28 July 2007

Loading the hoses in... Nit one pearl two???

Estle took the day to run to the junk yard to find a grille for his truck. He had an altercation with an errant member of the whitetail deer family and the result left his truck without front turn signals. In fact not only where the turn signals trashed, most of the front bumper and grill where pretty much wasted.

I did keep up with the schedule though; I spent a couple of hours fiddling around with the oil lines getting all but one routed. The last one; the breather hose, just routes to the back of the bike and ends, running out of hose and patience that's where I stopped.

I did have to remove the battery box and oil tank to get access to the bolt holes for the last bracket that attaches the oil tank to the main frame down tube. I know that we ran a tap through each and every threaded hole in the frame when it came back from powder coating, but it was necessary to re tap the holes. Once that was done the bolts when right in.

Note; for next time make a map of all hoses and where they go and how they are routed. Had I done that, a lot of my pain would have been just annoyance. Another tip; start with the lowest hose outlet and work your way up. Like an idiot, I did it the other way and fought each and every hose connection after the first one. It's also better if you leave the battery box and oil tank out until you need to make those connections.

We are waiting on parts still to add the inner primary cover, there are three hose connections on this cover, one oils the primary chain, the other is a vent located in the middle of the cover and the last one is the return line back to the engine. The primaries on these old Harleys where considered dry, the clutch doesn't require a full bath of oil like the new ones do. So what oil is slung off the chain is collected in the lowest point, the rear of the cover and sent back to the engine. The clutch plates are dry or mostly a little oil doesn't seem to hurt them.

The oil hose routing is pretty simple, but finding clear directions as to where to route the hoses is nonexistent. Unless you make an accurate map of the hoses or keep the old lines for reference.

For some reason I have a Y hose connector left over. I'm sure I have connected to each and every connection.

One change from the stock set up is the rear chain oiler. We aren't going to use it. Instead we are planning on using a modern o-ring chain and just be anal retentive about servicing it. The rear chain oiler was responsible for leaving the rear of these old bikes a mess, lots of oil being slung off the chain on the wheels and frame not to mention fenders, paint work and the ground.

There is an adjustment for the amount of oil that flows to the chain; it sits on the back side of the oil pump. Just about every one of these I have seen the needle valve will not seat completely to stop the oil flow. So we plugged the oil line and routed it to the tee in the breather line; this way if any oil does get through the valve and then past the plug, it can mix with oil vapor that's blown out of the engine during its normal running.

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