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Last week, I was going to take my 1993 Ultra Classic to work, but when I let out the clutch after putting it into first, a got a relatively high pitched grinding/whining noise. It did the same thing when I tried to shift into second. In either case, the the bike showed no signs of wanting to move, so I'm assuming the gears have not engaged. The noise was pretty nasty so I didn't let the clutch out all the way to be sure. I can, however, shift back into neutral.
Now, I did adjust the clutch after I installed a new rear drive belt a few months ago, but I've put a few hundred miles on it since then and it ran and shifted fine.
I'm going to adjust the clutch again, but I really don't have much hope for that. Any ideas? If it's in the tranny (which is probably the case) that would suck because, as you know, to change the drive belt you have to practically take the entire bike apart, so I'd hate to have to go through that whole process again!
pull on the belt at the rear sprocket to see if it comes out. Usually the belt goes during shifting and while you are moving so it just spits it out on the ground behind the bike. Push it a few feet and see what shakes out
Sh*t. I hope that's not the case. As you know, to replace the drive belt, the entire primary needs to be removed. After installing the new belt, I even purchased the special tools to hold the sprocket in place and put the proper torque on the sprocket nut. At the time, the splines on the main drive gear and on the sprocket looked to be in good condition. I even replaced the lockplate. I made absolutely sure that everything was installed to the proper torque.
I guess it's possible that the splines are gone on the compensating sprocket or the clutch also. That would suck too, but it's a lot less work to inspect those, because I only need to remove the outer cover on the primary.
All of this would be much easier to deal with if I had a garage. I'm temporarily living in an apartment and doing this level of work in the parking lot is a pain in the ***. And I refuse to have to towed to a mechanic!
Make sure the shifter lever at the transmission is not loose on the shifter shaft.
When you replaced the belt, what did you replace along with it?
The main features of the upgraded pulley design are:
A pulley that is thicker in the spline area.
A shorter spacer with a larger outside diameter (shorter due to the increased thickness of the pulley, larger OD to decrease pulley wobble).
Lock plate.
It is not possible to tell from the pic what configuration you have installed, other than you have the new lock plate, but they came out before the pulley was redesigned.
Suggestion: rent a storage unit big enough to get the bike in and on a lift, your knees will thank you years down the road...
Last edited by Dan89FLSTC; Oct 11, 2014 at 07:47 AM.
Dan89FLSTC - Other than expendable items like gaskets and locking tabs, I didn't replace anything other than the belt. Maybe that was a bad decision.
When I removed the inner primary cover and finally gained access to the sprocket, I found that the sprocket retaining nut was loose and the locking plate was still attached to the sprocket but it was in somewhat bad shape. See the "before" picture.
Maybe I should have questioned why the nut came loose, but I just bought a new nut and locking plate and used them for the re-installation. In hindsight, perhaps the sprocket was beginning to spin on the splines, but I don't recall any obvious damage on the main shaft or sprocket splines.
Not that it matters, but I acquired this bike from my wife's brother who passed away two years ago. It had been in storage for about 10 years prior to that. I have no service records. It's got roughly 46K miles on it.
I just rented a 10'x20' storage unit for my 1966 MGB. It's a small car so there will be plenty of room to work on the Harley. I just have to figure out how to get it across town.
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