Harley-Davidson Low Rider El Diablo (What You NEED To Know)

All right guys we're heading into the campus. What's up block fam? I am standing in the middle of a ton of just incredible equipment here that they're going to be using for an interview. Morgan over here from Cycleworld is going to be utilizing this stuff way more than I am because you guys know I like to use my GoPro. We've got Brian and Patrick here right? So these are the uh the real techie guys. What are we working with C70s. Amazing. I've got a R5 in my bag with some L glass so Canon fam. We're going to be defaulting to some of this footage but we're going to keep it casual with the GoPro here. If you guys want to see the highly polished stuff go check out Morgan's video here youtube.com slash Cycleworld. Cool we'll do a little video with you afterwards telling people who you are. All right guys so this motorcycle here is Harley Davidson's newest offering. It is called the El Diablo. We are here at Juno Ave. So this is Harley Davidson's beautiful uh campus headquarters right since when? 1903? This campus has been around since 1906. 1906. Awesome. So we were just talking about some of the pictures that they have where they loaded all the materials onto the assembled the bikes from the top floor and worked their way down and then there was horse drawn carriages or buggies that would like take a lot of the motorcycles away because the early 1900s there were still horses you know pulling carriages and stuff. Pretty wild to think about. So standing here with me we've got Paul Weiss who is... I'm going to let you drop your title because I feel like I'm going to mess it up. What's up Blockhead Nation. Paul Weiss. I'm the engineering manager for the Softail platform and I had the good fortune of being the technical lead delivering the FX-LRS and FX-LRST and now the FX-RST. Our icon model here El Diablo one of a kind making 1500 serialized units and one and done. One year of production. Crazy. So I got the pleasure of being able to ride this bike alongside Paul today. He said it's the first time that he's seen it in the sun so it's super cool to see it outside. It's got some really nice bursts to it. So what was your involvement? You said engineer with the Softail platform just as a whole? So yeah I've been with the motor company for about 16 years now. I am the engineering manager for the Softail platform. I did have you know the good fortune of being the technical lead on the FX-LRS slash FX-LRST project that just launched earlier this year. We got to ride those around in the canyons out in California together. That was a good time. You know it was pretty cool being able to you know see the sketches of that project and you know subsequently begging to be on that project. You could just tell that the model was going to be something special and it's something that I wanted to be a part of and I wanted to lead the delivery of and my boss at the time gave me the nod and the rest is history. It's been a fun ride. Probably the most momentous vehicle delivery that I've been part of. The FX-LRST here is obviously an icon model. You can see in the rear fender here. It's going to be serialized. There's going to be 1,500 of them. The paint is... So the serial number will usually go like here right? Yeah it'll be right on the ground. It'll take it off. Okay awesome. The paint is out of gunslinger right so highly custom paint. It's hand pinstripes. The fade everything is really just unrivaled quality. It's unbelievable and like you said first time seeing it in the sun. This thing has been kept under wraps for the entirety of the projects and I think you're actually probably the first person to ride one on a public road. Yeah man honestly whenever you see it and you're paying attention to those details like I don't know if any of you guys out there have ever tried to paint or pinstripe but to think that you know all these lines everything here is like hand done hand pinstripes and that the paint like with the fade so it goes basically here to here and then same with like the fender it's got more like of a lighter tone in the middle fades to dark continues to dark and then goes back to lighter tone on the sides. Very very well done. The fairing also playing with those like lighter and darker tones really helps to accentuate like some of the shape and design of the fairing. So you've been with Harley-Davidson for how long you said? 16 years. 16 years. How'd you get involved how'd you come on board with Harley? So you know I started working here in custom vehicle operations actually here in this building. Oh really? Yeah my first project team was Softail Springer back in 07 so that was my start. I've bounced around different roles you know with the company I went from CVO I went into powertrain for a while then I went into the touring platform dabbled a little bit in Sportster had some time in V-Rod now Softail has been my home since I would say roughly 2013 so nine years here on the Softail platform. Awesome awesome. What bike do you ride? My personal rider right now is a Street Glide Special. Okay. I will be trading it in for an FXLRST. Okay so you're on board for one of these? Yeah. Yeah awesome man. What's a serial count 1,500? 1,500. Wow awesome. Okay anything else you want to throw in about the bike? Rockford Fosgate Audio standard 125 watts per channel. Are you connected to it? I am not but. Would we be able to just to get an idea? It's really loud. What do you guys think? Pretty loud right? It's crazy. I feel like we're like in a live concert hall right now. Dude that's impressive. Like weren't you saying it was like almost too loud earlier? Yeah yeah you can hear it clearer with a full face at 80. It's very good. That's wild. Next up in this interview video we've got Brad coming down to talk about some of the design of it. Big thank you to Paul. Appreciate you man. Very important person in the whole line so thank you man. Really appreciate it. I'm standing here with Morgan. Cycle World Magazine. Cycle World Magazine. You guys were saying you'd been around since when? The 50s? 50s yeah. Okay what's Cycle World for those that don't know? I mean if you don't know you're living under a rock but. We're a motorcycle magazine. We talk about all things motorcycles. Just a lot of technical reviews of bikes, gear reviews, news stories, racing stories. You know talking about people and culture. You guys should do a write-up or like some kind of interview or hang out with that Blockhead guy. Dude I've heard about him. Yeah I heard he's all right. I don't know. Talk to your editor or whoever it is. What power does it be? Where can people go to find you? Yeah you can go Instagram is Cycle World. Our YouTube channel is Cycle World. Our website is CycleWorld.com. Check us out. Cool. What do you think about being here? What do you know? You've been here before you said? I have. I've been here before. I've been to you know the museum. I've been doing stuff with Harley for a few years now but this place is insane. It's just it's massive. The love for the brand that everyone here has is palpable and being right in the heart of it is really cool. First time here today. I've been to the museum before but my first time ever like at Juno App today here. So I'm standing up there as Paul basically pulls the El Diablo through the gates. Yeah. And I'm like oh my god you know standing here in like hollowed ground. A lot of history. Pretty crazy. I've probably been out to Milwaukee for Harley I guess seven eight times. Somewhere around there. Right on. I started working with Motorcycle Cruiser and Bagger's Magazine and then went on to Hot Bike. So there's a lot of V-Twin focused stuff that I was doing. So I was out here working with these guys all the time. What's your current go-to bike? Right now at home I ride a Indian Chief Bobber Dark Horse. Okay. Yeah. Right on. But you were talking about a project last time around. So we were on a press event with... The Night Street. Okay yeah. Yeah. In Santa Barbara. Yeah. Okay. And you were talking about a project that you had at the time. Yeah. What was that? I've got a 1989 Honda Dominator 650 that is just my favorite thing. Nice. It's uh you know it's the old reliable engine just runs does its thing forever but we replaced the suspension front and back and subframe. Old school you know 1973 XL 175 gas tank so it's got a little bit of a retro style to it. Other fun facts so uh as soon as I walked up the shirt I'm wearing today. Yeah. You said your friend illustrated. Trevor Girard. Yeah he uh he did that design for Stranger Things. Awesome. Freaking love it. Dude the reactions that I've got from wearing this shirt today. Yeah. It's been so funny. I had a guy come up to me and he's like love your shirt where'd you get it? I was like Amazon. And this other old lady man like I did not expect I expect people to think I worship the devil with wearing the shirt right? Yeah. Because I mean Hellfire Club. And this old lady's like I love your shirt oh my god I'm like thank you. Doesn't even know the show. Right? I would hope she knows the show. She's just like I just love 12-sided dye. Yeah I'm a satanist too. I'm like oh. Cool man well thank you. All right guys so we are standing here with Brad Richards VP of Design for Harley Davidson and you guys have seen him in a previous video that we did in Santa Barbara. Yeah it was outside Santa Barbara for Nightster. Familiar face to the channel. You said you had watched that video. What were your what were your thoughts on it? Well I was just I was of course I'm always really impressed at this the quality that you guys are able to produce with these little you know these little cameras and the handheld things. It's pretty amazing. Super casual. Yeah but it's great yeah very passionate all everybody especially yourself. Master Blackhead. Yeah. I thought it was a great experience and I just appreciate you guys paying attention to the brand and listening to the stories of you know how we bring the bikes to life. Definitely definitely. I think you know it's like I was talking to Paul earlier bringing the people that are obviously responsible for so much of the stuff you know like yourself having y'all talk about you know a lot of the stuff that you guys are going through to bring it to life for our viewers for the people that are supporting the brand it's incredibly insightful you know stuff that they wouldn't normally have access to you know 10-20 years ago. That brings us around to El Diablo here which I had the pleasure of putting about 100 and something miles on that one over there. Awesome. Amazing. It's funny that we're running away from the sun because the sun's coming this way but this bike in the sun is amazing. So tell us a little bit about the El Diablo here. Well it's part of the Icons collection and for those of you who are been paying attention we this is the second bike in the Icons collection. The first bike was the Electroglide Revival that we revealed last year. That was great great bike. It's a homage to the 69 Electroglide. So this is the second bike in our in our new collection of motorcycles that we call Icons and the whole construct behind Icons is it's a celebration or homage to a past model done with a modern twist and so that's if you think about this motorcycle it very much embodies FXRT 83 FXRT was the kind of the birth of that model which was a at that time a sport touring version of a Harley Davidson with a really cool new fairing and really great new bags among a bunch of other content and so this is a motorcycle that pays homage to that and when we created Lowrider S you know what is it a year a year ago that we kind of revealed Lowrider S that motorcycle was also a homage to that that same era as was Lowrider S so which was a homage to the original Lowrider in 77. So it's funny on the test ride today I was talking about you have your regular Lowrider and then you've got your Lowrider S and then your Lowrider ST and now we've got the Lowrider El Diablo so this has its own designation. So if you think about the early 80s that's that's really where a lot of the the theme came from we were very inspired by things that were happening especially in Southern California early 80s so it was skateboarding was on its I think second or I think some people would argue it was it was its third rebirth but I think to me it was the second rebirth that's when like I subscribed to Thrasher Magazine and I you know there's Lowrider Magazine at the local 7-Eleven and there was Van Magazines Punk Rock was happening and so all these great things were happening in my youth and that's why we were talking about Stranger Things that were yeah that felt very nostalgic to a different generation typically when we pay when we have nostalgic plays with motorcycles much like Electro Glide Revival was a was a really a nostalgic play for a different generation but this is speaking to I think my generation although it appeals to a bunch of people. We wanted to have some fun with the paint the paints it's it's shot by Gunslinger who does all of our artisanal paint it's incredible paint job there's a fade there's a trajectory pinstripes beautiful metallic paint pinstripe trajectories are also paying homage to the original 83FXRT which had pinstripes as well we had a little fun on the logo with the the devil horns and the forked tail I love it first thing I noticed about it we just we call them easter eggs and we do we do them a lot on CBOs and other models but the concept is you know you don't discover that detail until you get it home and you're washing the bike you're like oh my god that's so cool there's like a little bit of branding or there's some kind of little you know there's something in there something special waiting for the for the rider and so Paul was saying it's like a second reveal or so we call it the third read third read so first the first read is when you see a bike kind of flashing by in the street and you're like what is that you know in this case it'd be what is that red bike that looks like an FXRT you go to the dealership and you see the bike and you know instead of 200 feet you're looking at the bike 10 feet away and you're like like basically where you are right now and you're thinking you're looking at all the details and it's drawing you in you're seeing how beautiful the powertrain is you're seeing there's not a lot of wiring or electric doodads that are hanging off the motorcycle there's not a lot of plastic so that's drawing you in the third read is the most special read that might happen once the bike gets home after you've purchased it and you're washing the bike and you might see something like that or see something like a bit of branding that's on a powertrain component on a cvo model we try to design it in a way that it's constantly revealing itself to the to the rider they're going to be family heirlooms are going to be passed down so we want to put that sort of heirloom quality into everything we do with the harley davidson especially with them being icon and you guys only making 1500 it's going to be very rare icon even more so that's right yeah so my first read was whenever paul came in here and picked it up and i was way on the corner my first time here at juno app oh cool and so uh i got the warm and fuzzies as soon as we got here man it is just insane and so i was at the corner at the at the main entrance and i saw him behind the gate and that was the first i'm like they did it red because we wanted we're giving one away right so we bought one to basically do up and give a giveaway and so we talked about wanting to do a red and black and i'm like oh they did it red like awesome like can't wait to see this thing and so as he's approaching you know i'm just like get in the pan and i'm like oh my god there's like you know fades and like you know different coloring hues and stuff and so that was the second read i think is like whenever he rolled it up that's when i started noticing more the detail of like the lighter going out to the darker and then the darker going back to the lighter you know and then on the tank and it's just so well done from from gunslinger it was that you said yeah yeah they did a an amazing job it's all hand done it's i mean it's it's very difficult to replicate a you know a paint paint job like this and they do they have to make over 1500 of them so um and they just do a fantastic job with it so they really did yeah what was the design process like in working with the team to get to this final product really talented creative team a design team there's about 20 some folks that are on the team and that's just the design team keep in mind that there are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds maybe a thousand people that have helped this motorcycle come to life but if you're talking about the paint job it's really coming from the design team and we have a color material and finish and graphics team and they they develop ideas and concepts and we put them up on a wall on a board and we all talk about them which ones we think are the strongest we talk about not just the paint but like what's the story behind it especially with an icon it has to have a story it has to it can't just be a cool paint job it's got to speak to something right so um all those things play into the final design and ultimately pitch it to executive leadership to get the get the thumbs up and then actually produce the thing sounds like a very cool brainstorming process working at harley davidson is awesome and just in general but then having the having the a bit like the experience and kind of going through the experience the creative process watching younger designers older designers one of our senior designers design this this was actually one of his last paint jobs before he retired so this was like a big deal oh no way yeah so it's um great working in the studio with the team and we have a good mix of youthful designers older designers everyone's kind of bouncing things off each other and trying to come up with the best solutions you have to have a bit of a tough tough skin because oh yeah you know some things get chopped and killed and you have to be able to go back the next day and be stoked to continue to design yeah because not every design gets to make it to the back of the factory and ultimately to the dealerships for every design like this there's probably 10 or 15 other ideas that end up in the trash can so wow it's i'm sure they're like so many of those are really good too so it's probably really difficult to the ones that are good but maybe they just don't fit the the kind of fit the bill at the moment we keep those in a separate file and we kind of like hey what about this or here you know we and we tend to go back and cultivate ideas from other ideas and and uh to create new new concepts man i'd love to be a fly on the wall one of the days because like well i have a design background as well and right with recently opening up a shop and we're basically getting you know customers are bringing us their bikes brand new off the showroom floor dropping them off for us to build them and design them one-off it's awesome and one of the things that i'm finding as we're doing this more and more is that difficulty of the design process it's like you get rider's block sometimes you know well what we do and that's how we kind of came up with the idea for this bike is we we take trips the department's not very it's not a big department but one of the biggest pieces of budget that we have our biggest our biggest chunk of the budget is really our travel budget and so i try to keep all the designers majority of the team out in the world kind of you know getting close to our customers and kind of i call it like you don't really know what the customers want until you're you're in their shoes and you're sleeping next to them in ditches you know at bike rallies and stuff so we we send people out to and we listen to we listen to all the conversations we pick up on nuances we try to we try to find the seeds of like what are the next trends and because a bike like this takes so long to actually bring to market sometimes as much as three years you have to be out ahead of the curve a little bit so you know keep in mind that you know people people saw lowrider st come to market last year but we actually had the design done years before that it just takes us that long to kind of get everything up and ready and produce the motorcycle on the factory right right so it's not you're not when you go out to these shows you're not looking for the trends that are most apparent you're looking for the one or two bikes that don't stand out like what what's going on with this bike it's not matching all the rest of these tall bikes you know that's kind of where we look what we're looking for right you guys are like design scouts yeah it's exactly what it is and you have to you kind of have to sniff it out use your instincts right then we come back and we have a bunch of other people at the company that are able to chase out you know is there a commercial opportunity here or not so there's a lot of there's a lot of people that help bring a bike like this together that don't get the fame and and like you get in front of the cameras because it's just maybe it's not as it's not as glamorous as the design work but it's just as important if not more important so i was talking to paul actually about getting some of that behind the scenes maybe in the future video to be able to see that process we'd love to show as much as we could to you yeah obviously stuff has to be yeah some stuff has to stay behind closed doors right yeah you can't can't unveil all the all the secrets yeah sometimes i pinch myself because like the stuff that we're looking at i'm just like oh you know can't believe that we all get to do this we we all feel very fortunate to work at the company yeah and likewise me standing here uh thinking this is my job incredibly grateful thank you i really appreciate it man glad you're here yeah me too you earned it have you seen the uh the new kind of trend with with paint jobs that are just kind of like a lot more harsher lines kind of going yeah have you seen this yep yeah we have it's funny because that's to me that's a homage to the 90s right whereas this is 70s and 80s that's the 90s everything repeats itself well i mean that's the trick i mean not the trick that's this it's the secret that everybody knows right it's all cyclical yeah so um and things that you thought like in your youth oh my god i can't wait to like evolve away from this they're all gonna come back yep so is there anything else about this motorcycle the el diablo that you'd want to communicate to uh to our viewers the icons collection is really part of our hardwire the corporate strategy right now we're trying to create as much desirability with our products as possible one of the ways that we can do that is to really you know take a model that's very popular like lowrider st and then do something to it that makes it like crazy popular like really create the i have to have that motorcycle right right and so it's just fun to get into a motorcycle like that and just kind of say what would i do if i could do anything and that's really what this motorcycle is and then to make it available to over 1500 people worldwide and serialized is pretty cool and so so i just wanted to say that these are very special motorcycles um you know you won't see them again and uh there's more coming i think it's incredibly insightful as always uh being able to talk to you about you know the process of the bikes boots on the ground sleeping in the ditches thing yeah i know people are going to love that because i do the fact that like you send people out to like you know get a pulse on the community love that uh really shows that you guys are in touch so if you guys uh watching have any questions do me a favor be sure to drop them down in the comment section below big thanks to appreciate you man uh instagram you want me to send anybody i'm zen of nito zen of nito you guys go follow him on instagram he posts just awesome stuff i'm always super jealous uh seeing this guy's adventures but highly recommend to follow hope you guys enjoyed the video big thanks to harley davidson awesome being here at juno av big thanks to uh these guys as well appreciate y'all and paul morgan back there if you guys did enjoy the video do me a favor hit the like button if you're not subscribed hit subscribe hit the bell icon also so it sends you notifications of future uploads and activity until next time ride safe out there stay vigilant catch you guys in the next one