Do you have Paint? I bring up a picture in Paint and then use 50% height and 50% width and then save the result with a slightly different name. I think you are right about the 45 mpg for the Harleys. I stopped in about two months ago to look at the drag bike (scary!) and yes the smaller Harleys get better than 58 mpg and as I recall the salesman said the big HOGS get something in the 40s mpg. That particlular showroom just down at the end of my street must have an inventory of over $1,000,000 on the showroom floor; it is dazzeling and of course we get plenty of weekend activity from the bikers. I have long been interested in the big V-twins ever since I read/studied a build-it article in Popular Mechanics or Popular science around 1956 which showed complete plans for a beautiful wood body two seat roadster with a Harley V-twin driving one wheel and a Fiat front end. The other rear wheel was free wheeling and the body looked like an early Formula One car made out of wooden strips and varnished. I have looked and looked through old Popular Mechanics files and cannot find that article. It was in a special issue on wood bodied cars with several wooden bodied cars on the cover and the plan was amazing in that the rounded shape was formed from wooden strips like a boat hull. If anyone here on the Forum knows the date of that issue I would really like to know it because if has eluded me for years and of course when I went to college my Mom gave away that issue along with a 12" stack of Rod and Custom magazines to a kid younger than me! That is a lot of tricky wood but I always thought I could form a body from an inverted rowboat hull from 1/4" plywood with a point in front and roadster headlights but I cannot find the article. Today there are various fiberglass shells and of course it would be better to have a fiberglass mold. The work on the mold is significant but then you can make many copies. Maybe you recall a picture of a roadster in the Whitney catalog that was used to illustrate frame mount headlights? That would be worth making a mold for but as far as I know it was only an artist picture to show the headlights. Anyway a fenderless roadster shell like the 1960s Indy roadsters would be worth making a mold for as a dwarf car in fiberglass. One flaw in the Popular Mechanics plan was that it used a wooden frame made from stout timbers that would rot, but that could easily be replaced by rectangular steel tubing. Anybody remember that wooden roadster?

Don Shillady
Teen rodder/teen rodder