AgentX
Over 1,000 Posts
Coupla things from a guy whose first bike was a modern Enfield 350 and just went to one of the classic iron barrels:
Old ones are truly 50s tech, combined with Indian manufacturing standards. Can be unreliable, especially due to quality control. Easy to work on overhead valve pushrod setup, easy to customize, kinda crude. Shifting is especially crude but workable. Continual maintenance required; you need to know the basics to own it. US models have a cobbly set of linkages to put the shift on the left and the brake on the right. Best altered back to the original right-shift setup. They can be hot-rodded to varying levels of performance; one company's "fireball" mod setup is supposed to really increase reliability and do the Ton pretty easily.
The new bikes are a different breed. They have more of a 70s/early 80s thing going on. Hydraulic tappets, unit-construction engine, fuel injection (on the export-model 500s), auto decomp, don't leak terribly badly, adequate electrical capacity, international standard controls, much slicker gearbox, etc. Much closer to turn-key transportation than the old bikes. Not so much aftermarket stuff available for them except cosmetics, although Ace Engineering, which does the Fireball bikes for the old iron barrels, is currently tearing down a UCE model and seeing what they can do to hop it up.
The very popular C5 models have no kickstarter, which I think is a huge liability with these bikes; the e-starts are pretty terrible and kicking is super-easy. They also use 18" wheels instead of the historical 19"; they have a reputation for instability at higher speed (as far as it goes) but no one has really figured out why, precisely. I like the B5, which looks a lot like the old Indian 350 models. The G5 is nice, too.
IHMO, the new ones are a bit like the new Camaros and Mustangs. They just lack a bit of presence compared to the originals, but do what they do pretty well without complaint.
Edit: Also, to complete the saga, there is a transitional bike between the iron barrel models and the new UCE ones: the alloy-barrel AVL engines, which were a slightly modernized take on the classic engines. Only made for a year or two.
My little lady likes what I did with this salvaged 1977 350cc military bike:
Old ones are truly 50s tech, combined with Indian manufacturing standards. Can be unreliable, especially due to quality control. Easy to work on overhead valve pushrod setup, easy to customize, kinda crude. Shifting is especially crude but workable. Continual maintenance required; you need to know the basics to own it. US models have a cobbly set of linkages to put the shift on the left and the brake on the right. Best altered back to the original right-shift setup. They can be hot-rodded to varying levels of performance; one company's "fireball" mod setup is supposed to really increase reliability and do the Ton pretty easily.
The new bikes are a different breed. They have more of a 70s/early 80s thing going on. Hydraulic tappets, unit-construction engine, fuel injection (on the export-model 500s), auto decomp, don't leak terribly badly, adequate electrical capacity, international standard controls, much slicker gearbox, etc. Much closer to turn-key transportation than the old bikes. Not so much aftermarket stuff available for them except cosmetics, although Ace Engineering, which does the Fireball bikes for the old iron barrels, is currently tearing down a UCE model and seeing what they can do to hop it up.
The very popular C5 models have no kickstarter, which I think is a huge liability with these bikes; the e-starts are pretty terrible and kicking is super-easy. They also use 18" wheels instead of the historical 19"; they have a reputation for instability at higher speed (as far as it goes) but no one has really figured out why, precisely. I like the B5, which looks a lot like the old Indian 350 models. The G5 is nice, too.
IHMO, the new ones are a bit like the new Camaros and Mustangs. They just lack a bit of presence compared to the originals, but do what they do pretty well without complaint.
Edit: Also, to complete the saga, there is a transitional bike between the iron barrel models and the new UCE ones: the alloy-barrel AVL engines, which were a slightly modernized take on the classic engines. Only made for a year or two.
My little lady likes what I did with this salvaged 1977 350cc military bike:
