(Highly Modified) 2019 Harley-Davidson Fat Bob Review

One of the best parts of being A Motorcycle Guy From The Internet is that it’s super easy to get keys to things most people aren’t allowed to ride. Today’s review victim is one such motorcycle. What we have here is the TC Bros. test mule. It’s also a great example of a typical motorcycle you could buy stock and alter yourself or have your local shop put together for ya.

Disclaimer: I work for TC Bros, obviously. I help sell these very parts that adorn this-here motor scooter. This benefits me in many ways. For instance, it helps me eat, so for the purposes of this review, I am very partial. The best part about this gig is identifying stuff that doesn’t work well on a motorcycle and then making parts we think work better. I have a dog in this fight and I am thus not an impartial reviewer of this machine.

This 2019 Fat Bob (FXBB) packs a 107 cubic inch (1,750 cc) engine with a scant 2,233 miles on the clock before I danced with her for a bit. The bike’s owners (my bosses) estimate its value at twelve grand or so, but it isn’t for sale at the moment.

Low-mileage late-model bikes like this pop up all the time; this is the stock and trade of any Harley dealer’s showroom floor. Can you buy one today? Of course. It might even have some goodies on it already; a paid-off Harley that hasn’t been modified is rarer than beef carpaccio. So how does it hold up in 2025? What’s it like with a bunch of fancy parts? Should you buy one? 

Awesome, awesome, and yes.

What’s not stock on this thing?

Everything. I mean, you know those used-bike ads where the seller says, “too much to list?” It’s that. There’s parts galore. Many (most?) of the parts went towards fixing the only problem I noted in my initial review of the Fat Bob. As a preface, I really liked the Fat Bob, plain and simple, except for just one thing. “Most of you know I have been pushing the domestic manufacturers to produce performance bikes with mid controls or rearsets. That’s the only improvement I could see being made to the Fat Bob.”

And that’s really exactly what this test bike tackles. I think explaining what got changed on this thing may help understand it in context, so we can get that stuff outta the way then I’ll get to the good part—how it gets on down the road.

The factory position on these machines included a low handlebar and forward controls. That’s uncomfortable for me, and that’s evidently true for my colleagues given how this bike was altered, so I’ll take a stab and say it’s true for a lot of people. 

Changing foot position is an intense proposition on Harley Big Twins because the left side of the bike has a big honkin’ primary (tradition amirite?) where your left foot should be and the right side generally has some smokin’ hot exhaust tubes in the way. (It’s even worse on the Fat Bob because the OE exhaust is pretty gnarly and climbs halfway up the bike.) You can’t really get the controls outboard of either item without crushing lean angle to a pitiful number, so you gotta go up. So off came the factory exhaust, and a Bassani Road Rage pipe went on to create some breathing room. (Sounds rad, too.)

The mids and footpegs that went on next changed up the riding position, but if you look at the complex latticework it takes to create the real estate to do this, you can see that’s much easier said than done. With feet having moved north, other contact points needed to move up, too. Saddlemen’s Step-Up seat moves the rider back and provides a shelf to push against, and the Truss Riser/Tracker Low bar combo is useful so your arms don’t just lay there in your lap.

Some of you may be saying, hey dingus, Harley offers something close to this from the factory. And that’s correct. Harley will sell you a Low Rider S or Low Rider ST I like so much—but those weren’t available in 2019 when this bike was born. This was the performance Big Twin the year it rolled out, so this mild custom kind of makes sense. I think this makes for a real-world review victim—this is pretty representative of a bike you could buy from the initial owner if he was well-heeled.

Riding the this 2019 Fat Bob

After shooting photos of this bike in pretty oppressive heat, I got down to the fun part. This bike is awesome. It stuffs me into that tight-and-everything-nice-and-high-so-I-can-corner position I prefer. A Harley Big Twin is not what many riders consider a performance machine, but the prodigious torque offered by the 107 can cover a ton of rider sins. Coupled with the real decent suspension this bike got from the factory and all the leany-bits up out of the way? This thing is way more agile and athletic than most would guess. It’s still heavy and it’s no I-4 screamer, but for around-town shenanigans, I think you’d have a hard time not grinning astride this Fat Bob. 

Put it this way: if a Speed Triple, ZRX, or FZ-09 ever tripped your trigger, you can probably find more than a few things about this scooter you’d enjoy.

The bars, while tall, offer incredible leverage—they’re 32” across. Mercifully, they have been converted to solid riser bushings, which means steering inputs go where you put ‘em. Rubber bushings wear out and the bars flop all over and it gets worse the taller the bar gets. The solution is hard-mounting as found here.

In fact, this one doubles down on steering feel with Hart-Luck grips. These are an amazingly thin grip. Some folks love that (I do) because I want all the steering feel I can get; vibes be damned. I want grip and traction and don’t care about vibration absorption and that is a bit of a hot take. (I will change as I get older, I’m sure, but for now I’ll take the speed and pass on the comfort, thanks.)

The mids necessitated the pipe, and the pipe dictated a tuner be added. And heck, why not an air cleaner, too, right? In stock trim, these bikes run just fine. An exhaust and an air cleaner and a tuner, though, were noticeable, though not exactly in the way I expected. I’m sure there was some power increase, but that wasn’t really the standout for me so much as the smoothness; credit goes to Austin in the shop (and the other guys) who ran this FP4 through its paces and tweaked the fuel maps after test mileage, 

Throttle response was nice and crisp and the engine acted just as you’d hope. The throttle-by-wire is every bit as responsive as a cable-pull carby without all the associated headaches. Fueling just…worked. It has been my experience that if I am riding a bike quickly and I’m not thinking about the fueling, odds are that it’s probably just about right.

The bike is equipped with crash bars front and rear, and if I’m being frank, they feel a bit extraneous. I understand why they exist, I just don’t love the way they look and I really don’t like the width they add to the bottom of the bike. I am accustomed to using my mirrors like a cat’s whiskers to see if I can fit into a given spot—if the mirrors fit, everything else will, too. I prefer the bike be narrow near the ground, just as the cat is built. 

Scalloped discs front and rear augmented the braking. I can’t say if they improved performance without a back-to-back test, but they certainly look trick. I mean, they sure ain’t hurting the braking. Front brakes on these bikes still require too much effort. OEM Softail master cylinders still use the wrong ratio.

Even though the 1/2” bore is smaller than previous OEM H-D master cylinders, I feel it needs to be smaller yet for the factory calipers. That would be on my personal “to be modified later” list. A little travel isn’t a bad trade for more leverage.

There were two more add-ons I think bear mention. The sissy bar on the back looks plenty beefy, but I had no occasion to use it, though I imagine it is convenient to have a spot to lash gear. The other modification was the Memphis Shades Road Warrior fairing and handguards combo. Handguards in general are ugly but useful. It was 93 degrees (F) on the day I tested this freedom machine, but I would make use of these eventually. If you ride in the north you’re nodding along with me. I’m sure.

The fairing does change the look of the Fat Bob significantly. Bikini fairings can look great but function poorly. This one, though, worked mint. I had a super-clean little bubble to ride in. No helmet buffeting whatsoever, even at speeds that were exiting two-digit territory. 

Weirdly, though, I had oodles of wind noise; it was like I didn’t even have anything in front of me. I really can’t say I’ve ever experienced anything like that before, but the wind pro was so good I would totally plunk down for one of these fairings if I owned a Fat Bob; I carry earplugs and they work fine.

All in all, this test bike is a more refined version of a bike I already liked, so…I like it more, which is to be expected. But how much more?

Does this make sense as a used bike purchase?

Is all this radical alteration necessary? Is this a good used bike to buy? Short answer to both: yes, if you want superior results for less money than OEM and working on your bike is pleasant and not a drag for you.

Now if you’re thinking, “Dude, that’s thousands of dollars worth of parts and a fair amount of work and you’re saying only nice things because you make money selling this stuff; get outta here,” I think that would be a fair criticism to levy. 

But I might point to my own machines both current and past. I’ve changed nearly all of my old Shovels and Dynas to this same riding position. Mids are mandatory for me. All my Harley-Davidsons have had aftermarket exhausts and saddles added. I have paid through the lungs to do so just like all of you—I buy my parts through my own shop like everyone else. This process requires more of my time and money than I would like to give, but I go through it on bike after bike because I wind up with something more to my liking than what the MoCo offers. I think my years in the industry and playing this game at home maybe serves as evidence that I believe in this way of doing things.

I also value my time at nothing in the above equation, which you may interpret as foolish, and that’s a valid criticism, too. So that’s sort of how I am approaching my assessment of this bike being a good deal or not. Paying a shop to do this work would add significantly to the bill. I can’t see charging any customer at my shop less than a full day (8.0 hours of labor) for this work.

Like many semi-custom jobs, this bike carries a higher price than a stock bike and appeals to a smaller segment of the market than an OE example—not uncommon in the land of the bar and shield. To me, this highly-modified (albeit bolt-on) bike makes financial sense in two scenarios. 

In the first, it’s a good choice for a rider who bought a Fat Bob when another alternative did not exist. That rider is likely to ride many miles and the financial pain shouldn’t be too intense: the costs can be incurred as funds permit rather than all at once, and they can be amortized over those miles in the saddle. After all, as a percentage of the cost of a new bike, these parts aren’t staggering.

If one purchased a modified bike like this one, the full value of these modifications would likely not be captured by the seller fully in a sale. The bike will cost more than stock, but less than it costs to replicate. A sharp buyer might be taking home a lot of parts for pennies on the dollar. 

This second scenario? This is a good example of the value in buying a stock used machine and changing it up as I mentioned at the outset of this section. This Fat Bob has effectively been altered to resemble a current Low Rider S. At that twelve grand figure, it comes in at basically half of the Low Rider S MSRP. The catch here is that none of the goodies can be financed as they can on a complete bike—instead, you have to pay as you go. 

Another feather in the cap of buying a stock Fat Bob and gettin’ after it? The OE parts. That $12,000 figure doesn’t include the takeoffs. They could be sold to offset the cost of the hotrod parts, but to me, that’s a mistake. Here’s why. This whole bike as it sits is reversible. In an afternoon, you could take this bike right back to bone stock if you saved all your OE parts. And if you keep your bike long enough, that adds mega value come resale time, because saddles and pipes and all the other stuff that gets taken off a bike gets damaged and lost and makes the surviving clean parts much more valuable. It’s a great bargaining chip for a seller and allows flexibility when selling—mint parts for a twenty-odd year-old bike bring beaucoup bucks if the buyer ain’t interested in owning them.

A savvy rider with enough boot money to cover a down payment and some parts could scoop a Fat Bob and switch it up for far less than it would cost to buy an S or ST from the factory, making it (to me) a pretty desirable used bike—exactly the ones the Retrospective Review series exists to highlight. My contribution to this series has often been bikes I have purchased, so I do tend to be more positive about them than reviews to which I am assigned; my “take rate” is naturally higher.

Now we come to the end of the story: I own a motorcycle that occupies the exact niche this Fat Bob occupies, and yet I still offered to write a check for the twelve grand it would take to buy this test mule.

And it still ain’t for sale. Rats.