Don't mean to sound dense, but are those the primary chain tensioners or the earlier version of the cam chain tensioner?

 

When I sold my 2000 Fatboy with 30K on the bike (bought the bike used in 2004 with a little over 6K miles on it) I looked at the tensioners. The rear one was hardly any wear and the outer one was starting to wear. I would have probably gone another 10K before looking at them again. My riding though is mainly freeway and highway (to/from work...about 105 round trip). I had read many posts on these and it seems that if you spent most of your riding like I did, the wear wasn't so great. However, it was always in the back of my mind. Some people had to replace them at 15K, some people over 50K never had replaced them yet.

If mine had looked like yours, I would have replaced them in a heartbeat!!

 

Early (non hydraulic) cam chain tensioners.

 

I also want to know how you like the new cams??

 

I started another thread about my cam "thoughts"

https://www.hdforums.com/forum/touri...pressions.html

 

Those don't look to bad. I helped a friend change the cams in his 2004 Road Glide. We pulled of the tensioners and the pad on the back side of the cam plate had worn completely through! He was just miles away from a disaster. I think he had about 20K on his bike.

 

those pads don't look too bad. If it were mine, I would have just put another set of pads in and called it good to go. The majority of the wear comes early on from the chain, which by 30k miles would have been nicely polished and smooth. After the chain is worn in, the wear rate on the pad starts to decrease; probably less than the rate of wear that your new system will experience.

 

Mine looked about like that at 33k, still had lots of life in them but I changed them out anyway.

I never thought about the fact that the chain would get polished up after running on the first set of tensioners. You never hear about someone replacing a second set.

 

I had heard the "polishing" factor that was described here as far as just replacing the tensioner shoes. Really the biggest reason i went with the hyd tensioners was the relatively small price difference. the tensioner shoes were around $60 each, and i only paid slightly more than that for the hyd. kit. It was worth it in my mind.

 

Thanks for posting those, it will be interesting to see what mine look like after 16500 miles on them.