Lehman and Triglide

I just noticed on the Lehman site that they won't be assembling the triglide's for the 2011 models. HD is assembling them in york, Pa. Good or bad, who knows.

I would think good. It put HD employees back to work and keep the York plant busy. It should also help on delivery with one less transport to run. I expect it will hurt Lehman a bit, but they still are suppling the parts.

[QUOTE=tmigala;24036]I would think good. It put HD employees back to work and keep the York plant busy. It should also help on delivery with one less transport to run. I expect it will hurt Lehman a bit, but they still are suppling the parts.[/QUOTE]

I could be wrong but I think HD is suppying the parts. When I was out there in 2008 the tour guide made me believe that all Lehman was doing is painting and assembly. Just my opinion.

[QUOTE=lzski326;24037]I could be wrong but I think HD is suppying the parts. When I was out there in 2008 the tour guide made me believe that all Lehman was doing is painting and assembly. Just my opinion.[/QUOTE]

They didn't do a very good job at paint or assembly. Some of the paint on my dads 09 is terrible. The trunk door is the worse, the Lehman paint for some reason is soft and marks easily. When working on the back half I found several loose fasteners that Lehman installed.

Izski, I also was out there in 08. On my tour they did not want to talk much about the HD assembly, but I cornered the tour person and asked what HD shipped to them and she point to the HD's that were waiting to be assembled that were complete out to the rear subframes. She indicated that they put their stuff on from there. I expect that some of the parts that they put on were designed to HD specifications to be different from Lehmans. The rear of the trike was built and assembled by them and shipped back to HD for distribution.

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]Ted, [/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]We might have crossed paths there and not even realized it. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]I was there at same time and it was made clear that the design was a collaboration of HD and Lehman ([I]duhh...who woulda guessed?[/I]) but that the rear was entirely manufactured by Lehman. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]If you recall however, there was some sort of technical problem (possibly paint related) and there were a bunch of “finished” TGs with Harley engineers pouring over them. Despite the big stack of HD front-ends, there were no TGs in the production process.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]Several in our group commented that by the volume of units in process, it was obvious that Lehman’s concentration was clearly focused on producing the new Victory line.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]Given all of that plus the many comments about problems we see here and on other sites, it now appears we may have been observing the genesis of the recently announced plan to move of assembly operations to a Harley plant so they can more tightly control the quality of the final product.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]My guess is that Lehman will continue as the vendor of both the rear mechanicals and body parts, but HD will absorb not only the assembly, but the paint processes as well.[/FONT][/COLOR]

I am glad some of you folks actually got a tour of the facility. I dropped in one day passing through on a little 4,000 mile trip and they blew me off. I will not use that very colorful and descriptive word normally used for such a lady that was there that day, but she was less than friendly and told me if I needed anything....go see a dealer.

I suppose this is good news and will only give us one source to blame for all the problems we have had between Lehman and Harley. Now we can just narrow all that down to the MOCO. I accept this as really good news. The Lehman PR sux, their availability to solve problems sux and the factory support and quality as well all sux.

I have been riding on Lehman Renegades for 10-years and have one still. I just have not been able to appreciate Lehman, or their network of so called "dealers" at all. It will be a good thing to remove Lehman from the Tri Glide loop to the greatest extent possible and I hope it will make for a better machine.

My 09 Triglide was the same. Paint very bad on the back, had to be buffed several times by Harley. Trunk has also caused me several wet belongings.

Bill

Bill just in case you don't know HD offers a 2010 trunk gasket that solves the 09 leak problem. Just make sure it is the 1020 design.