CarBrandLogos archive · Indian Motorcycle · 1922
Skirted fenders over a big V-twin: the most copied silhouette in American motorcycling.
Discover the storyPhoto: Yesterdays Antique Motorcycles · CC BY-SA 4.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Indian Motorcycle Chief, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
Two years after the Scout, Franklin produced its larger companion. The Chief of 1922 used the same architecture scaled up to 61 cubic inches, then 74 from 1923, and it became Indian's flagship: a heavy, torque-rich touring machine built at Springfield, Massachusetts, and sold against Harley-Davidson's big twins for the next thirty years.
Indian Chief 1935 Barber · Thilo Parg · CC BY-SA 3.0
02
The defining moment came with the 1940 model year, when the Chief gained deeply valanced fenders that swept low over both wheels, along with plunger rear suspension. The fenders served little practical purpose beyond keeping mud off, but they gave the motorcycle an unmistakable profile that has been imitated by custom builders and by Indian itself ever since. The same year's models also gained an 80 cubic inch engine in post-war form.
Indian motorcycle 1a · Zanitycomau · CC BY-SA 3.0
03
War work sustained the company, but the post-war years did not. A disastrous attempt under Ralph Rogers to build lightweight vertical twins for a market that wanted neither drained the finances, and the Chief was the last model standing when production stopped in 1953.
Indian Police Chief · Ozzy Delaney · CC BY 2.0
04
The name has been revived repeatedly since: at Gilroy, California from 1999, at Kings Mountain, North Carolina from 2006, and properly after Polaris bought the name in 2011, rebuilding the marque at Spirit Lake, Iowa around the Thunder Stroke engine that went on sale in 2013. Those bikes are competent modern cruisers, and every one of them is styled to remind you of 1940.
At a glance
Produced
1922–1942Engine
Four-stroke 42° V-twin engine,Technical specification
From the journal
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