I bought a used heritage a couple years back. its a 04 with about 47k and some change on it. is there any way to tell if the tensioners have been changed? it runs great with no problems to speak of, just curious.

 

Welcome to the Forum from Colorado!
Take off the cam cover and take a look.

 

Is the bike for most part a stock bike? If so I would seriously doubt a person would do that particular mod having done nothing else or something else first. I would say 99.99% of most guys, most bikes wouldn't do that mod before they did, as an example, some form of mod addressing appearance 1st.

To make sure 1st, do you own a manual for that particular bike? If not I would strongly suggest buying one and it will prove to be very useful going forward. If you have a friend or know someone with Harley experience I would try and get together with them and pull the cover and looking.

Now, knowing what we know about this bike that if you do pull the cover and it has the stock parts, combined with the mileage on the bike, I would strongly suggest changing them out and to do the upgrade while your there with the cover off. I am not that mechanically inclined and with what little tools I have that me doing it would probably end up pretty ugly! It's odd this thread popped up because my bike is in the shop as we speak getting head work done, the top end cooling fins show cut and this particular mod done right now with a new and different cam/cam plate, bearings, tensioner and high flow oil pump installed.

Keep us posted on what you find out and what you do with it and the shape of all the stock parts are in once you look at them.

 

Like was said, if its basically stock with no engine mods, chances are the tensioner shoes have not been changed. You can tell pretty easily by opening up the cam chest.

If you are fairly mechanically inclined, get a cam cover gasket from the dealer. Remove the front exhaust pipe if needed to access all the cover bolts and loosen them up but don't fully remove them yet. Use a rubber mallet or deadblow hammer to break the cover loose, they can sometimes stick to the old gasket pretty well. Then remove the bolts and the cover. This will expose the cam plate and the outer tensioner (Pics of mine at bottom of post). CAREFULLY pry back the outer tensioner and look at the contact face of the shoe. It will be worn due to mileage, but if its more than 50% gone and/or its pitting at all, it's time to change them. The inner shoe will be tough to see (but important as this is the shoe that wears the fastest) but with some ingenuity it can be pried back a little and inspected with a dental mirror. Might take two sets of hands for this.

There are a couple options out there. A new set of shoes can be had for about $70, and it is possible with some creative tool building (see YouTube) to replace them in your garage without removing the cams from the plate. You will however need to cut the pushrods and replace with adjustable ones.

The other option is to upgrade to the hydraulic cam plate, but I would go with an aftermarket setup and new cams. The reason is the SE hydraulic plate reuses the inner cam chain as that is the only one that will work with stock style cams. The outer chain is upgraded to a roller style. Why is that a problem? The chains are the primary reason for the wear. They are stamped steel link chains, and if yours was stamped late in the run on a set of dies, it will have microscopically rougher edges than chains stamped on a fresh set of dies. These edges are what eat away at the tensioner. The upgraded hydraulic tensioners are the same material as the stock ones, the difference being that the new roller chain will wear the shoe only until the roller contacts it. Then it will glide over the tensioner via the roller. So, leaving the inner link chain that tore up the old shoes is only going to tear up the new ones. Except now everyone thinks they fixed the problem and will stop inspecting it until the engine implodes.

So, the decision is based mainly on the funds available. The pics below are of my stock shoes at about 50k miles. I have noticed some orange plastic in the oil filter media, so it is time to change them. I will swap them out for the same as I feel 50k is an acceptable maintenance interval on a wear item.

The hullabaloo about the tensioners is somewhat overblown, but deserves periodic inspections. For every guy with a horror story about how bad his tensioners were, there are probably thousands of guys with 2 or 3 times the mileage who don't even know what a cam chain tensioner shoe is. Like I said above, it's the luck of the draw if you got a smooth or rough chain. But at 47k if it hasn't blown and isn't making funny noises, chances are you got a smooth chain. Check them out to be sure, and replace if necessary.

Now that I've written a book, good luck, and be sure to get a manual!

Outer tensioner



Inner tensioner



SE hydro cam plate for reference

 

As said at that milage definitely time to take the cover off and look, you'll soon see if they're worn you can check the rear one with a dental mirror, if the tensioners are an orange colour they'll be the oringinal sprung type, if they're a sort of white colour with an orange looking Camm plate the bikes had the Screaming Eagle upgrade with the hydraulic Camm shoes and bigger oil pump, if you hunt around this forum there's a stack of threads on this problem.

 

Put in a gear drive cam and you'll never have to worry about it again!
JMO

 

thanks for the advice. the previous owner did stage one,v&h long shots,a/c and fuel pac. he also bolted on every shiny thing that h-d sells. however i am pretty sure the case's havent been cracked open and of course the dealer doesnt know.will i lose my spanking new synthetic oil by removing the cam cover ?

 

I did this, but it's not always that straight forward to do on later bikes that have problems with crank runout.

 

I would check them. Take the cam cover off and the front one is right there. On your bike, according to folks on here earlier, you can use a dental mirror to check the rear one. They start failing as early as 30 k and can nuke your motor...so check them and change them if at all suspicious. Good luck and welcome to the crew!

 

No, you won't lose all of it. 1/2 a quart at most. But it will be messy.