Harley-Davidson 2003 Service and Repair/Valve Holes

We're making good progress on our V-Rod service. New tires are in, the front brake pads, rear brake pads have all been changed. I rebuilt the front right and left brake caliper, reflushed the fluid, reflushed the clutch fluid. We're getting ready to do our valve adjustment, so what I'll end up doing is I've left the rear axle loose. We have to loosen the front of the engine, tilt the engine forward, and that'll give me access to everything I need to loosen here on the top of the engine so we can do our valve lash. Everything's going well so far. The valve lash will kind of be the last big part of the project. By the time we're done, we're looking at a good three and a half, four days in this. It's just a lot of work when you get into these, especially, you know, having to change the fork seals and really just go through everything. I had to scotch-brite corrosion on the inside of the rim so the tires would seal well. This bike's been sitting for a long time. Well, one other thing I want to make a note of. You may have seen when I was doing the rear tire on the sprocket side where the cush drive is that I put some talc in there. Well, talcum powder is a little trick. Put in the cush drive, put the sprocket on, and you won't get squeaking. It's a phenomenal little trick. I learned that years ago. Matter of fact, that was given to me by Harley-Engineer when the V-Rod first came out because this was the first bike we had actually ever used cush drive on. And it actually worked great because brand new, out of the crate, these things were squeaking like crazy. And they said that would happen until they wore in and it would build up some dust in there from the rubber kind of deteriorating a little bit and the sprocket mating with it. And then the squeaking would go away, but a lot of customers were complaining at that time. So the other alternative was to put a little talcum powder in there and problem solved. So another trick from Motorcycle Garage. Stay tuned. I just want to show you that we have to verify our cam timing before we move any further. So I've gotten rotated the engine with our crank tool, brought the front piston up the top dead center. We have a top dead center tool here in the front in the front spark plug hole. If you look at these timing marks, you have the one dot in the line, two dots in the line, three dots in the line, and four dots in the line. You'll see everything lines up. That tells me that I have verified the cam chain timing. So now we can go forward and do our lash adjustment. You wouldn't want to move forward if you had maybe a tooth that's jumped. I haven't had that happen. I've seen guys as they've disassembled this and tried to do the lash adjustment have gone and kind of messed that up and have to bring it into me and then I go ahead and retime everything. But we're okay so far. So now I'll remove the top dead center tool. We'll put these front cam lobes at two and ten o'clock and then I'll show you how we go and do one cam at a time and we'll check how much lash we have. Oh hi guys. Just cleaning the exhaust here. Getting all my hand prints off. We are ready to give this a start. I've left the air box off because I still have to service the air filter and clean up the box. They get a lot of grind inside the boxes on these but we'll get it all cleaned up and this is just a quick quick get the hand prints off the exhaust so we don't burn our prints into the hot exhaust pipe. That's not a good thing to do and you're going to notice when we first start this there'll probably be some smoke and steam coming off the engine. It's all the chemicals we use in the process of actually doing a service and a valve adjustment just like when you buy a new Harley from the factory when we start a brand new out of the crate. There's all kinds of steam and smoke and things coming off. They have a weird smell. It's just all those chemicals burning off. All right so hopefully this will start right up. I haven't tried. I finished it last night and had to get home. So we'll give it as my son used to say when he was little a test out. So we'll turn the ignition on the check engine light will be on because I do not have the air box on with the intake air temperature sensor connected. When I'm servicing a lot of these I have actually a spare one. I'll plug it in just to save me the time of having to go in and clear the light but it's not that big of a deal. So let's give it a start and we'll check it out and make sure it sounds good and there's no no leaks no drips no errors. It does sound very good once this warms up and I get the coolant start moving around in the system. I'll make sure I have that bled. There's no air in it. We'll top off the coolant tank. I noticed the high beam but we need to replace the bulb. That's not working. Nice hard brake now. Nice hard rear brake. A lot of work. I think I'm into this for I haven't totally yet but close to 30 hours. It's a lot of work when you do a real service and do everything you're supposed to do and check all the critical factors. You can see some of the steam starting to come off. I absolutely love the V-Rod. It's the best engine Harley ever produced. The new Revolution X it's a mini V-Rod. I know the factory because of marketing is trying to say it's not. I get it. The V-Rod at first sold very well then it kind of died out but it does have a cult following. This bike is huge in Germany. It's huge in Australia. They understand performance. This is a performance bike. I've stroked a couple of these engines and you're looking at 160 to 180 horse at the rear wheel. It's incredible. I mean you have to launch in second gear. You might as well forget first. Having a leak on one of these would be such a pain. You'd have to do so much work. That's why take your time. Do it right the first time. It sounds so much quieter now the valve train too. This was very much on the loose side. Get back to the new 1250 Revolution X, Revolution engine, Revolution S. You know it is a mini V-Rod. The factory because of marketing is going to try to say it isn't but again 60 degrees, liquid cool, a wet sump crank. I mean it's other than the variable valve timing it's very much the same. In fact, I think this is a better looking engine with the fins. Now the fins don't do anything. They're just there for looks. That was Willie G and you know the styling team that wanted to make it look like not just a liquid cooled engine. These don't do anything. They don't need to be there but I personally love the look and I was lucky enough to be the first initial couple classes for V-Rods were supposed to be master technician and up. I was a master of technology. I was able to go. I went to the second week of class and uh it was it was really sad. I'll shut this off. It was really sad to hear a lot of the technicians that were there. They were calling it a Japanese Harley and they had all these really bad things to say. Myself and this young kid from the Midwest, we were done early. The guy that was running the class at the time was an engineer by the name of Mike Marty. Super intelligent, great guy. He said you two go down and you can go run the screaming eagle dino. So we get to go down to the screaming eagle room and play around down there while the rest of the class had to put the tools down and he went off on them about how they're being bad to the brand. It's what how great the engine was but you know the old timers just didn't like the new technology and quite frankly they're probably scared of it even when it came out. I was a little a little nervous. I'm like ah this is so different but and it is different. If you can work on one of these you can work on on anything Harley produces anything because this is the most complicated engine they have. I should show you the and I will probably at the end of this video I'll show you how many tools it takes to rebuild one of these bikes in the engine. It's a lot of tools so yeah and I remember telling a couple guys I said well I'm a deal of principle not just a mechanic and if you were acting this way and I found out I'd fire you because you can't have that in a business. This is a phenomenal product. Harley spent a lot of money developing this and you just you shouldn't be going around bad mouthing the product. You know the engine was designed in conjunction with Porsche so and that was like the third time that Harley had used Porsche. First time was on the Nova project which was that three-cylinder that never came out and then the Evolution Hedge with the wedge-shaped combustion chamber that would that was a collaboration with Porsche and then this engine so very high-tech phenomenal. Hopefully they keep producing parts. I'm hopeful that they keep producing let's just say that. I don't want it to be like the Buell where I love Buells but it's getting so hard to work on them because you just can't get parts. Thanks for watching. Make sure you like us on Facebook. Like us on YouTube. Send in those comments. You know when I'm home at night hanging out and the wife's gone to bed I'll try to get back to you. So we'll talk to you later.