Mike,
I bought a wrecked 1971 Sportster XLCH in '72. The front end was totaled, and H-D was on strike, so I went down to Wichita to look for something that would let me get it up & running. I wound up with a God-awful looking 10" over springer, with ugly oversized rockers, a narrow dinky 17" front wheel, and pull-back handlebars - thank goodness I don't have any photos of that mess, but picture in your mind something like that with the original fiberglas seat/rear fender on it. It was ok out on pavement, but riding it on any of our sandy county roads was nerve wracking, with the combination of the dinky front tire & pull-back handlebars. After a summer of riding/herding that thing around, I sold the springer, and bought a 10" over girder front end, which was a very bad move, as the girder's geometry reduced trail and made it unstable - which I found out on my 1st ride, as it went into a high speed wobble, and went down with me. After the road rash had healed, I bought what I should've gone with in the first place - a set of Ceriani road racing forks and a 21" front wheel. In fact, I went with aluminum hubs & rims front & rear, with custom disc brakes, and got rid of the fugly AMF-inspired fiberglas seat/fender unit, replacing it with a cobra-style seat. That got the weight down to 425lbs, and I enjoyed the ride a whole lot more than before.
After a couple of my closest riding buddies moved out of state, I finally sold the Sportster in 1987 to Dusty Dowd, a crop dusting pilot friend who has owned bunches of both flying & basket case warbirds, including an Allison-powered Mustang, Sea Furys, Yaks, a Beech 18, and God-knows what else. While taking an introduction to aerobatics flight in a Super Decathalon out at the Art Scholl School of Aerobatics at Rialto, Ca. with Chuck Wentworth, I mentioned that I was from western Kansas, and he immediately said "Then you must know Dusty Dowd!" He told me that Dusty had been flying beside him during a heat at the races at Reno a few years before when the wooden prop on Chuck's Cassutt fractured (they run O-200 Continentals at 3000+RPM while racing), and the extreme un-balanced engine shook itself right out of the motor mount before he could shut it down. If it hadn't been for a rule requiring a very stout engine-retaining cable harness, the engine would've departed the Cassutt, and it's very likely that he'd have died in the resulting loss of control crash. I flew with Chuck in 1982, and haven't seen or talked with him since. But last winter, Dusty was showing a video of himself in his Yak while racing at Reno, while he gave a presentation during an IMC meeting at a local airport. After watching the racing video, I asked him if he remembered Chuck. His eyes lit up and he got pretty animated, telling me about flying right there next to Chuck's Cassutt when the prop fractured. Aviation - it's a small community, and this is far from the only time I've met pilots who knew other pilots that I knew, even when I'm a thousand miles from home...
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