Belt Blues

Last summer (2005) I went down a road that turned out to be 35 miles of well groomed gravel. It was a really pleasant road, called Hogback Rd, despite the gravel with beautiful views east and south as I went from Oregon 395 to Plush, OR.

Map of Plush, OR US

I actually found myself enjoying the slower pace and greater concentration demanded by the gravel.

I finally pulled into Plush and stopped at the general store for a drink. The folks from Plush were surprised I had taken that route to the town since most bikers come into town from the south on the well paved road. But I told them I thought the views from Hogback Rd were worth the trouble, the dust, and the slower pace. One thing led to another and the locals steered me on a longer but much nicer route down to Oregon 140 through Adel. The views of lakes (one of them pictured) along the way were beautiful.

Maybe its my inner dark self or maybe its Jewish guilt. Whatever it is the net result is that sometimes it seems that nothing can be enjoyed without pain. The pain can come first or it can come later but there is always pain.

In this case the pain was getting home and discovering a rock lodged in the final drive belt on my Road Glide. The service departments I spoke with all recommended replacing the belt before it began to separate and eventually fail. Both shops wanted around $700 for the job. To replace a simple belt? This had to be highway robbery!

I had the parts department put together a package of all the parts needed, shelled out $250, and headed home to do the "simple" belt replacement.

The folks at Harley-Davidson who approved the design for the current generation of big twins are as good an argument in favor of the death penalty as any I've heard. They replaced a time honored solution, the chain, with a high tech kevlar belt, supposedly to improve the product. The belt is cleaner, zero maintenance, quieter, and lighter than an equivalent chain. However there are two glaring problems with the belt. The first is that it has no master link and so can not be installed without removing major components of the drive train. The second is that any small piece of rock or other sharp object can lodge between the sprockets and the belt and cause damage that requires belt replacement.

As I complete what has turned out to be around 25 hours of disassembly and reassembly of my Road Glide just to replace the belt (which at $200 ought to last a lot longer than a chain) I am left with the feeling that cost of ownership is perhaps not as well understood at the Motor Company as it should be.

Don't give me a maintenance free gadget that's more likely to break than the low tech proven solution it replaces. I'm more than happy to have a drop of oil grace the tarmac beneath my bike (not uncommon with the automatic oilers of old) in exchange for avoiding hours of tedious and pointless assembly and disassembly.

Buell has just come out with a new BMW GS competitor called the Ulysses. This bike has a belt, too, and is meant to go down gravel roads. There is a mitagating factor for the Buell; based on the Sportsters it has the belt on the right side thus avoiding the need to remove the primary case when changing the belt. And despite the guard intended to protect the belt from stones you know they will find their way in there and damage the belt. Seems that the good old chain (or, horrors, the shaft) might have some value after all.

I'm all in favor of high tech that makes things better. But I have to describe the belt as a Schlimbesserung or "an improvement that makes things worse."