I ve got a 93 flhs that the pulley bolts keep backing out of the hub. three separate times now on two totally different rims. I used new bolts each time it happened. Put blue lock tight on them, and torqued them to the recommended torque in the manual. I m stumped. any ideas what might be going on ?

 

Your pulley and the mating surface on the hub might be damaged. You might also wanna try red locktite. Are the holes in the pulley oval at all?

 

My manuals and every other thing I've read about drive sprockets call for Loctite 262, which is red. Blue is for small stuff, like case cover screws. Red is tough stuff, if you use it on something small, you might have to heat it to break it loose without breaking the screw. Not a problem on drive sprocket bolts, those are tough. I'm not convinced you need new bolts every time; those are real hard grade 8 bolts, big ones, and they're going in aluminum which would be very unlikely to wear them. If the sprocket had come loose enough to wiggle a bit, then I'd replace them for sure, that would have put a lot of side stress on the bolts.

A kind of worse case scenario:
An unfortunately common cause for bolts to come loose is previous over torquing, which makes the bolts/screws bind in the holes because the threads have stretched/warped out of shape, so people "clean" the threads with a tap. One way to tell if this has been done is to get a bolt that's the same size, but with no locking compound on it, and see if it spins in the hole easily by hand; it shouldn't, should be some resistance when it's in there a little ways. If the threads in the wheel are worn, it'd either be a new wheel or heli-coils - and I'd want someone really knowing what they were doing putting heli-coils in a wheel.

Until you find a fix for this, be sure to keep checking those bolts for tightness, guys have had a lot of damage from a sprocket bolt backing out. If you find out something definite, how about a post, might be something others can learn from. Good luck with it.

 

I had this problem last year and it was real close to being very bad, the bolts will get caught on the swing arm and your rear will lock.
I had a slightly warped drive pulley, replaced with new bolts and washers with red loctight and has been fine since.

 

I have to replace a worn pulley, find any good deals on pulleys? I know there's 50 buck ones on ebay, but kinda shy about used or noname stuff. At least they can last a long time, over 100,000 on this one.

 

Before I installed the 2007 rear wheel setup on my 1998 Ultra....I was having the pulley bolts backout as well. I caught them in time so no damage was done. According to the manual, they were torqued down properly plus loctite was used. Overtime, they would somehow start backing out.

I ended up safety wiring them in.....wasn't that pretty, but no way a bolt could backout after that.

 

Keep looking for a low mileage factory pulley. DO NOT buy a billet pulley. I ran one for a while. The cogs wore down to squares, and cut my belt at around 100mph. Not pretty.

 

Got mine from my local Indy he had an almost new one sitting around think it was under 200 installed. I have had some luck with ebay but find the phone and a list of locals will get me a lot farther a lot quicker, it's always nice to support another brother and sit around and shoot the breeze.

 

Would have thought for the price those would be pretty good. Thanks for the info. I should get busy with this, gotta warm up sometime in this refrigerator state.

 

didn't get a chance to look at the bike tonight,but I checked the service manual ,and it doesn t say anything about using Loctite on the pulley bolts. It says to use the five bolts and washers ,and to torque them 55 to 65 ft.lb., but im definetly going to use red Loctite on the bolts because the blue isn't cutting it.