Doing some winter projects in my garage

The picture below is how the bike sits tonight. I am in the process of changing the steering shaft/bearings and adding an additional 3 degree rake.

Installed S&S 510 cams, bearings and all (Done)

Removed both aluminum wheels and polished them (not in this picture but done). The spoke wheel in the picture is my spare, I needed it to work on the front
I have a friend that runs a chrome place in town so I dis-mounted the tires and polished the rims on a high speed polisher he uses for his chrome work......turned out pretty good for some old wheels.
I am installing two new Commander II tires. I removed the Metz 880's after about 2K in miles.

Changing fork springs back to stock length because I need the extra 2 inches due to the small amount of rake added this winter. I installed 2 inch drop springs last year.

Pulling the primary to replace the shift seal and check on the inner primary bearing (Next on the list after the front forks)
Wiring up some options for power accessibility (charge the phone, GPS etc)

I had some custom painted tins done and will be installing them
Installing a new LED tail light and chrome bracket to replace the OEM plastic one.
Still not sure about what turn signals to use but will not be the ones on there now.
I have been collecting all these parts over the last 18 months so the expense was spread out and it didn't hurt too bad

Pictures when I finish, hopefully by the end of February (I travel during the week, only get one day a weekend to work on it)

This is my first Harley and have had it for 24 months. My only other bike was a Honda 350 back in the early 70's

Anyone else turning in their poser card?
What changes / maintenance are you doing?

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Was there something wrong with the ME880's? I'm going to be ordering some soon.

 

They handled much better than the Dunlops but they got noisy (feathered front and back) and I found a crack in the rear tire that was unsafe. my Indy is warrantying the rear one for me.

They did really well in the rain

They only had a couple thousand miles on them even though this picture looks like they have more on them.

My crack may just be a fluke but i was disappointing that they were noisy after about 1500 miles

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Thanks for the info. I'll have to try them out to know for sure. Good to hear they handle well in the rain; that's one of my concerns.

 

ME880 is a good tire .. but they take a higher max psi than stock 402 dunlops so if you run the presure recomended in your service manual rather than the presure listed on the side wall they will wear quicker and start to cup and become noisey .

another great tire is the dunlop e3 it is much better tire than the 402.

 

1+ on the Dunlop Elite 3! 4000 miles and just starting to show wear.

 

Metzler used to have recommended tire pressures on their website, I use 40/42 front/rear. I'm not sure the pressure on the sidewall is a recommended pressure to use. The Metzler site doesn't have specific pressures that I can find now, only this:
http://www.metzeler.com/site/us/tech...intenance.html

 

I don't know a damn thing about tires. Mine are round and still hold air, so I got that going for me...which is nice.

But, more to the point: Good on you getting all those projects going on your bike! I'm jealous. My winter project has consisted of fuel stabilizer and putting the battery on a tender. I don't even have a garage (living on Osan Air Base) to do any work in. Anyway, I can't wait to hear how it all progresses.

 

Nice work turning in the poser card. Now you get to punch a few holes in the man card LOL!

The tire sidewall pressures are what the manufacturer recommends as the maximum pressures and not nessessarily the optimum riding pressures. Tire size, weight, load, average speed all come into play concerning the optimal pressures for any given motorcycle.



cheers

 

Excellent work my friend. Please don't hold back on sharing the screwups with us as you go along. I think no matter how much experience we have we still do something stupid when wrenching.
Example: A couple months ago I opened my primary because the auto tensioner was ratcheted way too tight, so I dropped it down a tooth. When I was buttoning up the primary using my new chrome bolts, I boogered one of the bolt heads an put a nice little gouge in my primary cover in the process. IMO, these are the reasons I fall in love with my bike. I spend so much time with her skinning my knuckles while dinging her up a little in the process.