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How I came to be the Harley Hummer Nut
I have been into motorcycles all my life and have owned Harleys since I was about 20 years old. One afternoon while walking through a swapmeet, I saw a pick up truck packed up and leaving the meet. In the back of the truck was a pair of small motorcycles. One was complete and an orange/red color. The other was about half there. I had never seen bikes like these. They weren’t your typical Japanese or British street bikes and definetly not dirt bikes. They looked to have Sportster gas tanks. Well, my curiosity got the best of me and I ran to catch up with the truck and get him to stop. He told me they were in fact Harley two strokes! After just a couple moments of conversation, the hook was set and I had a phone number and date to come see him. I was to come to his house and learn more and maybe…
So now I had some time to think about it, and as we all know, once the lust for a motorcycle starts, it is near impossible to ignore. Less than a week later found me at his place checking out this really cool 1959 Harley 165. It ran great and we were having lots of fun riding it up and down his street. Now with the wheels literally set in motion, it was just a matter of striking a deal for this great little Harley. Well as fate would have it, he didn’t want to sell just this bike, but insisted that the two were a package deal. If I wanted that 165, I had to buy the other one too. He explained that it was a later model and that it had a rear suspension. To me it didn’t look nearly as cool as the rigid frame model. However, I wanted this complete one so bad that I agreed to take the other one without fenders, and unknown to me, lots of other missing parts.
Proud Owner: Now what?
Well, I was now the proud owner of this really nifty 1959 165 and was having a great time riding it and showing it off. But, what am I going to do with this other rolling basket case? I went boldly to the local HD dealer to buy parts and put it back together…
Yeah, right! Surprise, surprise, come to find out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know anything about these fine little motorcycles. The guy behind the counter had never heard of them and told me that Harley never made any small bikes. Well, if it hadn’t said Harley Davidson on the speedometer, I would have thought I had been duped by the seller. So, being a bit stubborn, I went to the other guys in this shop. One guy said “Yeah, I’ve heard about them, but I think they were made in Italy. We don’t have no parts.” Little did I know that day that this was only the beginning of a long, long odyssey.
I could go into great detail about how frustrating it was going from dealer to dealer, only to find out that all the parts for these bikes became obsolete in 1966, with the last model sold and that most everybody had taken them to the dump or scrap metal yard! Finally, I found a private shop that had 4 pallets of “lightweight” parts. I thought I had hit the motherlode. Well, when I got to see it all I was very disappointed to find, parts book in hand, that over ¾ of it was for the Italian Harleys. So I made a pile of all the Hummer parts and told the guy that I wanted to buy only these parts. Little did I know I was about to hear a phrase that I would get to know very well, “No way Dude, if you want any of them parts, you gotta buy them all.” So, over the next several years I had to buy out entire inventories of four different shops and Harley dealers, just to find the parts I needed to restore the rolling basketcase, that came with my 165.
During my search for parts, I had found that there had been a Harley Hummer Club at one time. So after tracking down the founder and much convincing, I talked him into letting me revive the old club and newsletter. I came to find that there were quite a few members that were very happy to have the Club back up and running. Over the next 3-4 years the membership quadrupled. We all had lots of fun trading parts, printing stories and featuring member’s bikes. But alas, I chose to move to Colorado and build a house. I turned the Club Newsletter back over to the founder and soon it evolved into an online club. And the rest is history.
Now after over 15 years, I am done with most of my project bikes and am selling all the parts I have left over to folks like you, to help your Harley Hummer projects come together.
Check my parts list for current parts in stock.
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