Horse on a Hog

As detailed here, my bike suffered a broken drive belt on the Chateau to Plateau ride - its second broken belt in 3 months. It wasn't my happiest day.

My original thoughts were to just park it in the garage for about 6 weeks and ignore it. The full belt replacement (which I'm familiar with from the first one in October) is about a $1000 repair, and I don't really have that much spare cash at the moment, especially after paying for a service and new rear tyre in January ($600 and change all up).

After some consideration, I realised that if I was going to be parking the bike for the best part of 2 months, I might as well have a go at replacing the belt myself. Drive belt replacement on a Harley isn't trivial (as demonstrated by this handy how-to at harleyhog.co.uk but I figured given the time available it was worth an attempt.

So first steps have been taken towards that goal. A genuine HD service manual was ordered, and has arrived. Even better, I enquired about any warranty on the broken belt, and it looks like Harley are going to replace it, so that's a $300 part I'm not going to be paying for.

As for tools, I've got a reasonably good socket set and some spanners, but there are some things I'm going to have to borrow or buy. The good news is I've had offers of lending from some of the local KBers, which will be a big help. I've also purchased a cheap bike lift off Tardme, and that manages to lift all 370kg of the Ultra up off the ground

At present I'm still waiting to hear the final word on the belt warranty, until I've got that there's not much I can do in earnest. So I went out to my mate's place (he's lent me the use of some space some in his large garage for the duration) over the holiday weekend and gave the bike a decent wash. It had been well-covered in bugs before the Chateau-Plateau ride, and then sitting on the trailer over the Forgotten Highway gave it a nice coating of dust. It'll be much nicer to work on now.

BTW I should say a big thank you to Cook's Honda in Stratford, where the bike sat for a week while I arranged to get it back to Palmy. The owner of Cook's is a member of the Lions club that organised the Chateau-Plateau ride, and they were able to open up on the Sunday to store the bike in their shed, and were happy for it to sit there for the week, without drama. Top marks! I'd originally arranged to get BikeTranz to bring it back, but it was going to be over a week before they had a truck going in the right direction so I eventually went up with my brother and his Commodore and a trailer on the following Saturday.

Oh, and while I'm working on the bike I'm also going to be replacing the front brake pads, and sort out the problems with the worn splines on the heel shifter. Should keep me occupied for a few weeks.