17 am
Location: Sun City Center, Florida

Re: Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby Hammie13 » Sat Jul 25, 2015 1:13 am

A job well done!!!!! I think we should all send him a few bucks for this! It's GREAT!!! I do get the feeling he doesn't get out much though,and could stand to get laid.......
Just Kidding,just kidding,Thanks for the massive effort!
Hammie13
 

Re: Table of K and Iron Sportster major components

Postby sportsterpaul » Fri Sep 04, 2015 7:01 pm

I got the transmission section entered, taking pictures of the parts I have in my stash. The only change on the home page is that big table now has a blue link to "transmission". That link goes here.

I made thumbnails of all the parts for the first table. You can drill down to individual parts or to higher sections. The table below the first one has part numbers. The tranny level only has the numbers for the shifter shaft and bearing since they "report" to the transmission sub-assembly. To see the part numbers for the sub-sub-assemblies, you have to look at the second chart on pages for Countershaft, Mainshaft, and Trap door. The Mainshaft asy has its own sub-sub-subassembly, the Clutch gear, and the Trap door asy has another sub-sub-subassembly, the Shifter.

The look and arrangement of all this is still pretty tentative. All the part number tables have the pop-up image of the bikes on the left, which is a carryover from the top-level table software that builds these tables. I would like to get it so that hovering over a part number will pop up an image of the part, but that is a long way off. First thing is to get all the major assemblies represented, with at least a few model year's parts, and then I can fill in the different year part pictures as I find them. I expect to have an entire trove of pictures when I take apart my 1952 K-model.

Thanks to JerrryR for noting just how crazy some of the early bikes are. He pointed out to me there are dozens of changes to the early frames that are not noted by any part number. I have witnessed this in the transmission section, where sometimes I see parts that have no service number, like the shifter pawl spring retainer, until about 1970, when it gets a -70 part number, but we can see for a fact that part was made and used all the way back to 1952. I assume that they just considered the retainer plate part of the pawl holder assembly, and when AMF bought them, they were under pressure to "release new parts" so they created a new number for this. I noted elsewhere on the forum how the factory also had a -52 center stand, but they didn't appear until the 1971 parts book.

JerrryR said he is up to revision 14 on similar projects and I am sure I will have many changes and improvements as time goes on. I just want to get the structure of the BOM fleshed out for now. I tackled the transmission since there were not a lot of changes over the years. I figure next to do flywheels, since there were so few changes there. I do have a KH flywheel in my parts stash, so I have that covered, and I also have both pre-1976 and post-1976 flywheel assemblies. I figure there are 4 basic types, early K, KH long stroke, the early pinion shaft up to 1976 and the cheap pinion shaft 1977 and later.

I am re-arranging my house to make a photo and video studio in the living room. Once that is done I should be adding to the sections of BOM and hopefully create a reference that we all can use to figure out what is what. JerryR also recommended I add some disclaimers to show that none of this is definitive, the whole community is figuring out what was going on back then. I will do this next time I do an update to the home page. One of the biggest shortcomings of all these tables is I had to round off when the factory did changes in the middle of the year. The parts book will say E79 or L56, or in some cases, give a serial number when the change happened. It would just be too unwieldy to represent this, so I have to figure out how to add an asterisk to show that. I did try to explain these running changes in the detailed part page, so for instance the clutch gear page points out as much information as I could get out of the parts book.
sportsterpaul
 
Posts: 240
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:17 am
Location: Sun City Center, Florida


Return to General K / Sportster Discussions

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests

cron