I use MS Access, but then I am keeping maintenance data on about 10 vehicles.

 

That says a lot Dr H! I had a colleague who was a whizz on Access and I reckoned he was wired up differently to normal mortals......

keyskruiser, my old lady is several years older than yours and has been across Europe into countries like Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the only problem to date has been a split rubber valve stem. There aren't any Harley dealers in some of those countries!

So ride on and enjoy - the World is your oyster!

 

Thanks DrHess, GRBrown, and everybody else for your ideas and for your advice. I will take it, and stop looking for problems. I am going to ride it and deal with problems when they arise. The thing I like most about this old lady that makes her different from any of my new over done HDs of the past....she has a soul.

 

The worst thing that can happen is that you get stuck in the middle of nowhere, but at least you have half a chance that any passers by will speak the same language!

 

In my world, MS Access is for children. Well, maybe adolescents. The children use Excel as a database. SQL Server is my preferred database weapon, but I use Access for the baby stuff like my maintenance logs. Just try to throw 10 million rows at it sometime and you'll see why you don't want to use Access.

Anyway, yeah, ride it and have phun. If it breaks on you, fix it then. Ain't much on there that will stop you for more than a day or so, right?

 

If it still has an INA cam bearing, fix that.

 

What would be involved in the inspection to find out? I have the service manual. I have no idea of what has been done to this old gal.

 

Harley changed from the Torrington to the INA in 94. Its a time bomb if the INA is still in there. Mine grenaded at 38k I think. Anything after 25k miles and your on borrowed time. If your lucky the cage fails and the rollers fall into the cam chest, locking the oil pump and shearing the gear keys, oil light comes on and you shut it down. Rupture the other way, into the crankcase, rollers picked up by the scrapers and thrown into the breather gear.
I would pull the pushrod covers, cut the pushrods out. Remove the lifter blocks.
Open the timer and remove. Pull off the nose cone and remove the cam. Now your looking at the cam bearing. All this for a $10 part that will screw up your world if it cuts loose. Replace the pushrods with adjustable ones that don't require removing the heads to install.
While your in there swap out the cam and wake it up a bit. House of Harley has SE heads for about 800, you could swap them in too, especially if your bases are weeping, but I don't remember if they had that fixed by 96. Then send your carb of to Killer carbs in Riverside Ca to have rebuilt ($225).
I did this to my sidehack. Before it had a hard time maintaining 65 mph on the highway. Now it will do 90 with 2 people and loaded with gear.

 

Thank you CDF346 for your input. Do all those old bearings fail sooner or later?

 

From my reading of the site here, a lot of them fail, but not all. If you have any cam other than stock, it seems to put a lot more pressure on the bearing and those seemed to fail a lot more. Back then, people didn't know the bearing was a problem, so they just put a new cam in. Today, people know and always replace that bearing with a new cam (if it's the newer style bearing.) You'll need lifters at 50K, or should do them as PM, and that is a good time to replace the inner bearing (and cam.) If you just want something to wrench on, then any time is a good time to replace that INA inner bearing. There's a thread here somewhere that shows the difference between the two bearings.