This posting came out much better, ZooKeeper. Thanks.
I agree it seem an odd flaw for a company that is not usually associated with spectacular design flaws. Makes you wonder if the company caught the error and changed the design. Even so, you would think they would send out a recall to fix the error. Doesn't make sense.
A common trait of Harley-Davidson is to install less than pleasing components as stock appointments, at least on the esthetics option. Their theory seems to be that owners will trade-up to more expensive add-ons that they wouldn't chose to buy as an original equipment package. I suppose this allows for a more affordable buy-in price point as well as fueling their very lucrative replacement parts sales channel.
Being an H-D owner since the AMF days, I've never seen or heard of anything this life threatening from any of their models. There's generally a more appealing, better performing, highly polished chrome replacement but not because the original was prone to catastrophic failure. Still, the most stringent FMEA might not be exercised on a part that H-D expected to be replaced with the first 1k miles or so.
I'm not attempting any sort of justification, only explaining my perspective.
Thanks fo the gentle nudge. Yes, I did copy-n-paste; no spacing was the result.
You seem to be having some technical problems with your post. Did you copy it from another format? Usually this systems works fine if you type directly into the comment window. We would like to hear what you have to say.
I second what Alex said: It's hard to imagine that the belt guard has a single point of failure. Even the most insignificant components on many machines have some form of redundancy. Looks like someone decided the belt guard was too insignificant for redundancy. How scary.
That is strange there is no screaming about this flaw in forums. I looked at quite a few. It could be that not many of the belt guards are actually falling off even with the design flaw.
Good observation, Ann. I checked the forums as well, just to see if the problem was widespread. I couldn't find anything. I went back to David for more info. Sure enough, there seems to be a design flaw.
Glancing briefly at Harley owner fourms, I couldn't find any mentions of this problem. On the other hand, there were a lot of comments from people who take the belt guard off because they don't like the way it looks. Apparently, they prefer to take their chances with stones and gravel possibly taking out a belt! So it's possible that Harley is careless about the fastening strategy because they assume owners will just remove the part anyway.
Hopefully someone from Harley is reading this, because this sounds like a very risky bit of carelessness.
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