The Style Of Old Knucklehead
The Age
Thursday November 6, 2003
David Reidie has always been mad about bikes, particularly Harleys, says Kevin Norbury.
LISTEN you knucklehead!" How often have you heard someone say that? More than once, probably. But how often have you heard someone say that to a big, hairy hombre on a Harley? Never, probably.
Still, you could casually walk up to that same leather-clad biker astride his Harley-Davidson, no matter how mean and threatening he might look, and say: ``Is that a Knucklehead? Er . . . Sir?"
And if that rider just happened to be David Reidie and he was on his classic 1939 Harley, he would most likely answer: ``Yes, my friend, it is a Knucklehead."
And quite a collector's item it is, too.
But the seemingly unflappable Reidie, 54, reckons he is not into lots of hair and studded leather. ``I have no interest in the lifestyle and the subculture that goes with the Harley. I'm only interested in the bike," he says.
Proof of that are the 15 bikes he has squirrelled away in an old shopfront building in Brunswick. Every one of them is a Harley-Davidson, his rarest a 1933 Harley DAH 750 cc V-twin racer.
He reckons there may be only 16 of these Harley racers and his is ``the only 1933 competition bike known to exist". Clearly, it is special to him. So, too, is his '39 Knucklehead, so named because of the ``knuckles" on the bike's 1000 cc V-twin engine.
Reidie bought his Knucklehead - ``a jewel of a little bike" - in the United States in a semi-restored state 10 years ago.
``I was looking for that particular year, yes," he says. ``The design only came out in 1936 and the pre-war Knuckles are considered the finest of the breed."
What Reidie likes about the early Harleys is that ``they evolved without input from outside designers. And, in 1939, Harley was still being run by the founders (in Milwaukee)."
His '39 Harley is bright red and black with a brown leather seat. ``That's exactly the right colour, teak red and black," he says.
When you naively suggest it might look better with a black leather seat, Reidie is unimpressed. ``Well, they had brown."
He also has an original 1949 ``Panhead" Harley. It has a black leather ``deluxe solo" seat, well worn and with lots of studs, as have the saddlebags.
``This was the '50s in America," says Reidie of the forty-niner. ``It all emanated from the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One." But Harley ``disowned" the movie, not wanting to be associated with the image it portrayed.
That Reidie loves Harleys - and sells them for a living - didn't stem from a childhood infatuation. His first motorcycle memory is of seeing one lying on the street, after the rider came to grief, in Invercargill on New Zealand's South Island, where he grew up.
It was not exactly inspirational. But the Honda scooter someone rode to school a few years later certainly did inspire him. He remembers wagging school just to be first at the local newsagent's ``the day the main motorcycle magazines arrived from England. It (motorcycles) just took over my life, really."
By the age of 14 he was working odd jobs to raise the #159 he needed to buy the Suzuki 80 he saw in the local dealer's window. ``I bought that new bike in my third year at high school." After that came a succession of Triumphs, including one he bought when he came to Australia in 1974. ``But the Harley thing was always there," he says. ``Harley-Davidsons were always very coveted."
His first Harley, a 1978 Sportster, was brand new. He could have bought a car for the price, but he wanted a Harley. ``Made sense to me," he says. That same Sportster, ``amazingly enough", no longer rates as a big moment. ``I suppose because it (the Harley) has become so continuous a part of my life. I don't reminisce much."
He doesn't reminisce and he has 15 Harleys? ``To me the number is not important. Every one of these (bikes) does have a story and has been selected for a particular reason. I suppose what I'm saying is that the '78 Sportster is no longer significant to me because of these bikes."
He rides every one, regarding it as ``a pleasurable experience because it does take you back to an era when things were more simple".
When you suggest that some riders don't exactly give Harley top billing as a handling bike, you expect Reidie to react. But he doesn't. ``Maybe they're right," he says curtly. ``And maybe the 270,000-odd people who bought them in the past year are wrong."
Ask him what the red Knucklehead means to him and he seems almost perplexed. ``I just count myself lucky that I have it. I'm not going to give the line that it means more to me than anything, because it doesn't."
He likens owning it to ``the warm glow some people get when they have a quality glass of red wine".
But when you ask what is it about Harley-Davidson, why owners like him are so passionate about them, his eyes glaze over.
``Look," says Reidie getting serious. ``If there was one word it would be style. The style of these bikes I find to be probably their greatest attribute. Other than that they were superbly made."
knorbury@theage.com.au
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Knucklehead was Harley-Davidson's first overhead valve road bike of the 1930s.
The name was a slang reference to the shape or ``knuckles" of the rockerbox on the bike's 1000 cc V-twin engine and was coined after other overhead valve models, the Panhead and Shovelhead, were released.
The Panhead was so named because its rockerbox looks like an upside-down baking pan and the Shovelhead has a rockerbox that resembles the back end of a coal shovel. The Harley company was family-owned until 1969.
© 2003 The Age
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