1966 Harley-Davidson "Ironhead" Sportster

1966 Ironhead Sportster - Note the Bike's Modifications Over the Years

My pride and joy right now is a 1966 Harley-Davidson Ironhead Sportster.  The 60s were the heyday of the drive-in, bowling alleys, the Space Race, and the birth of rock and pop. American popular culture had infected the world, from blues to big finned Chevys, and out of it would come The Grateful Dead and The Beach Boys, skateboards and hippies. By 1961, motorcycles, especially big bikes like Harleys and Indians, even the BSRs from England, were the new thing – yeah, you get my enthusiasm. Five years later, motorcycles had arrived.

In '61, Harley-Davidson sold just 10,467 motorcycles as the only hardy American manufacturer, and a majority of those were police bikes. By 1966, Harley had increased its sales threefold to 36,210 units with its focus on the Shovelhead. At 66HP, the shovelhead could reach 100mph.

1966 Ironhead Sportster: I'm well into the process of restoration. If you restore a mid-century modern home from the 60s, you take the time and effort to recreate what the house looked like then. That's what I'm doing to my Ironhead - restoration not renovation; I might even call it rehabilitation. At 168 our goal is to enhance the provenance of whatever we do, providing a history and a story, and we hope you'll follow the restoration process with us. Check back each day to note the bike's progress, and definitely let us know if owning a piece of history like this 1966 Ironhead is in your gameplan. (For you purists, the Ironhead - made of iron and not aluminum - wasn't nicknamed until 1986.)

Although the bike has some great original features, like so many bikes of the time, a series of poor choices were made, alongside the appropriate ones. Note in the above pic the inexpensive aftermarket exhaust - we fixed that - and the wrong-era rear wheel, but also note the way-cool, low-slung handlebars, too often replaced with Sting-ray bars like a kid's bicycle. Those are little things. A bigger issue right now is the gas tank. The original decals say "AMF Harley-Davidson." Provenance says no. Harley didn't merge with AMF until 1969. Is it the right tank with the wrong decals or are the decals original to a replaced tank? If you were like me, you'd need the truth - "You can't handle the truth!" - yes, Jack Nicholson, I can. 

Something cool, though, is the reinstallation of the upswept chrome exhausts initially installed around 1969. A little explanation here: in terms of provenance, most owners interested in a bike's history (or that of a house or a car), are impressed by ownership. Twin Palms, for instance, is the coolest house in Palm Springs, made even cooler by the fact that it was owned by Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra was the original owner, so that makes restoration decisions easy. But what about John Lennon's Rolls Royce Phantom V? If restoration were in order, is there anyone who would want it returned to the original owner's "Valentines" black? And so, although the chrome exhausts were aftermarket, the bike at its best, from our research, were those years between 1969 and 1973, and so we've reinstalled them.

We're working hard to trace the bike's ownership, having pinned down its history to the east coast over the past twenty years, but having found registration in the American Southwest prior to that, with the original sale in California. We'll keep you posted. Provenance is research driven and we're dedicated to the restoration of the '66 in its best iteration. Here's where we stand today, after finding a pic of the bike with an unknown rider, circa 1972, and getting all giddy about the tape-wrapped pipes, we followed the lead: