At first glance, the S&S manufacturing complex in Viola, WI seems like an unlikely place for such a facility. Viola is a rural village in the extreme, one gas station, one bar and one horse. The S&S ‘ranch’ is even farther out in the boonies west of town on County Highway G, but when you consider it all started as a family concern, and indeed continues as one today, it makes sense. As many of you know, George Smith and Stanley Stankos went into partnership in 1958 in Blue Island, Illinois creating the company known as S&S, they were knocking out high performance alloy pushrods for 61” and 74” big twins. A year later they started producing stroker flywheels for those bikes and have never looked back since. The same year George Smith bought out Mr. Stankos but remained as S&S as George was running the company with his wife Marjorie Smith (her maiden name was Smith also). George and Marjorie often vacationed in the Kickapoo Valley area, and moved to Viola in 1969. You can tell the original farmhouse, as it seems much as it was 36 years ago, but the rest of the facility has definitely been upgraded.

We met with James Simonelli in the offices, and after the usual pleasantries, he took us around on the tour.

There seems to be some newly emptied space in the Viola facility, most of the offices and several departments have transferred to the new plant in Lacrosse, more on that later.

One of the first things I picked up on here is the pride that they all seem to have in their work, which seems to me to be well placed!  The whole operation defines “Made in the USA” and incredible attention is paid to quality. I was snapping pictures of pallets of raw castings for parts, I don’t know why but they just fascinate me. About the only thing not done here is the pouring of the castings, other than that, everything that makes it a desirable part of your motorcycle is done right here! There were unfinished shovel heads, cylinders, timing covers, tappet blocks etc. as well as examples of partially finished pieces farther down the line, all interesting stuff!

It’s not all cast iron and aluminum of course, there was a box full of billet chunks that will become timing covers. The interesting thing to me was that they are actually extruded in the shape they need to be, or at least close. This cuts down on the amount of waste material when they are machined, and that helps keep costs down. Many operations take place in computer-controlled cabinets, allowing strict tolerances to be observed. Some operations just have to be done by hand, and the plant is populated by smiling employees (well, mostly) doing everything from mundane hole drilling in crankcases (one of which they allowed me to drill,
I thought for a moment it would be cool to keep track of that case and see who got it and in what kind of a bike it ended up in, but then again, knowing my luck it would be some gawdawful swoopy billet monster) to the rather specialized operations, such as setting the crankshafts up. They set the cranks to within one half of a thousandth of an inch runout on each side. They also have these way cool crank balancing setups, they look like a complicated computer controlled lathe, they set the crank and rods in the machine, and it spins the assembly, and gives a readout of the current balance factor, and you can have the machine do everything for you, kick ass!



Then it was on to the engine-building phase. It was a little more intimate than I had pictured.

There were five or six guys building them along a corner of the plant, about half of them looked like “bikers”, the others like regular folks. They weren’t rushing their work, just methodically assembling the engine, taking notes on the individual build sheets that follow the engine around, containing such info as flywheel serial #, what bob weights were used, how much endplay there is etc. To be sure they were doing the work a WHOLE lot faster than I could, but if that’s all you do every day I can imagine you would get good. Once again the pride in the work was evident, this stuff is good, folks. We followed the engine building line right to where they wrap it up and put it in the box for shipping.

Then it was on to the museum, several bikes are there representing various achievements, mainly on the track, couple of neat old pieces from the early S&S catalog also, such as their dual-carb panhead conversion that appeared in 1960.

Then it was off to the R&D department, I was impressed with a cool toy they have there. They can make a three dimensional drawing of a piece- let’s say a cylinder head- and then it can make a hard plastic version of whatever they have drawn. Inserts can be added so they can bolt down rocker boxes and put in valves if necessary. This allows them to easily test new designs, to see if they will fit, and even get accurate flow numbers from prototypes!  Just about any part can be knocked out this way to see if it will work, there were dozens of inlet manifolds around; I have to wonder why they would use other colors than gray though! The R&D department do their job well though, it’s no accident when you buy a new super E carb for an 80 inch shovel, that the jetting is pretty damn close and you can usually just bolt it on and go.

At the top of the hill at the plant, we were shown the ‘endurance machine’, this contraption has an S&S V-Twin hooked to a transmission that drives a couple of big squirrel cages for airflow, there’s copious amounts of gas and oil available and it basically sits there and runs at high RPM for days, racking up the equivalent of a hundred thousand miles in a short time. They say it’s pretty unusual for an engine to fail during this test (unless they are doing an oil starvation test or something) and they can break the engines down after testing to see what gets worn the most, and what can be done to improve that area.

A lot of the Twin Cam improvements have found their way into the S&S engines, the cranks are all notched now for the newer IST (Intelligent Spark Technology) timing, the cooling jets for the pistons etc. improvements are always being made. We also got to spend a few minutes with the guys who put the advertisements together, again I was impressed with the attitude these people have, and was sorta surprised that we all seemed to share the same taste in bikes. You would have thought that the suppliers for Arlen Ness, Big Dog et al would be more biased to, let’s say, more “modern” designs.

Then it was time for the 55-mile ride the Lacrosse to the new plant. It was a little later in the day, so there was more traffic out and about. I probably could have made some good time, but I didn’t want to lose Trina following me so I had to behave.

Lacrosse looks like any other town of its size, which is fairly large, certainly seems pleasant enough, and we were soon in the industrial-looking park where S&S resides.

There’s basically two buildings involved here, one side deals with all the shipping and receiving/warehouse duties, and the other is now the corporate offices and customer training and certification center.

We checked out the warehouse first, racks of engines, carburetors, cylinders and everything else lined the walkways. They have a way cool carousel for small parts, coupled with a elevating work station for pulling small parts that is computer controlled, looked like fun. 

They now do all the shipping from this building, and there’s still plenty of space in there. They have a powdercoat conveyor line being set up in there also for future fun.

Over in the other building, the CEO Brett Smith greeted us, and we got to meet most of the other corporate bigwigs, most of who seemed to share in the pride of the factory workers and have that whole ‘team’ mentality, which in this case seems to be working. Even Howard Kelly, the former editor of “Hot Bike” seems to be happy there, he just finished up putting together a service manual for the Super Sidewinder series of engines. He did a good job (really!).

My incredible sense of timing continued, the floors were being recoated in the training centers. I did get to see most of it; there were more MAC tools than a Monster Garage Marathon, Dynamometers and a bunch of other goodies at their disposal.

Lastly, I checked out the 1953 panhead that George Smith Sr. used for a sort of rolling advertisement for his wares back in the ‘day’. The finned oil filter housing, the footpeg setup, the side fill oil tank conversion and the dual Linkert carbs were all S&S innovations in the early 60’s and of course it also was stroked out to 84 inches, quite the machine and still in great shape today.

It was time to hit the road, everyone was going home, Howard Kelly did his mandatory entire-length-of-the-street wheelie on his XR dirtbike that he rides to work (it was Friday after all) and I started doing the kick through routine with the shovel. Something was wrong, when I kicked through; I heard a loud ‘clunk’. This, of course was kind of worrisome, I kicked through slowly a few more time trying to identify the source of the clunking. It turned out that ‘ears had broken off the bracket that was welded to the swingarm to which the rear fender was bolted.

James Simonelli suggested that I follow him to his house and we’d find some solution to the problem. He only lived four miles away and he had a handy-dandy motorcycle lift in his garage. We cranked it up and ended up using zip ties to hold the fender in place. It held it pretty firmly, and the weight of the fender is against the swingarm anyway, so it looked as if it would hold pretty well (it’s a week later as I write this and I still have the zip ties holding it together).

We stayed the night in Tomah (didn’t want to go too far east and run into that EAA stuff again) and got a fairly early start headed east to catch the 1:05 sailing in Manitowoc. The weather was great, and the shovel ran flawlessly the whole way, I’m really happy the way the engine is loosening up now, it takes off like a scalded cat.

The voyage across the lake was as dull as the previous version, with the exception of it being daylight, so we could see the Ludington shoreline approaching. When we got off the boat, there was a couple on a Kawasaki drifter that were taking a leisurely bike ride from their home in suburban Chicago around the lake (via the ferry). The problem was; they didn’t bring any helmets with them! They were obviously immigrants from Europe, but the guy spoke pretty good English. They had been talking with some of the other bike riders on the boat, and their new “bro’s” did take the time to inform them that they had to have helmets to ride in Michigan before they abandoned them sitting there. It was after 6 on a Saturday evening, there was nowhere in town to buy a helmet so they were pretty screwed.

Trina mentioned we still had one of those black-spray-painted-previously-red-metalflake that most of you probably have in your closet, but the only other spare we had at the house was a rather pricey real DOT half helmet. We told the couple to hold tight and went home and fetched the helmets. They wanted to pay us for the helmets, but we could not bring ourselves to take anything from them, we just asked if they would mail the good helmet back to us. They readily agreed and we wearily headed home to put our feet up for a while. A few days later, we received both helmets back in a box from UPS, gotta love it!

All in all, a great trip, it’s a pity Hammer missed out on it.

I’d like to thank the guys at S&S, especially James Simonelli, who drew the short straw to baby-sit us for the day. Check out all things S&S at www.sscycle.com or 1-608-627-2080 for general info or 1-866-833-1508 for sales in the USA.