Eric Burkey

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President of the IAM Lodge at the York factory. With others at Harley-Davidson, he went on a tour of the Honda factory at Marysville, Ohio to take a look at Japanese production methods. He later recalled his amazement that Harley-Davidson engineers from York were making hurried sketches (no cameras allowed) of how the Honda workers were bleeding brakes. This was the same method that had been used at Milwaukee for years, but no one at York appeared to have heard of it. This anecdote is a good illustration of one of Harley-Davidson's central problems at the time -two plants hundreds of miles from each other which didn't appear to be on speaking terms.