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You need to make sure the rear wheel is lined up first in the swingarm. There is a tool for early Dynas not sure about late.
I have used the tool. There are two holes in swingarm for it. The rear wheel should be straight.
Thanks for all this info, Max. Very valuable as always.
I initially made a home made tool for my 17 Dyna LRS for the first few times..
To be honest nowadays, I always back the bolts all the way out and count equal turns on both sides back in everytime I pull the rear wheel. No need to make it more complicated than need be.
Sometimes, string can be unwieldy. For this reason, I'll use "looped together" rubber bands.
On a bike that's "new/unfamiliar" my first test is to ride on a flat (zero crown) road and get up to 50-55mph, then let go of the bars and see what the bike does. (Other than the HD shimmy at 42mph, it should track relatively straight.)
I thought I should return to this thread as I just made som measurements. My rear wheel is not vertikal. The center of the wheel is 7 mm too far to the right. (That is a just little more than 2/8.)
I post some pics describing how I measured this: Frame straight. Front wheel straight Rear wheel, not straight Front wheel not centered between the light green strings Here are the results in mm. I plan next time to adjust the top link to the right and we will see what will happen. I have a Predator. Maybe I should loosen it before i adjust?
Last edited by OakMountainRider; Mar 2, 2025 at 10:23 PM.
As I wrote above, the bike was mistracking with 7 mm (little more than 2/8"). The rotors were not straight. However after getting them straight there were still 5 mm misstracking.
So then I did a new lateral adjustment of the rear wheel, NOT using the tool and the small holes in the swing, but loosened and turned the rear wheel so the aligning strings centered the front wheel with 34 mm on each side. Thus zero mistracking. This was the easy part.
The more difficult one was to keep the bike straight, adjusting the stabilizer link and holding my eyes on the magnetic spirit levels. Finally I got it pretty much right, according to the spirit levels on the rotors, and when I control measured with the iphone app it said 0° front and 0.2° rear. Harley permits 1°, so I was ok with 0.2°.
I feel good about that I finally may be able ride without misalignement between the wheel. But there is one concern. The rear wheel belt sprocket may not be so good aligned with the belt sprocket on the motor as I did not use the tool that aligns the rear wheel with the swing, Also I have not checked how parallell the front wheel is to the strings (the rear wheel). Hmmm. How important is the alignment between the belt sprockets?
I made a drawing in illustrator which describes vertikal alignment whith a adjustable stabilizer link, which worked very well. Below you can see it and a picture of the stabilizer link. (Bought it on Ebay.)
Last edited by OakMountainRider; Mar 8, 2025 at 06:17 PM.
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