FMH LIVE: Removal of Stock/OEM Handlebars

Hey guys, I'm Tommy Creal, contributing editor with Fix My Hog. And we're back at you here in March, going through a stock setup for handlebars, and controls, wiring. We're gonna disassemble all that stuff, reassemble, and I'm gonna go through various pieces. Chose this bike because it's kinda bare knuckles, bare bones, I should say, and give you a good example moving forward if you're looking to upgrade things or clean things up on the front end of your bike. That's just kind of an overview of what we're gonna be doing today.

If you got any questions, make sure you drop it right there in that chat box. I've got it up here, fired up on my computer, and as we go, I'll keep checking it to see if there's anything I can help you guys out with. While you're at it, please take a look at the banner right below that chat box. It's a free video on troubleshoot with Harley error codes. There's a ton of good, free stuff up on this website, so make sure you guys browse around, and take some time to look at that stuff.

So again, make sure you ask those questions. And with that, we're just gonna get ready to rock and roll. So, what we've got here, this is actually a custom setup. Many of you guys, probably, last month saw this bike. We used this one as well.

We're gonna be going through and disassembling the handlebars, these hidden controls. We're gonna go through, take the mirrors off the grips, and then actually the odometer and all the gauges are built right in here to the risers. So, obviously, there's various setups that we can use on bikes where obviously look different cosmetically with our Street Glides and Road Glides. Our entire front end is a different appeal. So we're gonna have to actually take fairings off with that, but I'll address that down the road.

So get going on a disassembling these bars, obviously we've taken the tank off, prepped that and kind of covered up some of the components that we don't want dropping down if a bolt were to come through or something. So, all right. Let's make some room and get going. You're gonna have to zoom in a lot of this stuff. Yes sir.

All right, so with these bars, we've disconnected the break line already on here. If you having a hydraulic clutch you're gonna want to do that as well on that cylinder on your left side. But our brake line is detached over here. We've taken off all the wiring components in this bike. It was a hot mess coming in, so when we get these projects and we're not even gonna attempt to try going through someone else's wiring job or routing job.

So I, what I actually does, I just clipped the wires cause we're going to pull them anyways and get them out of there and examine it ourselves so. We disconnected all the lines drop those off again, electrical came off and what we're going to do is we've got three inch risers with a pullback, meaning three inches up. And then we've got a one inch pullback bringing it back closer to us. And when I get it off, I'll address different types of that. But with these risers, we have a bushing in the middle, on our upper triple tree here and then a through bolt that goes directly through to our riser holding that in.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna crack both sides loose and then we're going to pull them directly out. And to do so... I always keep my finger right onto the chrome. Ah, come on. It doesn't wanna work with me.

All right. So cracking this one loose and you should have some Loctite on there, so don't be, don't be worried if you think you're cranking too hard on the bolt, you want to break that Loctite so that's why we're just cracking them loose to start with. And you could see they're starting to drop back on us here. That's looking good. All right, we're getting them there.

I'm actually get a smaller socket so we can get it in there. Come on, come on. Here we go. What's actually happening, I'm running out of room here between the bottom of the, bottom triple tree, and the bolts. And at this point, if you've got a buddy laying around or coming on over, it's a good time to get an extra hand in here to hold these, hold these bars.

So you can see they're starting to move on me. This is awfully tight coming out. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of rust, or extra buildup on here. All right, we got that one for the most part done. As you can see I'm putting my hand around the tool.

I rather crack my knuckles, draw blood from me than going directly and chipping on the chrome or actually going to the paint. You can also put tape down around painted areas on your frame. And that'll obviously help prevent anything from happening. These are long bolts, usually around three inches. Depending on that riser type.

Yeah, we're gonna go slow on this one. Getting right there towards the end. All right, now I'm feeling them give. So when these bars come off there's actually gonna be a chrome cover right over the polyurethane bushing. So keep an eye on the bottom and the top when you do take these off.

If you got an aftermarket set up with a raked out, for a street bike or something, you may not have these. They're just going to be flush, your risers or your bars are just going to be directly bolted down to that top tree. Man, guess not. Yeah, it's working it's way out. All right, we're almost there guys.

It seems like an endless road, but eventually I'll get it. What I'm doing is I'm actually pushing up against the bars too, just in case that pops out. I don't want to strip it. So what I'ma do now, we've got that bolt out. I'm gonna pull this one loose, keeping an eye on grommet.

And there is a ton of Red Loctite on that. You could probably see it going right through it too. All right, so I'm gonna let that thing come down. Now, we're going to finish up on this side. And don't let the, all the parts and components intimidate ya.

This is pretty simple job. It's just a matter of taking your time and doing it right. And making sure you're going step-by-step. All right. Not bad.

All right, now we've got our set up off, without scratching anything too. That's pretty darn good. That's the whole goal. Can rest at ease now. So what I'm gonna do, is set these down like that.

All right so these are... Can you zoom in on this one? Yeah. These are riser bolts. Right here you can see that there's a split washer going directly through on the bottom side here.

We've got another split half like this polyurethane bushing. These have the tendencies to go out typically after a couple years. If you have a rubber one in there those will go a little bit quicker depending on what kind of atmosphere it's in. If there's rain, it might get some rotting on it. So when you pull off your bars, make sure you take a look.

It's a good idea to upgrade on these and get something a little bit tougher, more appliable. These are dampeners for your handlebars. So once these go in your triple trees and your riser bolts do go through here. This is providing that dampness and that mobility for your bars to move. So if it's harder obviously you're gonna have less pullback and push on that, but keep an eye on these.

There are two pieces, like I said one for the top, one for the bottom, riser goes right through, right to the bottom here. Now, if you're keeping the same bars and doing controls or you're just in general, just swapping out a few other things, make sure you run a tap right through that area down here at the bottom of the risers Reason being is all that dry, dried up thread lock is still up in there so you want to just run a quick tap through and wouldn't be a bad idea, if you have a die laying around to go in and strike these bolts as well and clean those up too. What we're gonna do, we're gonna disassemble this side and we're gonna start right here with the riser and the top clamp. And as you could see, this is the whole mechanism for all the wiring coming out right here. There's a drilled out portion down here and we're gonna go later on in this segment and show you how to drill out your bars and run wires through.

So make sure you stick around for that. But we're gonna pop this one off by doing so I'm going to crack, crack 'em loose. Lay this down in a good work in position here. And a lot of times you're not gonna see too much Threadlocker on these. You may see blue, rarely see red but it's very rare that you're gonna have Threadlocker of a higher caliber on this.

All right, crack those loose. I'm gonna take out one side at a time. Need some more table space here. All right. So as with any kind of parts when we take 'em off, I always like to lay 'em out.

Obviously for this event, I want try keeping it as much in front of you as possible. So I'm gonna put some of these parts back here. Risers, polyurethane bushings, and the bottom bolts. So I wonder how many of you guys are out, out riding already? If you're in the Midwest here, we got some good weather coming our way so sure many of you are out there.

All right. Personally, these odometers and setups, you're not gonna see too many of these anymore due to all our five gauges and two gauges out there with the Road Glides and various Twin Cams. But there are definitely plenty of options to do this on your bike and just dummy mount some fillers in those spots on your bike. But this is a good one. So this should actually be popping off right now.

And I can't seem to get it, so I'm gonna tap with the rubber mallet probably being a little bit of a build up. There it is. All right. All right, now we're coming loose. All right, so here's the top clamp for our bars.

As you can see in the back right here we've got a little recess spot for the wires. Are you zoomed in on that one? As you can see these wires are splitting and fraying up here. So we're actually gonna have to repair those and pull out our gauges, our indicator lights right there and redo all these little wires, they are for the most part all split off. And that's probably due to someone actually going in not aligning these correctly with the hole in our bars and ultimately just rubbing right off.

All right, so now that we have the clamp off, ch-ch-ch-chu. We're gonna get the controls off. Check to see if you guys got any questions just yet. So this one's kind of pretty cool set up. These are Performance Machine Controls.

Nowadays, you'll see a lot of bikes out there where they're gonna have drilled indentations right here at the back of the bars, allowing for the brake and the clutch line to go in where it's a smooth setup. You don't see many lines, same thing for all the wiring. Obviously we're gonna be routing them through the bar. So it's cleaner look. You don't have a bunch of cables on the outside but these buttons aren't your normal, you know, standard black buttons with your Harley set up.

These are just one push and two pushes and you're getting various things. So what I actually did on here when we were going through and disassembling the bike I took a look in try to determine which was which. If you're taking your bars off and keeping the same controls on for say, it's a good idea to label, you know, what side is which. What are the wires going to if you're in doubt of anything, because it will save a lot of time and headache moving down the road. All right, so now I'm just gonna crack these loose.

A lot of times you can pull them off. I rather directly just take the entire housing off. Keep this thing moving. This can be a little stickler. The OEM setups on Twin Cams, you're gonna have two bolts, one from the top, one from the bottom, make sure those are evenly torque down when you do put those on, if one side is a little tighter than the other, I've seen it where we've had bikes in where the wires are catching and splicing on there.

And those will bind up and obviously cause some kind of electrical failure. So take the time to check that out. Before we move on that one, I'm gonna pop this one. And then obviously here's our brake reservoir with the mirror mounted directly to it. And if you've got a lot going on another good little piece of information is to put the bolts directly right back in to where he took 'em out.

That's probably our number one protocol that we normally do is once we take the bolt out it's going right back in. These threads do mate specifically with that certain area, so it's always a good idea to try putting them right back in there. And these things are a mess. I've got black bolts on this side, chrome on the other. You can see that someone didn't take the time to go through for the detail on here.

Everyone's got their own way of doing stuff, for me personally, we'd be making sure everything matches and put some caps on these sockets. All right. Then here's our perch lever. Chu-chu-chu-chu-choo. All right, here's everyone's fun part.

Specifically, my main man Zach, back there. The electrical side of things. All right, so on all bars, you're obviously gonna have some kind of electrical, unless we're working with old, um even some old Panheads too, are gonna have those setups, but 9 times out of 10, the bike you're gonna be working on or you have, is gonna have electrical running through. So I'm gonna take off all these looms that they had here, and then we're gonna start from the basics. And what you guys see here, this is just a sheathing to go over the wires.

It does nothing more than something cosmetic, and keep those wires put together or a loom. That's what we call it. You can see these wires right here, these are actually in pretty good shape, but from the backend... My zoom. You're in?

I'm in pretty tight already. All right, so for right here, these wires look pretty good. We've got two or three wires running outta here. One's gonna be our positive and one's gonna be our signal. So we're gonna take this one, put it to the side, now that looks good.

And then on this side, do the same thing. Inspect to see how these are looking. No binding and kinking. So both sides look good. We'll be able to put these together, re-install 'em a little bit nicer than using four pieces of sheathing.

Probably just run away with two of 'em. All right, so here's probably the most important part with your bars. If you're doing an aftermarket or actually made your own set, this is gonna be even more critical for you to look through. When we are routing these wires, these are the dimples that we have in there. We have to make sure those were looms are actually tucked in here nicely and routed all the way through without any kind of catching, the wire shouldn't be catching any of this metal on the inside.

And same thing if you pre-drilled or need to drill your own hole, you need to make sure you file that away or even grind it down before you get it coated and make sure those wires will not catch or snag on this. I can't tell you how many times we've run into doing a front end job, and it's kind of a hack show, a set of bars in those wires, even the looms or the heat shrink is catching on this and caused a lot of the electrical failure. So it's a lot of time and money that you're gonna invest in that when you can just avoid it by looking at these. So this one, you know typically, I wouldn't, we'd file this down a little bit more. It wasn't cut the best.

So we need to take this one down a little bit more. But for demonstration purposes I'm gonna show you guys how to get going on your own set of bars and drill. And you can do this with any aftermarket depending on what you're working with. All right. So depending on what you're gonna be using, first thing that we wanna do, let me clean this up.

Is take note where the risers are gonna drop through. So we're going to have both risers on this side right here. If we're going to have a top clamp or individual covers for that, we wanna try hiding the wires as best we can under that. And for a good example, these are stubby risers and these are individuals. So it would look something similar to this.

We'd have top clamp here, obviously the bars would be turned around, like that. And on both sides. So we would have to determine where we want those wires to run through and keep it clean as possible. On the other hand, as we took this off that's a one-piece top clamp. So these are a lot easier to hide those wires.

That'll go right over and we can sneak those wires right out and shoot them behind the headlight and right down the frame rail. So for this application, what we're gonna do is just do a top clamp and we're gonna make a point right here. Grab my trusty good luck marker. This is just ink felt. And we're gonna be going directly in the middle of those two ridges and making a quick mark.

We can hardly see it though. A little tough to see with the white. Second what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a center punch, place it right in the middle. Make sure these bars are held sturdy. Put one, looks good.

And then we're gonna make an additional one. And then we're gonna make a pilot hole. And then we're gonna get into using a taper bit and then filing this thing down. Obviously wearing all the safety precaution, glasses, eyewear. Now, this can be very tricky to start drilling on a rounded surface.

Wow these glasses aren't too good with the light. So my recommendation is obviously get yourself a partner or a buddy to hold these bars for ya. If you don't, put them in a vice with rubber jaws in there otherwise aim your drill directly on that center punch, start slowly. Make sure you do start your hole and then you could speed up. And if you do feel this slipping at all, obviously pull back, readjust.

The last thing you wanna do is is start scoring up your bars. All I'm doing is changing out bits here. Get a little sharper one. Man, these things just don't want to work today. All right.

And I'm just slowly going up size by size. Taking your time, as you go through as well. I probably should... I got the worst bits for today. And now that we got hole, we're gonna take a taper bit.

Get that nice and steady. We need to sharpen these little guys up here soon. Um, all I'm doing is I'm looking through to see which bit we can do a little bit larger here. All right. So now that we're through, we have a smaller hole before I jump to the next thing, I do wanna mention when you are drilling on these, any kind of, you know, circular or tubing of any kind, be careful when that drill does catch, it has a tendency to move.

So if you are holding it, like I am, I can feel it starting to move and I just pull back. So be careful because those things can really take wind with those, with those bits in those drills. So now we're gonna figure out the gauge that we want the hole at, depending on the wire loom that we are gonna be running through. So we're gonna go about two or three notches here. And that looks pretty darn good to me.

Obviously, after drilling that out, we're gonna have some edges that are gonna catch. We're gonna take a file, we're gonna run those through. I've got, where's our other file? Take a small file, we're gonna run it through and you're good to go. A lot of times if we want to...

Yeah, can you toss me one? Make this a little bit cleaner rather than coming directly out of the bars, put a rubber grommet right through here. That'll help with preventing any kind of water or moisture getting in there as well. Thank you, sir. And it's obviously much cleaner look.

So now that we have that hole, what I'ma do is I'ma start on the sides, just like I showed you. And then we're gonna work around. Take your time, be gentle. There's no need to rush on stuff like this. All right.

For the most part we take another 10, 15 minutes to continue to go through that and file it. Make sure it's done smooth to our liking and then we'll be good to go. So now that the wires are actually pulled out here's a little trick that I wanted to show you guys that we'd been using for, I don't know, since we started building almost 15 years now. Running wires can be tricky. So if we have a loom of let's just say eight wires that we need to run with our new controls that you're putting on and it's gonna be awfully tough to put them directly through here and get each individual wire to come out.

Now there's various ways of doing it. Easiest way that I've found is simply take a piece of string. You can put a nut at the bottom, for this I put a little brass piece from a throttle and we just start it right through. If we're gonna have a dimple right here with the wires coming, we put that, this brass right through there and shoot it through. And what we're gonna do is simply shoot air in one side, and that's gonna push that right all the way through.

Now, this is very helpful on... I could see it. When you have Z-bars or a lot of these new Bagger bars are out there. They're awfully twisty and windy. It's a perfect way to use it.

So now I'm doing, is I'm putting a pick in there, pulling the wire right through. I know it's right there. And now you're gonna... And obviously make sure that nut or brass area on the bottom will fit through your diameter size hole. And then now that you have that string ran through all you're gonna do then attach all your wires to this side, lock 'em up and pull them directly right through your bars.

And you'll be good to go. Nifty little thing. It's the small things that avoid a lot of time consuming areas on these bikes, on your project. So that's just a small little one. So that's for the most part, drilling out your bars and getting your wires ready.

That's all you need to do. Obviously we're gonna shoot this through, make sure all the debris is out of there. But other than that, you're good to go. All right, let's check, see where you guys are at. That drilled a lot better than I thought it was going to, after a little while there.

Okay. So before we go to reassembly on this, putting everything through, I want to go through some of the parts that I didn't touch on yet, which are our triple trees our neck area with our Timken bearing, dust covers, races and we did touch on the polyurethane bushings but we're gonna go through it a little bit more here. So on our bikes, outside the Springers what we have is we have an upper and lower tree. This is going to be a stem or a shaft depending on what you prefer to call it coming through either the top or the bottom. And for this one, this was on a CVO 2015.

This is gonna be our upper tree. So you can see right here this milled out areas for the wire loom to run through. Here's our polyurethane bushing. Here's one of the covers. And same thing on the bottom, you can see all that grease from those bearings.

Now, a lot of times when I took off that, that set of bars you're not gonna see that come off that easily. So little way to remove those bushings, I like to take an extension for a ratchet, put it directly around the middle outer diameter of your steel and your bushing. Lightly tap it to get it going. And then what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna hang it directly over the side here. Lightly push it through.

And this is pretty much what's gonna be holding in your polyurethane bushing here. Man, someone got enough, jeez. See all I grease? Jeez. It's like half a bottle.

All right, so here is your steel sleeve. I'm just gonna push it through the rest of the way here. Come on, you don't need to be trouble. So here's our steel sleeve. Now these should in theory drop out pretty quickly, of course not, they're not gonna do it since we're working with you right here.

What I'm gonna do is just take a pair of needle nose and pull those out. And you're gonna do for reassembly, there they are, here we go. Top and bottom. When you do order new ones you're gonna have a set of four halves and two steel sleeves. For re-install on these you're just gonna pop one right on, slide it in, back end pop, slide it in and then install your sleeve.

A lot of times you'll be able to push it through hand tight and get it right in there. So along with our upper triple tree what we're gonna have here on this setup, our four tubes will be coming up here with an external bolt going through the top. A lot of times you're gonna see nowadays where this is actually flush and it's gonna be, your focus will go directly up to the upper tree and screwing up there. One thing to be careful of is putting too much grease on like, yeah. Sorry guys, I gotta get all this stuff off.

Being a pain. You don't ever need to use this much grease. Someone went overboard on this one. Is that what we're gonna have or we're gonna have pinch bolts on this. Sometimes we're gonna have four, two on the upper tree, two in the lower tree.

And what those do, they actually grip the tube of your forks putting them in place. Now, installing your triple trees. If you get this far in any of your projects, what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna take your lower and upper tree after putting your Timken bearing in there. And I'm gonna cover this in a minute, put those down and then you're gonna hand tight the top tree torque that down to spec. And you're gonna see pinch bolt right behind that.

Take that one, bring it tight. Still allowing for movement in there, put your tubes right through and then tighten those down all the way. Now, once you get your four tubes put into the tree you're gonna take this pinch bolt, you're gonna torque that down to spec and then you're gonna go to the upper and lower trees and take those pinch bolts and torque those down. So sequence of... Can you turn that down real quick?

I didn't even turn it up. Yeah I know, its some like music going on. So sequence of putting the bolts stone, you're gonna put the tubes up, tighten those down to the upper tree. And then you're gonna go to this top pinch bolt, tighten that down, and then you're gonna go to your lower and upper tree to get your fork tubes all buttoned down. The reason being is that you wanna make sure that your trees are snugged up first.

You're not applying any distress to your tubes and pulling those apart. Those are all in play and that we were evenly torquing everything out. Alright, so outside of putting too much grease on this thing I think we're good to go. On the bottom triple tree here, you can see the bearing and right under that is a dust cover. And that dust cover is obviously what it's name is for, is preventing any dust from coming in there.

You can have 'em chrome, you can have 'em black, we've done some copper to match some front ends that we've done, so you can get these done any kind color you want. You're gonna drop that right over the shaft bring that all the way and set it down. You're gonna drop in your Timken bearing, this is actually a sealed one. I prefer to use just a normal Timken bearing. You're gonna drop that down after it's all greased up, put it up in the neck and then same thing on the top end and put that all together.

So that's the assembly process of that. Now it seems like a lot of parts to do, but it's just a matter of taking your time step-by-step and making sure everything is torque down to par for ya. So if you've got any questions on that make sure you drop in the chat box. I know I kind of ran through that one pretty quickly but you can do that. It's easy stuff.

So we'll do, drop this back in. And I'm sure a few of you have installed races before, probably on wheels. If you're not using a seal bearing, and I do wanna show you a little tool to install these for that one or two, do-it-yourselfers out there and you're removing one from the neck or both of them from the neck. The easiest way is obviously putting a bead either a TIG or a MIG bead directly around that and it pops out. What it does is it shrinks the metal and then you just pop it directly out.

There's many other ways you can really forcefully bring it out, but you don't wanna dent the neck here. So we wanna be cautious with that. But when we are taking those races in and installing them in this is just a race installer. It's tapered as you can see. What you do, is just gonna find the correct diameter, put it directly on here, take it on the neck and then jam it home till it's seated correctly.

And you're good to go. Then you do that whole long list of things I just told you to do with putting the triple trees and the bars together. All right, so now we're gonna get to installing these guys. Man, we got a lot of parts over here. Who thought we were gonna get to all this stuff?

All right, since we're running a little bit short on time, I'm gonna take this down real quickly. Obviously you don't wanna be doing this quickly. I wanna bring this down. I've always been a big freak on making sure things are pretty, pretty darn near to perfect to be. So I wanna bring this down a little bit more and get that edge out of there.

All right. So first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna install the wires, like I said, we didn't need all four of these looms, someone did, but we won't need that. We're gonna take piece of heat shrink make it look a little bit nicer. Run that over through. We've got various sizes here.

And I recommend if you're putting these controls through you've got obviously a new set of bars maybe you're putting on, to apply a little bit more length to the bottom of the wires so you've got extra room rather than not enough room on your wiring. And what that could lead into if you're trying to snug things up too tight is when we're turning our triple trees, we're turning our whole front end, I should say, we're coming down here. That's gonna put stress against that entire loom of wires potentially pulling them out or binding them or kinking them. So again, at the end of the day you can have the nicest looking bike but when it comes down to electrical it's got a mind of its own and it'll do things to your your bike that you couldn't imagine possible. So make sure you take your time and apply those factors into play.

So what I'ma do is I'm gonna measure these out. It might be just a tad bit too long. Cut this little bit shorter. So we're run these right through. I try avoiding these mini switches like the plague, reason being is these wires are so small and fragile, any little pull or tug against the actual handlebar controls can really pull them out of the place.

So it's my personal preference, I like to stay to a thicker gauge wire and make a couple more cuts or drills if needed with that. All right, so I'm gonna get, just so those wires are out. I'm gonna actually be able to sneak this through without putting the string through. However, I'm gonna leave room here at the end. We still need to figure out which wire is going to which on this setup, like I mentioned to you earlier you can tag your bars a lot, give yourself a future vision of what to do, but I'm gonna leave this so we can indicate and pull which wire we need to and then we'll heat it when we're done.

We should be able to sneak these right through, like so. And then run that through. Some of you may be asking why we're not heating and shrinking that down just yet, other than not or trying to figure out what to label. Reason being is that we're just gonna heat probably the bottom six inches of this and leave the rest unshrunk. All right, one more piece.

And again, we're gonna measure this out. It looks pretty good to me. And all I'm doing here is I'm moving this heat shrink and making the larger diameter. So we sneak those wires through. Take these through, make sure they're not binding or kinking on anything.

We should be good. This heat shrink you'll see time after time, likes to kind of clamp down so to speak on these wires, just move 'em around. Eventually make your way through. This one's just being stubborn. I've got different names for you here wires.

There ya are. All right, so we're gonna pull those through. And obviously you guys see me doing this on the bench top. It is much, much easier to assemble your bars even put your clamp, your clamps on, throttle on, on the bench and then apply it just directly bolt on to your trees. Less risk of damaging any parts.

And additionally, you have more room to play and work on that. So what I'm doing is I'm pushing and pulling. You don't wanna directly just pull on these wires again. They're just gonna pull right out. All right, not too shabby.

So we've got two looms coming out right here. What we're gonna eventually do is put one piece of the sheathing directly over this. We'll put a rubber grommet in here, cover that up and then we'll stick this way up in the bar to hide any of the, from fraying off. All right, we're gonna put on the brake. We doing on time?

All right, we got plenty. Flip these guys over. And with any bolt, what you want to do is start it by hand. Please don't try directly by the tool unless you actually have to, in this kind of case, there's no way we can get this Allen in here. So we're gonna have to kind of start it by using the tool.

All right, now that we're at a point where we're gonna install these, I'm gonna actually pull these wires through so they're almost taut, like to say by now we've already labeled and figured out which switch is which too. So now that we can button these things up, I think that's gonna be all right. And I've got a whole new respect for when I got someone over here holding this stuff. When I'm doing it with another set of hands too. All right, so now we're going to start this Allen.

We've got a longer one here, maybe I can try it without it. All right. So now, we got it matched up. Let's start this one in. I'm gonna turn it to where we want it.

Obviously, what you want to do is determine where the bars are gonna sit on your bike, at which angle or degree, and then adjust your levers from there. You can do this while it's on the bike after you'd done all this too, but do keep in mind if you're gonna do a drastic change make sure there's enough wiring or cable running through your bars for that as well. All right. So now, you got those two started, what I'm gonna do, tighten those up and get to these other two. All while doing this, ensure that your wires are still tucked under there.

Those things can be a little devils and move around, cause you a headache. All right. And what we're running into right here, is just what I was telling you guys about, that wire popped up on us, there it is. So it was getting snagged in there. All right.

Come on, work with us here, work with us. All right, now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tighten this down, we've got it in the position we want, double check that the wires are snugged up in the dimples, routed in there. And we'll be good to go. All right, we'll get the left side on. Who in the world thought this would be a good idea putting black ones and chrome ones together.

I like it. It's a different look. Guess we all got our own styles. All right, take the back end here. What we're just gonna do is we're gonna put two of these on so we can get to putting the risers on and the dampeners.

So you guys get to see that, the install. All right, same thing on this side, tighten these down, line them up. Make sure those wires are tucked away. And you want 'em at the degree that you need them at, where it's comfortable, functional. Fit and form.

That's what we always said, functional fit and form. All right, so now that we have, we've got the switches mounted up, we've got the reservoirs, we've got the wires ready to go. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put on the risers. Now you can put blue, I suggest you put Red Loctite on these. And make sure you do have the right one where you need it to be.

Easiest way to know, hold them off and then put the rises directly up. Then you're gonna see the flush mount there. And these are two different colors, jeez. So let's get some Red Loctite. Got plenty of time.

Dab it up on, little bit Threadlocker here. Just gonna do it on the tip. Reason being it's gonna work its way back, sick man. All right, so this gonna be the top on this side. Push that through get our bolt through, and get this guy up there.

Getting it started by hand. And I always like spinning this, if you got the room to do it, go for it. Now don't snug this down just yet, obviously we need to make sure it's still mobile so we can get our clamp up there. All right, we're gonna sneak this one through, top bushing on, chrome cover on. Start this by hand.

This one's a little, just for the reason why I'd put a tap through that is just because you can feel it binding up a little bit. I hate to go beyond that just because of the risk you may run with stripping out those threads or that bolt or not, or whatever you're working on at that time. So we're gonna do is we're gonna have to start, get the tools over here. And these were just gonna be dry again, we're gonna have to replace these wires. For this setup, this wire is just gonna go directly through and all I'm doing on this side where he can't see is I'm actually just feeding them through this hole.

A lot to do with one hand. All right, we're gonna measure this up. Get those wires out of the way. Start these by hand. It's pretty darn good.

I shouldn't get too cocky. The only reason why or another reason I should say why you'd have someone helping ya is, it's awfully difficult to hold the piece of equipment or one of the parts and then work with the tool at the same time. And all it takes is one little pop from that tool to come out of place and get an expensive repair. So you're feeling uncomfortable about a situation or putting something on, installing it by yourself, make sure to ask someone to help out. Kids are good at that too.

I think I got this bottom one little too tight. What we'll do is we'll move this up, adjust it where we want it for comfort level. And then we're gonna go through torque these down to manufacturer specs. And if you have single place risers, you're just, I'm just gonna do one riser at a time. Torque 'em down.

I'm gonna go through a torque wrench and then come down to the bottom. Riser bolts, get those all torqued down and then any bells and whistles beyond that point with routing wires or anything we're just going to take them through here. So it's not that too daunting of a task to get your new bars on, put new controls on, grips, whatever it may be. Just a matter of obviously taking your time. So if you got any more questions in the future, make sure to check out Fix My Hog.com and look at the videos we have.

If we don't have it, drop us a line. Maybe we can get a video out there for ya. So thanks for joining me for this month and we'll see you next month.