Harley Monoshock Adjustment

Hey everybody. It's Mike Roen. Welcome back to Fix My Hog. We're gonna do an overview of Harley's Softtail model in 2017, they pretty much redesigned the whole motorcycle. Got the M8 motor got a completely new different chassis. And what they did is they kind of went back to an old school design, like from a dirt bike from the late seventies, early eighties everybody went to that model shock and it's pretty slick design suspension can kind of be a kind of a head game at times. And really what you should do is, you know depending on your model of your Softtail look at your owner's manual look up the model identification of it. It'll have a, if you go to your manual they got a pretty wide variety of models there, with different specs for this particular model, you know this rider is 220 pounds, well, he's not 220 pounds but he's gonna be that with rider weight. So you kind of take into consideration, are you riding solo? You can ride in two up you load it down now on a motorcycle like this. You're probably not gonna be touring cross country but you're gonna maybe have a backpack, might have a passenger at times. And really what people do is they really don't think about their suspension. A lot of people don't play with it. And really what she should do is take your owner's manual, read up on it and see what you're doing because it can really affect the handling of the motorcycle dramatically. And the biggest thing I see is people come in, and I ride their motorcycle from around the shop. And I right away, I noticed the tire pressures are low. They're like at 15 pounds, they're practically flat. So check your tire pressures for you really start fiddling with anything with the suspension. Now on this particular bike, it's pretty handy. It's got a big old knob here, and what this is doing is, this is adjusting the preload on the rear shock spring. This particular guy, like I said we're gonna set it up for eight around 200 to 220. And really what you do is now you, you get on your favorite loop that you write every Sunday morning or whatever you go out, you put your motorcycle through the paces, you sit down and have your cup of coffee and think about it and you go, okay, I hit that bump the bike did this, blah, blah. So then you can go back, and if you're not that sensitive about it you can typically go from one extreme to the other just to get a feel of it especially if you've added on another rider or something. So don't be afraid to actually go out and experiment push the motorcycle through the curves, see what it does cause it can make a pretty big difference, and some people just never take advantage of that. And they ride their motorcycle for, you know four or five years. And then someone brings it to their attention that, Hey, you know it doesn't have to be this sharp when you hit bumps, you can soften it up a little bit. So it makes a pretty big difference. All right, like I said this model has got a handy little adjustment knob on it here. There's two other styles of soft tail models, one of them, depending on your model, it has a spanner wrench to actually adjust the preload on this. And then there's another one that actually has it use your special tool and it's a screw type adjustment. So like I said, refer to your manual. Now, if you notice this we'll get a shot of this and you can actually see the area here, it's hydraulically compressing this spring. That's pretty slick, cause now you don't get to mess around with tools. I mean, this is quick adjustment on the fly. So basically you do your five mile loop, you can pull over no tools needed, don't gotta pull the seat off set the adjustment back again go hit the same section of road, pretty simple. And like I said, on the other models it's gonna be a little more elaborate to where you're pulling the seat off and making your adjustments but either way, pretty handy little item. And it's just something that really gets overlooked. So get out and experiment with your motorcycle.