![]() Harley-Davidson saw the opportunity to re-design the Knucklehead engine to make it what they had really wanted to build before the war but couldn’t. ![]() Not much of anything accelerates technological development like a major war and World War II had resulted in a quantum leap in design, metallurgy, and technical understanding of internal combustion engines. However, by the end of the Second World War Harley-Davidson had a new and wonderful set of advantages that were denied them prior to the war. The Knucklehead had been Harley-Davidson’s very first venture into overhead valve technology for a production motorcycle and although Harley-Davidson were able to partially de-bug the design they were not able to refine it to their satisfaction. The previous Flathead side-valve engine had been intentionally built to be agricultural/military grade technology. Introduced in 1947 this was Harley-Davidson’s second move into overhead valve technology in a production motorcycle. The Harley-Davidson Panhead was a post WWII design, and so it is very much the bike that was an integral part of the motorcycle cultures of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. The 1969 movie “Easy Rider” was arguably the film that brought the Chopper motorcycle from being an obscure cult bike to being a popular custom bike and both the “Captain America” and the “Billy Bike” of the movie were custom built choppers built on hard-tail Harley-Davidson Panheads. The Harley-Davidson Panhead powered bikes (along with the Knuckleheads) are the motorcycles of the ’60s custom culture phenomenon.
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