“I just kind of started thinking about this concept—wouldn’t it make a great story if we had an American-made bike with an American-made fuel all coming together,” Ammann says.
Ammann, who has been riding motorcycles for six years and has worked in sales and marketing the past 15 years, has been interested in the ethanol industry for some time. He joined the renewable fuels industry two years ago when he was hired by Rapid City, S.D.-based KL Process Design Group as its director of marketing and distribution in Sioux Falls, S.D. KL Process Design operates corn ethanol plants in South Dakota and Nebraska, and a wood-waste-to-ethanol plant in Upton, Wyo.
Three years ago, Ammann bought a used, but well-cared-for 2004 Electra Glide Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and shortly thereafter, upgraded it. He used a standard big-bore kit to increase the engine size, and added a new exhaust system and a high-performance air intake—all to increase the horsepower and torque.
Then, in 2007 he suggested to his boss, David Litzen, an owner of KL Process Design Group, that he would offer up his personal motorcycle to the Black Hills Harley-Davidson dealership in Rapid City to be modified to use an 85 percent ethanol blend. Litzen encouraged Ammann to do it. “I approached the owner of Black Hills Harley with the idea and he offered his master technician to do the work on the bike to get it remapped to burn on E85,” Ammann says. “The owner is a big fan of ethanol and was all for what I was proposing.”
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So, with the help of Chris Myers, a Black Hills Harley-Davidson master service technician, Ammann’s fuel-injected bike was put to the test to see what, if any, affect E85 would have on it. Deep down Ammann told himself it would run fine but if anything happened to the bike, it would be at his own expense.
“Basically, being in the industry and knowing ethanol, I had no reservations about doing this with the bike,” Ammann says. “I knew that the ethanol was not going to hurt the bike, if anything it was going to help it run more smoothly and more efficiently. So I said ‘Let’s do this. Let’s put a tank of E85 in, let’s run it and let’s see how it goes.’ So we literally drained the tank and put in a full tank of E85 and just ran the bike, just to see how it would run.”
Modifying the Hog
From the first tank of E85—without any initial modifications—Ammann says the bike’s fuel injection system ran rather well. However, he admits, it did choke a little bit at first, due to the difference between premium fuel and E85.
The fuel-injected bike’s electronic computer module, which is programmed with the engine and fuel type specifications, had to be remapped. “So basically we needed to put the bike on the Dyno (dynamometer machine) and let the technician literally just play with different mapping scenarios to compensate for the alcohol content and adjust the air intake and the fuel injection so that the bike ran smoothly,” Ammann says. Because E85 has a higher ethanol content, it runs at a higher octane level—but Ammann says it runs cleaner and burns more completely.
Myers says, like most mechanics, he was skeptical of E85 because of the negative rumors he had heard. However, he was receptive to the idea of modifying Ammann’s motorcycle. After some researching, experimenting, and spending approximately 12 hours adjusting the bike’s computer mapping scenarios to find the best equation for air intake and fuel, Myers was impressed by E85 and how the bike operates on the renewable fuel—which burns cooler and should burn better in high-compression engines, such as those used in Harley-Davidsons.
Although the bike can use both E85 and premium fuel, Myers recommends that for optimal use the bike should operate on a steady diet of E85.
Myers admits until E85 is more readily available, he’s reluctant to convert more bikes. He is open and receptive to doing the work, but it’s important that people understand that
the long-term affects of using E85 in a modified Harley-Davidson motorcycle are not yet known. “I’m happy to get involved and see where the road takes us,” Myers says.
To his knowledge, Ammann says custom bikes using ethanol have been built, but nobody has taken a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, straight from the factory, and worked with a dealership to convert a bike to use E85.
Ammann went through a Harley-Davidson dealership to make the conversion, in part, so they could go to the manufacturer, and say “look, we’ve done this with Harley technicians and Harley parts to make this work—and it’s working just fine.”
“I’ve got to believe that within their confidential confines they’ve got some of this testing going on,” Ammann continues. “It’ll be a long time before we have Harley putting their flex-fuel bike out there but it’s got to start somewhere.” Harley-Davidson has given its approval to use E10 and E15. “In essence we’re pushing the envelope a little bit, but this gives them a real-life example and scenario and they can see that the E85 is not ruining engines, it’s not melting parts and engines aren’t blowing up and overheating,” Ammann says. “Ultimately, I’d like to see them develop a flex-fuel computer chip that really requires no Dyno time, that’s just simply a chip that you can buy at the dealership and takes just a little bit of time to download it into the engine and away you go. Or just like the car manufacturers do with a flex-fuel vehicle that comes off the line, it would be a flex-fuel bike, something that would be an added feature to a bike that came right off the factory floor.”
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