by hennesse » Wed May 06, 2020 12:17 am
The May 1952 Enthusiast (look over in the Literature section, click on "Enthusiast") is the first one to show production K's. Texas dealers got their first demonstrators on March 15, 1952. Five K's were entered in the Sixth annual Pirate Treasure Chest run in Shreveport on March 29 and 30. Another K demonstrator was was ridden for a story, but no date was given.
If the Texas dealers got their demonstrators on March 15, and Harry Molanaar didn't get his until after April 24, shipments of the demonstrator Ks were few and far between. These were dealer demonstrators, not quantity production for public sale. Note that the May, June, July, and August Enthusiasts all had Ks on the cover - they were really promoting them then!
Harley had a rather poor record of delivering new models. The 1930 VL had major problems with the flywheels being too light. As complaints from customers piled up, Harley recalled all the bikes shipped, and replaced the flywheels at no cost to the customers. The 1936 Knuckleheads had so many changes that each one was almost "hand built". The 1948 Model 125 missed the September/October 1947 new model introduction, and didn't ship in quantity until around January 1948. The 1955 Hummer was several months late. The 1959 Topper motorscooter missed 1959 entirely - it came out a year later as a 1960 model.
The WL model was dropped during 1952, about the same time as the Ks started rolling out the door. I don't think there was supposed to be a 1952 WL - I think it was continued into 1952 simply because the K was not ready for shipment. The February Season Order Blank shows that the K was targeted for shipment in February, but they blew that by several months. We don't know when production actually started. Was production hampered by supply problems? Mechanical problems? Quality problems? Who knows? But it's pretty sure that quantity shipments didn't occur until around the May 1953 timeframe.
Triumph and BSA were eating Harley's lunch with their inexpensive and fast 500cc (and later 650) vertical twins. Harley had to come up with something quick to repel the British Invasion. The K was the right general idea - mid-sized, mid-price, unit construction, hand clutch / foot shift, suspension front and rear. But the tired old flathead design was the wrong idea. Didn't Harley start eating Indian's lunch with the OHV Knucklehead 16 years earlier? But Harley was eager to get the Brit-killer out the door, and didn't want to invest the time in designing an OHV.
This was a short-sighted decision. The resulting bike wasn't as fast as the British twins, nor was it as inexpensive, and that became its reputation. After the initial sales euphoria wore off, sales of Ks and Sportsters remained flat at around 2000 units/year until the mid-1960s, when they finally took off. Had they invested the extra time and money to go OHV from the get-go, they might have conquered the market from day one.