I took my 07 Ultra in for the 1000 mile and told them I was having a problem with backfiring through the air cleaner on occasion and also having a starting problem. The starting problem was a failure to start, it would crank but not run, and would backfire badly while cranking sometimes. Anyway the service manager said he had never heard of these problems before. I know he surely has because I have seen them posted here before. He never wrote these problems on the work order. I noticed on the work order that there was 2 recall downloads done. The funny thing is I have never had either of these two problems occur again. Do you think this knucklehead knew that these downloads would fix these problems but did not want to fess up?

A friend of mine works for Ford and said that they fix stuff all the time under warranty knowing it is a major problem but only do so if the customer complains. He said that the only ones they have to have a n advertised recall on are the ones that involve safety issues. He said that they can not afford to advertise all of the problems because it involves too many vehicles and would bog them down. I asked hime what was to keep a mechanic or dealership from making a living off these problems and he told me that they audit the repair orders regularly for repetituos warranty repairs.
That being said, don't assume that MOCO will fix something on your bike without you complaining about it. T.

 

It is programmed into most service managers and writers heads to keep away from warranty repairs like the plague.

 

This much is true, however, sometimes they can make some serious cash by doing those recall/warranties. I worked with a local Yamaha dealer on weekends a few years back and helped do all of the transmission recalls. They paid 9 hours labor for those, per bike. The first recall took us about 10.5 hours, so they lost a little money tere (not really) then. after we figured out the entire process, we could do everything, from removing tins, engine out of bike, crankcase opened, engine broken down, gears reinstalled, engine back together, engine back into the bike in 7 hours. We did about 200 recalls at this specific dealer. They got paid $45 per hour and my wages were only $15 per hour. They made close to 42000 while I was working on the bikes, and another $18000 for the 2 hours I cut off of the actual time they paid for the recalls. $60k is a pretty healthy profit for a recall, all paid for by the parent company. I'd imagine HD works the same way. They pay those dealers for recalls and service bulletin work. They're making serious cash. There are time though, I'm sure, where the warrany work takes long then what the MOCO pays them for.

 

Recalls are all safety related and required to be completed by the NHTSA. When a car or motorcycle comes in and and has an open recall it is required to be done before it leaves due to safety. There are also Technical Service Bulletins that related to many problems. they are designed to help a tech to make a faster diagnosis and a proper repair. these are very helpful when the applied to a particular car model but are not normallysafety related and are not required to be done by law. I know this because I'm an automotive tech at a dealer.