  From left to right: The Drag Specialties Tech Center’s Jeff Fuller, Pete Larraby, Terry Carmine and Chuck Cain. If you have a question, these guys have the answers!  ave you ever found yourself wondering if some super-slick part in the FatBook, something that’s just captured a customer’s heart will actually fit his bike? Or have you had any of those real head-scratchers of mechanical problems, the ones that have everyone in the shop stumped? You wouldn’t be alone there, either way. Every day, day-in and day-out five days a week, the team at the Drag Specialties Tech Center gets questions just like that and plenty more. Only these guys have the answers. They know the FatBook inside out, even helping to create it every year. They know what fits what, what works and what doesn’t. But more than just possessing that voluminous product knowledge, these guys know motorcycles. Between them there’s more than a century’s worth of hands-on experience working in custom shops and factory dealerships. They’ve seen it all, done it all and all of that knowledge and experience is available by just picking up the phone, dialing 763-577-4263 and asking for the Tech Center.Drag Specialties’ Tech Center has been solving problems and answering questions for, well, for almost as long as Drag Specialties itself. Headquartered in Minneapolis, today’s Tech Center is headed by Terry Carmine and routinely fields 100 to 300 calls a day. Along with Chuck Cain, Pete Larraby and Jeff Fuller there isn’t a question about anything in the FatBook and how it fits and works on a Harley that Terry and this highly qualified team can’t answer. “Well, almost,” Terry laughs. “Some questions we get just don’t have an answer, but that’s usually when someone has broken something and doesn’t want to ‘fess up!” Basically, he explains, the Tech Center’s job is to answer any question or concern a dealer or Drag Specialties rep might have, and while retail customers can and do call in, the Tech Center is really geared towards the dealer. And the background and experience these guys bring to that job is impressive. Terry began his Harley-Davidson education working at a dealership in 1972. He worked continually at Harley-Davidson dealerships right up until the day he was hired by Drag Specialties. Chuck Cain has 17 years experience earned in independent motorcycle shops and 10 more at the Tech Center. It’s the same with Pete Larraby and Jeff Fuller. These guys don’t just talk the talk, they’ve all walked the walk and then some. “We all began by putting motorcycles together just like everyone else back in the old days,” Terry says. And they’re still at it. Chuck Cain, for example, spends his days at the Tech Center and his nights out in his own garage working on, what else, motorcycles. “I’ll generally build a bike from the ground up every couple of years,” he says. He ends up doing a lot of work for friends, too, modifying their bikes and installing the parts he talks about at work. And Terry’s a racer as much as a mechanic. He’s built and run Flat Track bikes and drag-racing machines, including some pretty successful Top/Alcohol bikes. “All that racing was a lot of work,” he says. “Plenty of headaches, but I learned a ton.” This is the kind of background that’s just a phone call away. On a typical day questions posed to the Tech Center are as varied as the people calling them in. “It can be something as simple as fitment,” Terry goes on to say. “Someone looking at a 2006 FatBook and asking if a certain exhaust system, for instance, will still work on a 2007 bike.” Or it can get involved and complicated with dealers asking about mechanical problems they’re having, right down to the specifics of properly setting piston ring end gap and bearing clearances or trying to find a cure for a 113-inch engine that’s pumping oil out its breathers at high-RPMs. The Tech Center has to cover it all. With all that background and experience to draw on these guys can generally steer a dealer in the right direction. Quickly. An average call, Terry says, takes less than a minute, most questions answered in a single sentence. Sometimes, however, they might be on the phone for a half-an-hour or more. “You just never know what it’s going to be when you pick up that phone,” Terry says. One of the more common queries, Chuck Cain adds, concerns handlebar replacements. “Dealers want to know what cable lengths they’ll need when they switch to, say, 16-inch apes. They’ll ask what else they might need to complete that swap, too.” And for the record, Chuck says that with those 16-inch handlebars most often you’ll get by just fine with 6-over cables, not the 16-over cables some dealers ask about. “If there is a question about anything in the FatBook we can generally come up with the answer,” Chuck adds. “And if we don’t know something we’ll darn well research the problem and get back to that dealer with an answer.” “It all keeps us on our toes,” Terry agrees. “We have to really be up on the products, and the one thing we keep uppermost in our minds is that if we give someone wrong information it can end up costing Drag Specialties and that dealer money. That’s something we certainly want to avoid.” Sometimes the guys at the Tech Center even request that a dealer send a part that’s in question back in for inspection. “If he’s really tried to get that particular part to fit and it just won’t work we’ll want to see why. We’ll ask him to send that thing in to us through Customer Service.” Something like that just happened, he says. As it turned out the machining on that part, a wheel hub in this instance, was slightly off, and that brings up something else the Tech Center will do. In instances like this they’ll actually pull a few more sample parts out of stock to see if this was an isolated aberration or if the problem is widespread–which is rarely the case. But if the problem does turn out to be widespread every last one those products will be taken out of stock so they can’t be sold. They’ll be returned to the manufacturer for replacement. The guys in the Tech Center are all old school. They’re mechanics and parts men who would sit down with any new catalog as it came out and really study it so they’d have the answers when their customers had questions. They still do that, and like we said, today even helping to write those catalogs. “We’ll review each page of a new Drag Specialties FatBook,” Terry explains. “All four of us will make notations of any changes we think are needed to give a dealer the information he needs to intelligently determine exactly what that product is, what it fits and what it does. We’ll make sure the part numbers are right, too, and if there are any photos that they’re the right ones.” With the boom in Harley ownership over the past few years phone volume at the Tech Center has dramatically increased, and here’s a tip straight from the guys answering those phones. “If the calls came in at a steady pace between 8:00 in the morning and 5:00 in the afternoon,” Chuck says, “it’d be great. Everyone would get right through on the first try. But it doesn’t work that way. No one call us at 8:00 in the morning, and everyone calls between 10 and 12. Sometimes dealers and reps get frustrated because they’ll call in when we’re super busy and get a voicemail.” If that dealer leaves his name, phone number and dealer number he’ll get a return call as soon as possible, of course, but it’s easier to just plan ahead and try not to call in during those peak hours. You’ll actually get your answer quicker. It’ll be the right answer, too, because that’s what the Drag Specialties Tech Center is for, and it’s all there for you. 
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