Last August I purchased a 21 CVO Street Glide in Sunset Orange & Sunset Black. I upgraded from a 2002 Road King so you can imagine the excitement I was feeling at the time. Completed the break in just as the dealer instructed and had the first service just as I was supposed to. Well after the first 1500 miles the excitement started to fade. At around the 1600 mile mark while riding along the bike suddenly felt very hesitant when I twisted the throttle, I noticed the fuel injection was "searching" a lot (hunting back & forth) and just not stable. Finally after a few more miles several codes popped up so I took it back to the dealer I purchased it from. A fuse had blown which controlled the O2 sensors among other things including the solenoids on the heads which allow compression release when starting. After doing a quick search, they found nothing wrong replaced the fuse drove the bike on a 15 minute test run and said I was good to go.

I took the bike and road a while but never got the confidence the problem was resolved. Well at 3200 miles while my wife and I were on a fairly long trip through the mountains the fuse blew again. We were on our way home on a Sunday afternoon so I stopped at the nearest dealership to see if they had the time to replace or look at the fuse. The dealership was extremely busy but did read the codes and told me I could leave the bike and that it would be several hours before they could look at it or I could drive it on home that it wouldn't hurt the bike to ride it like it was and there was no safety issues in doing so. We came on home and I took it to my local dealer the following day. Note: this is not the same dealer I purchased the bike from. I purchased the bike 2 hours from my house because my local dealer didn't have the bike I wanted. Well these guys spent 3 days going through my bike looking for a reason the fuse would blow. They took the bike apart looked through all of the wiring harness, ohmed things out, did several test but eventually found nothing. They spent all the time that the "warranty" would allow them to spend looking for a problem then replaced the fuse and sent me on my way just as the other dealership had before. No worries there I understand how it is to find an electrical problem that's intermittent.

Well here we are at 4200 miles and riding home on the interstate running about 80-85 mph one Friday afternoon I could feel the bike act differently and I began to hear a tapping noise (and yes I heard it at highway speed). I pulled off at the next exit ramp and the motor was just tapping and clinging like it was about to come apart. I shut the bike off and looked all around trying to see something dangling or hanging out of the motor but found nothing. Checked the oil and it was good, was darker than I figured it should be but at least it was still there. I started the bike back up and at this point oil pressure was good and no codes were on the bike. I decided to drive it home easy which was only about 15 miles. Made it home and loaded it up and took it to my local dealer the next day again which is not the dealer I purchased it from. They found 2 of the lifters had failed and also told me the oil was low and very black. The internal pieces of the lifters had exploded to use their words and no other damage had occurred. Well they ordered 2 lifters and replaced them, however when they started the bike back up it was still tapping and clinging as if something was still loose in the motor. At this point it's also smoking like crazy. At this point I want a new engine and Harley has yet to agree to that. They wanted them to do a compression check, do a leak down test, and take a video of the bike running and send them.

I've called Harley Customer Service which is absolutely no help at all in these matters and I've talked to everyone I know trying to get a new engine. I've also called the dealer I purchased it from. They are saying they could possibly get a new engine but I would have to get the bike from where it is now and take it to them. I'm not a mechanical genius but why would they want to do a compression check when the obvious failure was the lifters? The lifters are in the bottom end not the top end, so why are they wanting checks on the top end. I've read about the previous year M8 engines sumping problems, could this still be a sumping issue? Am I asking too much for a new engine? Has anyone had any type of issue like this? Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated. I apologize if this is too long, it's my first post. Thanks in advance,

 

Congratulations on your first post to HDF, it is one of the longer ones without paragraph breaks that I have seen. Welcome to the Forum

You may get better responses if you break down into paragraphs for easier reading so old guys like me and folks with short attention spans don't have a hard time with the run-on sentence structure.

Warranty should cover it, keep on them. Good Luck & Best Regards.

 

Ouch! My head!!!

 

Sorry for the length and yes is first post. Just wanted to have as much detail as I could, again apologies for that.

 

Welcome to the forum. I guess I don't understand what you think anyone on a forum is going to be able to do for you? You are at the mercy of the dealer and the MoCo to get it sorted out. Personally I'd be looking to see if there was something in regards to the lemon law in my favor. I'd want to dump that bike.

 

Good luck with getting the problems resolved to your satisfaction, you’ll likely need to be really persistent to get MOCO to replace the engine.
Happy to say I have over 13k miles of trouble free ownership on my CVO but that could change on any start and if I’d does I hope it happens before the warranty expires ….. keep us informed how this saga develops.

 

Did you ever get the problom resolved???

 

I hope so, it was almost 4 years ago,

 

still in the shop, should be finished the first part of 2027.