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Garage Basics

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Garage Basics

Welcome to the mysterious world of wrenching. So you weren't born with a silver wrench in your mouth? No idea, how to tell a metric nut from an SAE bolt? No clue about torque settings, drain plugs or hex keys? Don't despair, here's a few basic mini tutorials to keep your sled rolling.

Throttle Cable Trouble

Check, lubricate and reassemble or replace outright – do the right thing.
Now, what’s a throttle cable anyway? In these days of throttle-by-wire, we’ll tell you all about it, ’cos the throttle isn’t controlled by electrical impulses but in a more classic way, that is to say: mechanically.
A vintage bike usually has a throttle cable, a thin steel wire living in a Bowden cable housing, telling the engine how much power the rider wants at any given moment in time. It opens the throttle butterfly, or the slide in a slide carb, letting more or less fuel/air mixture reach the engine. It’s a part that needs to be absolutely reliable, so a little tlc every now and then won’t hurt. If you’re on the road often, or your bike spends the night outdoors it’s a good idea to keep the cable regularly lubed. It’s supposed to glide smoothly in its housing.
Here’s our real life check list for disassembly, inspection, decision making and reassembly:

Replacing the secondary chain

Checking and adjusting your secondary chain is a routine job every 1.000 miles. There will be a point when the old chain can’t be adjusted any more, that it becomes necessary to install a new one. Changing a chain is no rocket science, if you have your wits together and the right tools at hand.

At the end of this checklist we rounded up a few useful tools that make your life easier, ready to order.

And now: Let's go!

Fork Oil Change

If you have to shrug, when the term fork oil pops up, and turn back to the work on your bench, you are probably the guy who has a springer, girder or leaf spring fork in his chop, and generally keeps to Harleys before the 1949 vintage.
1949 is the year when Harley-Davidson introduced the red-hot Panhead "Hydra Glide" motorcycle, which came with a "hydra-ulic" front end. Steel tubes sliding on steel tubes, and deep down inside long springs swimming in oil raised the riding comfort to unheard of levels, reducing back-breaking potholes, back then a daily menace to riders, to minor bumps in the road.
With all this sliding action going on, it’s no wonder the oil gets tired and saturated with microscopic metal particles due to abrasion, which makes regular change a necessity. The viscosity of fork oil can be used to adjust the damping characterisics (and levels of comfort) of hydraulic forks. SAE 30 W was standard on HDs up to 1978 (and up to ’84 on FL models). 30 weight is rather stiffish by today’s standards. It was replaced by 20 W later. If you appreciate a soft ride, go down to 15 W, or concoct your own "viscocktail" by mixing different viscosities. Make sure that you remember the mix ratio for next time.
Model specific quantities, the maintenance intervals and where to find the drain plugs are best looked up in the Let’s get started:

Airfilter Maintenance

For some really healthy potatering and throaty gargleblasting a Harley engine needs a steady supply of clean air. To keep foreign matter such as dust, beetles and low flying hamsters from clogging up the delicate mechanical innards of your engine, some bright spark back in the good ole days invented the air cleaner. Depending of the vintage or customizing level of your ride, these gizmos are filled with a variety of filter media. Reaching from metal mesh for the really old Linkert filters to foam elements or cotton gauze media elements (washable) to disposable paper elements on the later models.
Even when you’re not the heavy mileage eater, filters get clogged up with dirt after a time, foam and K&N type filters also lose their cleaning power due to the loss of air filter oil. The air resistance grows and the engine’s power decreases, the idle suffers and both you and your engine start feeling less than happy.
Service intervals can be found in the It's not hard to do, so let’s get started:

One oil change per riding season is a good rhythm, so the perfect moment to change your bike's oil (and the filter) is the last ride of the season. Throw out the old gunk and settle the bike well lubricated into hibernation. Waking up your bike in spring is also a good moment to do a lube job.

If you’re ignoring the seasons and ride year round, you’ll have to keep an eye on the oil change intervals given in We happen to know that changing the oil on a hog can be a messy and dirty job, that’s why we have a few items on offer to make it as convenient and hassle-free as possible, even when using other brands of lubricants ;-) So best take your time to read this through once before opening that drain plug.