curiousgeorge wrote:I have always held with the human factor on the transition of new parts. It just depends on who was pulling the carts out. Regular guy whose right handed gets sick, new guy fills in and he`s left handed. Even as late as the 79 sportster I found motors with both o ring and cork push rod seals and push rod covers, also shows that some didn`t care or understand.
In any production environment, there will be anomalies - parts run short, and something else is used to get the product out the door. A worker mistakenly uses a wrong part. Et cetera. But we can't use anomalies to justify doing the wrong thing when restoring our bikes. We have to use factory documentation, unless we have a reliable source that indicates otherwise.
1954 - Cowbells or boots? The September 1953 Enthusiast touts the boots as replacing the former steel covers - see below. All 1954 advertising photographs - see the Literature section where I've just uploaded
3 new photos of the 1954 KH from the Enthusiast - they show the boots.
Since the prototype bike had the new boots, it's a very good indication that all 1954s had the boots.
The 1954 Spare Parts Catalog says cowbells for 1952-53 and boots for 1954. The 1954 Spare Parts Catalog is a bit of a problem though - it was issued in June of 1954 - close to the end of the model year - so it includes most of the changes that occurred during the year. The other years SPCs were issued close to the beginning of the model year - so they pretty much show the configuration at the beginning of the year.
The advertising photos were usually taken a month or more before the start of the model year - they typically show a prototype bike. Sometimes the prototypes have parts from the previous year, as the parts planned for the production bikes were not available yet. An outstanding example of this is tank decals on these
boy and girl photos.
Take a look at the gas line on the left side Enthusiast photo and also the 20061 photo - the prototype has the 1952-53-style steel line. Is this because the rubber gas line was not yet available? Or was it because the early 1954's used the steel line? The 1954 Spare Parts Catalog doesn't help us here, since it was issued late in the year. The only close-to unmolested original 1954 is
Jim Garrett's original paint 1954 KH 1629. Jim said he replaced the cracked rubber line with the earlier steel line since he couldn't find a good rubber one. This is a pretty good indication that the rubber line was available at least by s/n 1629.
The March 1954 Cycle magazine road test shows a rubber line. We don't know when Cycle received the bike they tested. An educated guess would be at least two months before March, but that would be around the same time as Jim's bike was produced.
So, based on the information we have, we can't tell for certain when the rubber line appeared. What we can say is that if your bike is s/n 1629 or later, you should have the rubber line. If you have an earlier serial number, your bike might have had either.