I am about to turn 20K on my 2006 FLHXI. Should I do service myself or take it to a shop?
Whats involved with the 20K service?

I have been doing own maintanence, but I am thinking to have a professional wrench give it the once over for piece of mind.

What do you all think? I am pretty good with a wrench , but have far more experience with 4 wheels.

 

Just had the 20k service done on mine. It was a whopping $550!!! They told me it's the biggest service and it takes 5-6 hours or so on average. I don't even know what all they did, but I'm told it was ALOT of stuff. I hope so for that amount of money.

 

I'm sure you're going to get alot of comments from the do it yourself crowd. What it all comes down to, is are you familiar enough with it and confident in your ability to find all the potential problems, adjustments, etc to keep yourself safe and your bike running right. I am comfortable working on my cars, but take the bike to someone who knows what he is doing. I sleep better that way. But that's just me, I'm not a bike mechanic and don't pretend to be...

 

I think you should take it to my mechanic who is the best ever!! $225, and he installed my oil cooler. I LOVE my mechanic

(my opinon is take it to a mechanic)

 

If you have the service manual you can easily do it yourself. Nothing major.

 

+1 - what he said..

 

It all comes down to what you have more of, money, or time. With a service manual you can do it yourself if you are any kind of wrench at all.

 

I prefer to do the work on my bike myself, any of our cars newer then 2000 go to the mechanic. I did let my dealer do the 1k and I may let him do the 5k coming up, just cause I like the owner and I want to hear the shop manager bitch about how badly I have voided my warrenty, lol. Actually the only way I would have the dealer do a service on my bike again is if it was in the winter, they had the bike for a total of 6 days when they did the 1K and that included a really nice weekend!

Seriously the manual is very specific about how to do each step of the maintenance and what special tools you will need. The question is how much is your time worth. If a Saturday is worth more then $500 then let the dealer do it, if on the other hand, your idea of a pleasent Saturday is working on your bike, do it yourself. There is no magic in motorcycle maintenance, just a bit of Zen!

 

With me, it's more about the aggravation that comes along with trying to do this crap on my own. Sure, I can change fluids in the three holes and an oil filter. That's simple to do and it makes my daughers think I really know what I'm doing "wrenching" (lol) on the bike.

But taking the front end off, adjusting the clutch, etc... (or WHATEVER they do for the 10/20k mile service) sounds like a big pain in the *** to me. I'd get halfway done and be aggravated as hell, because I can't figure something out and don't have any knowledgeable friends that could come over to teach me. So yeah, anything above the BASIC stuff and I don't feel like going through all of that.

I'd rather pay a couple hundred or whatever to get it over with.

Chris

 

I do my own fluid changes; a dealer does the rest.