I just need to vent so I can wind down and get some sleep. This is probably going to be long, so unless you're a real glutton for a tale of frustration and stupidity, you'd best stop now.

I head out of work this Friday afternoon looking forward to the ride home. I've had a couple of week streak where nearly every mechanical or electrical thing I've touched has broken in one manner or another. Nothing catastrophic, just nuisance, hard to fix, time consuming stuff. It didn’t matter if it was personal property at home or equipment at work. It was one of those kinds of weeks where I'd have been farther ahead if I'd just stayed home. I didn't realize it was going to get a bit worse yet.

I unlock my 2006 FLHXi, snap it over to the usual position and attempt to yank the bars straight to fire up and ride. But the bars didn't move. I flicked the **** back and forth a dozen times and it’s just stuck. I wobble the forks a bit left right middle but no luck.

I call my wife up and describe the problem and tell her to google something like "Harley stuck fork lock" or such. She finds an article or two that makes it sound like if you smack the top of the ignition switch **** that a sticky fork lock pin just might pop loose. By now with a series of broken things in the last week or so I'm ticked off enough that I'm ready to try anything so I smack it with my hand a few times and it stays stuck. I’m an engineer, I’m fairly mechanically minded, I usually don’t take out my frustration on a chunk of iron, but I guess I just had enough of it this week. I grabbed the biggest wrench out of the tool kit and wacked the ignition **** a time or two as well. All this accomplished was to bust the chrome **** key switch off the shaft that goes down into the ignition switch. I didn't think I hit it that hard, but anyway it broke. That prior advice about "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet" popped to mind. Meanwhile I’m wondering how many hundred this is going to cost me to fix on top of whatever is wrong with the fork lock.

I call my wife back and have her grab my tool box out of the garage and head over to my work place. With the forks locked completely to the left, I'm looking at it trying to figure out what I might be able to take apart to figure out what's stuck so I can at least get the bike home. Anyway, let's just keep this part short and say there's not much you can get at with the fork locked to one side. I took a lot of things partially loose only to decide it wasn’t going to work. There's at least one screw on the outer fairing you can't get off. I had a cigarette lighter type power adapter for my GPS plugged in, that helped a whole bunch too.

After about an hour of goofing around and I decide I'm defeated so I call the local dealer to see if they have any ideas. But no good ideas there, just a “get the bike to us and we can work on it” was about all they could offer. So I asked for some recommendations on anybody in town that could move a bike in this condition.

I start down the list. The first guy sounds helpful until I tell him I'm on the 4th floor of a parking garage. With the forks locked, he says he has to use one of his bigger trucks with a lift and there's no way it’s getting in a parking garage with a 7 foot ceiling.

It’s starting to dawn on me that Murphy has been riding shotgun with me for several weeks and isn't about to give it a rest on this Friday afternoon.

Now it’s late, my wife’s hungry, we’ve missed an evening event we were supposed to attend, etc. We leave the FLHX behind and head home. About ½ way home it strikes me that I’ve got a service manual that a riding buddy gave me a while back when he traded up to a newer bike. I scan a few pages and I see that you are supposed to access the key switch mechanism from the inner fairing side. But the book talks about only being able to do this with the forks moving freely. Now that I’ve seen a picture, I have a brief visualization of drilling the fork lock pin out from the bottom, but quickly decide with my luck my drill would probably light off the gas tank and I’d have to buy a new parking garage too.

Having at least identified my target with the service manual, I throw about every tool box I’ve got in the car and head back to the parking garage. After a bit of checking, though I can’t see it, I do discover that you can get a Torx driver on the left side fairing cap screw. You probably can’t see it (might have had something to do in that the spot I was in at the parking garage was about as far away from any light as you could get in the facility), but you can get it out. Within about 10 minutes I’ve got the fairing cap off, l pulled the ignition switch assembly out and I can move the forks again! With my new found knowledge I expect if I had the right tools in my pocket I could get at a 2006 touring model unfork locked in 2 or 3 minutes. It’s not that hard. (well, maybe it is, it took me 5 hours to get to this point)

I don’t quite understand how the fork lock is supposed to work, but I ended up with a loose .5“ round 1.25” long pin out of the bottom of the ignition switch assembly, its tapered on one end, has a rim on the other, from a few feet away you’d think it was a flat nosed 45 caliber shell.

So no fork lock for now. I’ve got a 10 inch locking pliers in place for an ignition key swtich ****. I can’t lock it, but I can pull the shaft out of the switch so that you can’t turn it on electrically. I’m kind of wondering if I need to spend any money on it now...?

I spotted an Internet article about a Harley service bulletin stating that there was a problem with a weak part in the fork lock of the 2006 touring bikes. I’m going to follow-up on that one a bit more. I don’t want to do this again.

 

If you PM me your VIN I can punch it in and see if your scoot is one of the ones affected by the fork lock warranty.

 

HERE is the link to download the service bulletin about that

 

Its in to the dealer, I'll be very curious to find out what's going to be covered under warranty.

For a 2006 touring bike owner, this should be something that ought to be fixed before it breaks.

 

I have a 2006 St Glide and they are replacing mine next week under warranty and it
is out of warranty.

WilllieC

 

At one time or another, we all end in situations so unbelievably frustrating that you could not have made up the scenario if you tried. They made good stories when looking back, but not much fun in the present! Glad you finally resolved it.....could have been worse...like in a parking lot 1000 miles from home in the middle of a trip of a lifetime!

 

My 06 Ultra locked the same way. Fixed under a recall. Voltage Reg was fixed under recall at same time. Both May of last year.

Good luck.
Mike

 

I hope they still fix it after you tearing into it like that.

 

I've been out of town on business, but just got the bike from the dealer this weekend. All I paid for was the part I broke. The rest was covered on warranty. The new ignition switch just "feels" like its got some heavier mechanical parts in it than the original.

It makes a fair war story, but I was sured ticked off the night it happened...

 

great! its fixed....and it makes me feel better cause i thought stupid crap like that only happens to me!!