EXTRA SPECIAL

Open the throttle and smile as the exhaust roars a song we can all sing along with.

- Paul Bailey & Mick Withers

It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a 96 cubic inch motor in your Harley you were king of the kids, and you had power to burn off just about anything on the road. Well – hasn’t time changed things!

Who would have thought back then that you could build a reliable, everyday street engine that was 131 cubic inches or 2147cc. The big improvement has come with the new M8 engine, it has been designed to be taken to these types of capacity extremes. In the Twin Cam or earlier days, nobody would have believed it was possible.

Other companies have been building big engines for a few years, but they have – to a certain point – been a race motor with limited warranty and tended to be a bit fragile. But over recent years Harley-Davidson has been gradually increasing their engine capacities to the point where you can now buy a Screamin’ Eagle 131-cube M8 crate engine. The big news is that it’s all very safe and reliable and provided certain parameters are met, it comes with full factory warranty.

But this 2020 Road Glide Special has been built along a different path. The basic bike had a few kilometres showing on the odometer but was still running perfectly. Because it was a Special, it had a 114” M8 engine fitted as standard plus lots of bling to make it a little bit more special – a perfect candidate for hot rodding.

A Stage IV kit containing big bore cylinders and matching pistons, CNC-ported cylinder heads, SE8-515 camshaft, 64mm throttle body and manifold was ordered. To this was added a pair of Street Cannon mufflers, SE Pro Street Tuner and SE Smart Tune Pro Automatic Tuning Module, Heavy Breather Extreme air cleaner, and a set of SE Premium Tapered Quickinstall pushrods with black covers. Gotta get those details right!