Alright fellers... sorry about the long read; just wanna be accurate.
Buddy buys '81 FLH Shovelhead, appears to be an 80 in. (10 fins is a 74 incher, and 9 fins an 80 inch, right?)
Guy he bought it from knows fuck-all about the bike. Been setting a while, guy thinks it's got fucked up oil lines, because it's puking oil into the primary.
I got a diagram of the oil lines from the factory manual (fuck, that is a lot of lines. Four hundred and twelve separate vent lines.) I couldn't see every inch of every line, but it looked like the shit was all where it was supposed to be. Jim's aftermarket pump, but the line routing looked pretty close to stock, I guess.
I put a battery in. I opened the inspection cover, and oil barfs out. I put new 20w50 about halfway up in the oil bag, and start it. Bitch comes to life, and the oil pressure starts climbing to about fifty pounds, and the top end seems noisy. (The whole thing was noisy - drag pipes in a concrete garage!) Open the primary, pukes everywhere.
I repeated this process three times, and finally, the oil level in the bag stopped dropping, the clacking up top stopped, she put out a solid forty pounds of pressure at fast idle without climbing, and the primary stopped filling. (I think - it sure as shit slowed down if it didn't stop!)
Is this normal? I assume the check ball either wasn't seating or had some crap between the ball and seat, and since the bike has some odds-and-ends safety bullshit that needs pretty immediate attention, told him to check the primary level again after he next started it to see how bad it's sumping. (The bike sat for like five years or some crazy shit.) I figured if it did the same shit, we'd try and clean up his seat with a new check ball or some lapping compound, but if it was in pretty good shape, we'd chalk it up to the long spell it just sat for.
But can this feeding into the primary chaincase happen? Instead of crapping through the vent onto the garage floor, can Shovels offload that oil into the primary? I watched it for a bit with the inspection cover off, and it was fucking puking in there at the beginning of this little science experiment, but it seems to have stemmed right down to nothin'. I've only really worked on Blockheads, and those have sealed primaries, so I'm in the dark on this one. I pronounced this bike drivable for the time being, but I told him I'd ask all of you guys to give me a green light before it got my blessing - did I do right, or just fuck my buddy?
Thanks!
-L.
Buddy buys '81 FLH Shovelhead, appears to be an 80 in. (10 fins is a 74 incher, and 9 fins an 80 inch, right?)
Guy he bought it from knows fuck-all about the bike. Been setting a while, guy thinks it's got fucked up oil lines, because it's puking oil into the primary.
I got a diagram of the oil lines from the factory manual (fuck, that is a lot of lines. Four hundred and twelve separate vent lines.) I couldn't see every inch of every line, but it looked like the shit was all where it was supposed to be. Jim's aftermarket pump, but the line routing looked pretty close to stock, I guess.
I put a battery in. I opened the inspection cover, and oil barfs out. I put new 20w50 about halfway up in the oil bag, and start it. Bitch comes to life, and the oil pressure starts climbing to about fifty pounds, and the top end seems noisy. (The whole thing was noisy - drag pipes in a concrete garage!) Open the primary, pukes everywhere.
I repeated this process three times, and finally, the oil level in the bag stopped dropping, the clacking up top stopped, she put out a solid forty pounds of pressure at fast idle without climbing, and the primary stopped filling. (I think - it sure as shit slowed down if it didn't stop!)
Is this normal? I assume the check ball either wasn't seating or had some crap between the ball and seat, and since the bike has some odds-and-ends safety bullshit that needs pretty immediate attention, told him to check the primary level again after he next started it to see how bad it's sumping. (The bike sat for like five years or some crazy shit.) I figured if it did the same shit, we'd try and clean up his seat with a new check ball or some lapping compound, but if it was in pretty good shape, we'd chalk it up to the long spell it just sat for.
But can this feeding into the primary chaincase happen? Instead of crapping through the vent onto the garage floor, can Shovels offload that oil into the primary? I watched it for a bit with the inspection cover off, and it was fucking puking in there at the beginning of this little science experiment, but it seems to have stemmed right down to nothin'. I've only really worked on Blockheads, and those have sealed primaries, so I'm in the dark on this one. I pronounced this bike drivable for the time being, but I told him I'd ask all of you guys to give me a green light before it got my blessing - did I do right, or just fuck my buddy?
Thanks!
-L.