The events of yesterday about my trike really pissed me off but I remained as polite as I could. It is what it is. I didn't lose any sleep over it.

More was said to the person I was talking to during the first update than I put in my last post. It's just ridiculous to tell a customer your picking up his trike and agreeing to fix issues then not doing what you said you were going to do.

 

what is the number the NHTSA so we can reference it when i go to their site to file a complaint.

 

This is my compliant number filed with NHSTA 11000009. You can file your own at https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/VehicleComplaint/. I haven't been on that site or walked through the process to file a complaint online. I called but they said it's better to use the site. They said everyone should reference my complaint number but I don't know where in the process you do that. they said the more they get the better the chance that an investigation would occur. It's all about visibility if we want to raise awareness and catch the attention of HD.

I am glad you are making progress!

I hope the dealership ordered everything for mine Friday but it wouldn't surprise me if they put it off until Monday and it wouldn't surprise me if something is on back order either. I ordered a clear lens for each front turn signal and they were on back order for over a month. There was nothing special about them either they were just a clear lens. Same thing happened with the HD trunk lights.

I guess I am fortunate that they agreed to replace everything related to the swing arm but the offer to take it in last Tuesday and take the swing arm out and fix it didn't happen all they did was ride it and then tell me either they don't see it doing that or it's normal. I thought you know it appears to me you think I have nothing better to do but waste my time and I sit around and dream things up, call and complain and waste their time too, then give up my trike for an unknown period of time and then need to find a way to get to the dealership 50 miles away. That's just the kind of guy I am. That's when I said what I said in the update post from the day before and sent them the pictures. They called back after they got the pictures and offered what I posted earlier. It wouldn't surprise me though if they got the thing a part and decide it was 'normal'. Like you said in your post about your progress everyone I dealt with was genuine and committed to fixing it but when they gave me the update I found out that they didn't even look at the swing arm bushings and bearings.

I may be wrong about this but I've never seen anything designed (pivot shaft) to wear something else (rubber bushings) to the point they generate that much debris over the short period that my trike has been on the road. I was told by another dealership that the parts in that swing arm and the rubber bushings are design to last 100,000 miles and someone on here posted the same thing. Based on all of the debris everyone is seeing from the bushings there is no way they will last 100,000 miles. I equate this situation to engine wear. The HD engines are designed for the long haul. I have a friend who is 77 yrs old and been riding road bikes since he was 15, all Harleys,and he rides from MD to Alaska about every year and a half, as well as other long trips in the USA each summer. In 2020 he will be 80 yrs. old and a good number of us will ride with him on his last ride to Alaska. He's a very highly regarded man in the area where we live. Anyway, he puts around 130,000 miles on each bike before he trades it in and out of a countless number of bikes he has had only one engine failure. Those of us that change our own oil know that the drain plugs for the engine oil have a magnet (so do the other two) on them to catch debris and it does that. It's a very, very fine powder mixed with oil and we all know that is how engines wear normally. I have seen engine bearings for everything from lawn equipment to bearings in a top fuel 8000 hp engine beaten to death in one run at the track and the principles are the same that fine powder is normal wear. If we were to drain our oil and larger pieces of metal were stuck to the magnet and coming out the drain hole we would know that is not normal wear. My thought around the bushing wear is that normal wear would be a black powder not larger pieces of rubber like we are seeing. If HD designed it to leave that much debris then where would it all go after 20, 30, 40 thousand miles it would be packed in there unless it forced the caps off the end of the shaft because I don't see any other way for it to get out. Leaving it packed in there would bind the shaft up eventually.

There is just so much common sense involved in this issue that it's plain to see what's going on here. For the most part all mechanical work is about common sense regardless of the mechanical thing involved. At least that's my view. I could show them my journeys through building multiple high performance street cars and the mechanics are all the same. The car I loved the most was a 2005 GTO. If I were to take them to a forum just like this one I could show them the four year journey I went through to build 600hp supercharged and cammed car. My goal was to build the car so that it could have fun power to play with and last. I wanted a daily driver that could have the crap beat out of it on the street and a car that you could take to the track, beat the crap out of it, and drive it home every time I went. The GTO's had a lot of drive train issues to overcome so it took awhile but I got there. That car got the living crap beat out of it for 4 years and it ran perfectly when I sold it. It's still running and still gets beat on hard. It's approaching 65,000 miles and is now 12 years old. There was so much common sense involved in building that car and some of it applies here, The wear to the suspension bushing were an issue on GTO's and caused horrendous wheel hop and disintegration of bearings and bushing in the rear suspension. The debris from the bushings was a lot more than this situation though. But they all got replaced with bushings and other parts that would survive the beatings that would last the life of the car.

I have pictures of every new bushing that I had to put in that car. But I don't think I have pictures of the worn out ones any more. I also have pictures of all of the axle stubs, CV shafts. and the new rear end I put in that car myself. A lot of that damage if not most was related to the rear end suspension bushings and bearings that allowed the horrendous wheel hop to occur which caused issues to other bushings in the driveshaft and up into the bushings of the trans mount and then up through the clutch pressure plate to the flywheel. I have pictures of all of the destruction caused by the bad and poorly designed bushings and bearings. I'd really like to show them the pictures of all that. They may realize that I know a little bit about suspension stuff and bushing and bearing wear.

And, yes there are complex things that require training and tools but a bushing is a bushing and a bearing is a bearing. Some have very tight tolerances and some have less. Some have very specific installation requirements and some don't but in the long run this kind of wear and debris is going to cause issues over the long haul.

I have enough common sense to know what I can do and what I can't as well as what is normal and what is not.

There are too many times in today's world where you take something in for a problem and you are labeled as a novice who knows nothing right from the start and it's because the human side of business is gone in the USA in so many ways. It's all about money. It's the $100 bill.

If my trike gets fixed and it's done without a war occurring I am going to ask the dealer involve if they will grab this issue and carry up the chain and into HS instead of it ending up in some warranty report or repair report that no one will ever recognize as an issue. They will see it as one incident and that's it.

A few weeks ago a friend introduced me to a guy and his wife that own probably the most respected custom bike shop where I live. he had worked together with the owner of the shop for 15 years building custom bikes. I talked to the guy for a few minutes and then he turned his attention to business stuff. His wife stayed there and my friend started telling her about my trike, the issues I am seeing,what I did myself to work with in the trike supplemental guidelines, and then about the friends that came over that have experience in mechanical things. Immediately the conversation turn south in regards to skills and people bring things into their shop that they screwed. I sat there and took the abuse for about 2 minutes and then my friend spoke up and said wait a minute you don't understand I have seen stuff that Bill's built and you are going down the wrong road. She continued on and he cut her off again and told her she was wrong. She got his message this time and she said well that coming from you means a lot given your skills and our relationship over the years. Then some one else came up and started talking to her and off she went. She came back about 15 minutes later and apologized.

My wife and I drew a line in the sand with big business their lack of respect, concern for customers, and ownership of issues in 2003. A representative of a company walked off with $30k of our money and the company refused to take action and responsibility. We didn't have enough money left after the theft so we had to work it through ourselves. It took over a year and all kind of different entities and government agencies got involved in the end the company paid for it and ate the $30k and we got what we paid for.

There have been several more incidents in our lives where big business did the wrong thing and didn't care so we went to war in a polite and professional way using any resource we could find. We were successful each time.

I don't like talking about all this stuff but when things get to the point where a business won't help I go to war and do what I can especially if it involves other people who need help. I think every consumer needs to stand up to this 'it's all about money' attitude and push back.

I am sorry that I threw all that off topic stuff out at you all but there is nothing novice about my skills and it's time for them to realize that I have a little bit of knowledge, common sense, and skill. I didn't make a living in a mechanical trade but I sure as hell am not a novice either and truly felt the conversation began to drift that way with one of the people involved with this issue. The other person I spoke with and driving this issue through has had a commitment to fix it from the start but I don't know why that commitment wasn't executed below his level.

And for the record I really don't have anything better to do than sit here, make it all up, photo shop some pictures to prove where I've gone in life so they are available in case they are requested, and type all this stuff into a post. Really it's true, I don't have anything better to do.

 

I talked to the dealer where my bike is a 5:00pm on 6/20 and the swing arm bearings are in stock. The pivot shaft and rubber bushings and the nuts that go on the ends of the shaft had to be ordered and have been received at their warehouse and are en route to the dealership they said they probably won't get them until Friday 6/21. So they are moving forward.

I couldn't get another dealer to just get it done. They said they would do it but if a warranty issue was not found I would have to pay for the labor.

Fingers crossed and I will not declare victory until I ride a couple of hundred miles

 

Still waiting on parts....

 

Jeopardy music today on the status of my trike...

I heard from another owner today and he told me he got his fixed! Yes! I am glad!

Still perplexed on how to raise awareness to a larger trike owner crowd.

 

keep putting the word out there. everytime i see someone on a trike now i tell them about that little plastic plug and what to look for. if it had not been for you i would have never found my problem. thanks!

 

I am on here at 4:30am EST ( I don't sleep much) to report I got a call yesterday, 7/6/17, and was told my trike is ready for pickup. There was no bearing damage in the swing arm, however there was movement. They were glad I pushed forward and got help from others to shine some light on the situation and show them pictures of a situation that quite likely could be occurring given the rubber debris behind the caps. Every thing but the shocks were replaced in the rear of my trike that is suspension related including a rear motor mount of some sort.

I was informed that the rubber fragments that I discovered and so did others on this forum and one other are NOT normal. It is excessive wear. At worst there should be nothing more than a fine black powder in there. Root cause: unkown

I need to update the other forum and then go to a third where I started a thread last night explaining this same issue.

I will not declare any victory until I have 2 to 3 hundred miles on my trike to ensure all of the symptoms are gone. I will also continue to watch this issue here and on the other forums and keep people updated as the NHTSA complaint moves along, hopefully! Feel free to contact me here or via email: wlibert@hotmail.com

Thank you everyone who has participated in this thread. Problem or not you all made a contribution and that's what forums should be about. For those I snapped at please accept my apology. Bad time in life right now outside of this issue and it ain't pretty.

 

Thank you for all of the information provided by you and everyone else. It will help me when talking about this issue with my local dealer.
I don't remember seeing what year your trike is. Was this work and the parts required covered under the original warranty or HD's extended service plan?

 

I am not sure how they are going to handle the financial side of it. They didn't say whether that would be a warranty claim or if they were eating the cost but I do have $50 deductible for warranty work and I wasn't charged for that.

I came here to give another update. You guys did the work, I only did a small thing and that was ask for help and that's something that is 2nd nature to me know since I became disabled 3yrs. ago. I am hoping that everyone who is seeing this issue files a complaint against Harley Davidson but not at the dealer level with the NHTSA and references my complaint number. I truly believe that a larger visibility of the issue while yield owners that have this problem

There is no reason to be in that area unless a swing arm has an issue and that's why we are all seeing this now because no one looks there.