Why Use Motorcycle Safety Wire?
Mike RoenDescription
Before Harley Davidson started using Loctite on retaining hardware, they used a lot more lock washers, nylock nuts, interference thread nuts, and motorcycle safety wire. Motorcycle safety wire was most commonly used to aid in retaining inner primary bolts on Shovelhead and earlier models.
The heads of these OEM hex bolts were machine drilled with holes for the motorcycle safety wire.
This would assure that, even if a hex head retaining bolt had loosened, it could not back out of its location and wreak havoc within the primary case.
In this video, Mike gives us some pointers on why motorcycle safety wire should still be considered a reliable option when it comes to retaining vital retaining hardware on your Harley Davidson. Mike gives us an example of a performance upgrade gone wrong. Imagine; you purchased a high flow air cleaner assembly. The instructions are straightforward and you own all of the necessary tools, so you decide to tackle the job yourself.
200 miles later, you are stuck on the side of the road while you wait for an expensive tow to your local independent shop or dealership. Even worse; after getting a look at your bike, your mechanic informs you that one of your new air cleaner screws has ended up being sucked through the mouth of the induction module and has found a final resting place in between your rear piston and valves. That small 1/4 X 20 screw has now created a lot of damage and the owner has now incurred a large expense.
If this hardware was properly tightened to its factory torque spec with the appropriate type and amount of Loctite, this could certainly be avoided. This scenario could also be avoided by incorporating motorcycle safety wire to the critical retaining hardware.
Mike demonstrates the installation of motorcycle safety wire on retaining hardware for an older Screamin’ Eagle air cleaner backing plate.
Hey, it's Mike Roen. Fix my hog. We got a great little tech tip video today for you. And it's kind of a big deal we're gonna do is show you how to safety wire, a couple bolts. And more importantly we're gonna show you how you safety wire the bolts on your intake because what people are doing is they're getting online and they're ordering up a lot of aftermarket air cleaner kits for their motorcycle stage. One's pretty popular. It's the, the routine thing of you do the intake. You do the exhaust and you do the download and you ride your motorcycle. This is back basically a stage one. It's old, my old shovel head, but on your motorcycle it's gonna be the same theory. It doesn't matter if it's fuel injected or carburetted. You're gonna have these three bolts that are gonna hold the backer plate on. Now, as you can see, these bolts are not encapsulated and oh my God, what could happen? Well, they could come loose and guess where they're gonna end up. I'll show you guy calls me up, got a 2009 street glide. And he says his motorcycles running funny. So, you know, told, well, bring it in. You know, we'll take a look. And in the meantime he had tried to fix this motorcycle himself. And in the process, he ended up destroying his starter and his starter clutch and his compensator just because he was repeatedly trying to get a motorcycle to run that had no compression. As you can see, there's his intake bolt it he had, you know, been doing his own maintenance. He got online, he bought the air cleaner kit. He put it on no lock tight and you know, 2000 miles later he sucked it down the intake and it went into the chamber and, and destroyed a lot of stuff. So this is why we're gonna safety wire, these bolts it's kind of a big deal. Now you're saying why not just lock item? Yep. You can lock item and you probably do wanna put a little dab on there. But the problem with lactating is you're. You're going to continually probably be taking this air cleaner kit on and off and over the life of the motorcycle. Those threads can deteriorate. Now, if you've got a, you know thousand dollars throttle body on there, you you probably don't want to be damaging those threads. So in this case, like my bike I went ahead and just safety wire.
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