The late, unlamented Supervee.

The little engine that couldn’t: A short saga of the Super Vee
When it comes to motorcycles, I like the odd ducks.

I prefer ducks that are actually capable of moving under their own power, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m no match, though, for Paul and Joel at American Cycle Fabrication. You might remember Paul as the man who had those $35 Harleys we wrote about. Recently, I meandered by to see what the boys were up to and what curiosities I could turn up. I walked in the door, and sitting on a bench was the mother lode: a Super Vee.

Nothing gets me going like an abstruse piece of motorcycle equipment, so when I saw this engine parked there, I started pushing people and parts out of my way so I could snap a few photos. You see, I’ve heard of Super Vees, but I’d never actually seen one live and in color. The particular one I saw was a third-generation, the final design ever offered for sale — and the rarest. Approximately 45 were ever sold.

Now as a rowdy, uncut stripling, I read all the biker rags religiously: Iron Horse, my all-time fave under David Snow (CAUTION: Fakeberg link) and my dear departed friend Chris Pfouts; Outlaw Biker, for whom I would later toil thanklessly; American Iron, for whom my tight Pittsburgh brother Mike Seate ditto; Easyriders, the granpappy of ‘em all, and entirely righteous back before it began to suck dead donkey dicks (in its glory days, ER once ran a pic of the illustrious Traci Lords [link is related, just scroll down] on the cover, under the preposterous nom de slut “Suzy Softail,” IIRC); Biker Lifestyle, an also-ran publication about which there really ain’t a whole lot to say other than they always seemed to run more titty-pics than any of the aforementioned rags; last and probably least, Steve Iorio’s Supercycle, which eventually became little more than a vehicle for pimping Iorio’s useless PoS Supervee doorstops.

A pic of the monstrosity in its natural habitat: to wit, propped up on a workbench surrounded by the tools with which the poor schlub who got suckered into buying it would attempt to ascertain why the &^%@#%)*!!! it wouldn’t run.

The rest of the sordid story.

So what is a Super Vee?
In 1983, Harley was not selling whole engines to custom bike builders. Steve Iorio, who owned an outfit called Nostalgia Cycle, wasn’t really digging that situation, so the Super Vee concept was born. The idea was to create an engine using cheap, easily available small-block Chevy parts, that could power a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. By 1985, the engines were released for sale. Iorio was so bold as to suggest that he was going to unseat Harley and put them out of business. He felt Harley was putting the screws to the workin’ joe, and the Super Vee was the common man’s way to fight back: Engine parts could be had reliably and very affordably from any GM dealership or aftermarket auto parts house.

Articles published in Supercycle Magazine as early as 1983 helped get the project off the ground. The engine, though primitive, got rave reviews. Nostalgia Cycle even had a phone number customers could call and hear a Super Vee running! Heady stuff for the 1980s. Nostalgia put together a video (which is pretty funny) extolling the virtues of the new mill. Take a peek. (Bonus points for the first reader to count how many times the narrator says “American.”)

Everything seemed hunky dory, but there were a few problems. First, did you notice in that video that you never hear the engine settle into an idle? That seems a bit strange, right? Secondly, Supercycle was published by the same guy who owned Nostalgia Cycle, Steve Iorio. Steve had dabbled quite a bit in the motorcycle industry. Those initials may be familiar to some — he used to produce springers under the company name SIE, and hung out with Dick Allen, a motorcycle legend in his own right.

Ol’ Steve also went by a few aliases, including “Steve Nelson.” In fact, you can read a lovely article the Los Angeles Times wrote about him — using his fake name! The biggest, most glaring problem with Iorio was his character. The biggest, most glaring problem about the Super Vee was its near-universal reputation of being a complete piece of shit.

For those of you who have never purchased a crate engine, let me fill you in on how the process works. You buy the engine, and sometimes you have to install an ignition and a carb. That’s about it. Install it, and hit the starter button.

The Super Vee was different. It did not run well, if at all. Mating Harley-esque cases to a General Motors rotating assembly presented problems. Critical engine parts didn’t always receive enough oil, yet most Super Vees puked plenty outside the engine. In many cases, engines required some disassembly and some additional machining. Many of the engines required an overhaul simply because of awful quality control during manufacture.

The gruesome saga of Iorio’s exorbitantly overpriced bastard-baby carries on from there; it’s a truly gripping read for any dyed in the wool gearhead-type weirdo, past or present. Won’t do much to bolster one’s naive, childlike faith in the fundamental decency of humanity, I’m afraid. But hey, dem’s da breaks, laddie-buck.

Update! Another aspect of the Iorio melodrama I thought might be worth a mention: I also spent a fair few simoleons on Nostalgia Cycle parts for my trusty old Shovelhead FLH over the decade or so I owned and rode her, mostly at swap meets and such-like dens of iniquity.

I quickly learned that those Nostalgia Cycle (universally reviled amongst my fellow CLT-area scooter trash as “Nostalgia Psycho”) geegaws and gimcracks were without exception El Cheapo crap: flimsy, soft-rubber handlebar bushings; bolt-ons which couldn’t be bolted on thanks to mis-aligned mounting holes; “stainless steel” engine hardware dress-up kits that were neither stainless nor steel; points that didn’t fire, plugs that didn’t spark, filters that didn’t filter, external oil hard-lines without any holes drilled in ‘em; “high flow” oil pumps with no pump gear, etc. etc.

The chrome on all those fancy-shmancy covers—battery, nose cone, breather, primary, drive chain, coil, &c—would begin to blister, flake, and/or peel within no more than two (2) days of the first time it got wet. I was never much of a chrome-cover guy myself—I was more inclined to remove all that shit, box it up, and store it in the remotest corner of the garage. I vastly preferred the lean, mean, bare-knuckle brawler look, as exemplified by my stripped-nekkid, hellaciously fast, screamin’ demon 06 Sporty:

Custom Hot Rod Flatz paint in Desert Sand (hand-sprayed at the shop by Goose, hand-striped and -lettered by the legendary Eddie Brown, Fender motor-mount bottle opener by yrs truly); wrapped header-pipes; no front or rear belt cover; not a single extraneous piece of chrome anywhere that wasn’t factory-installed—what can I say? Except that I surely do miss that sweet, nasty little bitch.

Anyways. Every last bit of Nostalgia Psycho’s teetotal junk, mind, was made from pure Chineseum© in an era when such foreign-parts profanations were strictly verboten—taboo to any self-respecting Milwaukee Iron aficionado, for which unthinking sacrilege the Harley Gods would surely smite down the blasphemer with a quickness. Suffice it to say, after getting bitten like that a cpl-three times, my days of throwing money down the Nostalgia sewer drain were O-V-E-R over.

Updated update! Awright, awright, awright, quitcher crying, ya sissy-Marys; more righteous photos of my beautiful, decidedly non-shiny Sporty below the fold. Although I’ve described her verbally/textually here before, I don’t believe I ever did post any pics, for whatever bizarre reason.

Continue reading “Rolling abortion” →

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