I have just fitted some S&S Lifters with travel limiters. I use the method S&S suggested
1. Cam on base circle
2. Set 32tpi pushrods at zero lash
3. extended Pushrods 4 turns ( at 3 turns the valve started to lift of the seat)
4. waited 15/20mins to blead of ( Valve still lifted of the seat)
5. shorted pushrod until valve was seated and had slight drag on pushrod rotating with fingers ( this was about 1 full turn of the pushrod).
6. backed of 2 more flats and locked down( S&S say 6 flats but from what some Yankie experts say I went 2 flats)
All seams good, pushrods all rotated with fingers after adjustment and engine turns over by hand with no issues.
Anyone that has used the Travel limiters how does this all sound?????
working on a set of premiun S&S lifter's into a 124 & another set for a 145 c.i. , did not like the way they felt in the bore's , mic up the body & both sets are 0.001 " greater @ 90 deg to the axle pin shaft low on the body , compared to the rest of the body , been clamped too har when pined , + were slight less dia compered to stock lifter's a little bit loser in the case bore's , i have use a few set's of these before but ?
Just joining in to keep track and learn a bit. The bee hives are made so that the spring rate is not uniform, a uniform spring will have harmonics, its unavoidable. They change the diameter and spring rate to try and get a single spring to handle higher RPM's by avoiding the harmonics, thats my understanding of them. Are the limiters your talking about, the ones that stop the lifter collapsing at high lift and RPM's. Might need to go find the part number, as was going to put them in mine as well. The lifter noise can sometimes be the lifter landing back on the cam if it has a very fast closing rate from the lifter not being able to keep up with the cam profile. All that extra valve train weight from the pushrods and lifters having an effect of needing heavy springs to keep it working properly compared to an overhead cam. It's a lot of weight to accelerate up, stop and accelerate back down again 50 times a second at 6000 RPM.
To add a bit to the S&S lifter limiter installed lifter adjustment method ,when they say they want the lifter on the base circle of the cam, for the average guy this means very little when he stands in front of his bike with the tool box slightly ajar ready to strike ,,, It is easier to set the engine on top dead center firing ,as this is the time you want both valves shut no matter what lifter is in use ,basically turn your engine forward as the inlet lifter on the cylinder you are working on is falling to the bottom of its travel then turn the engine forward with a plastic probe in the spark plug hole till the piston is felt to be at the top of its stroke ,also both lifters for the cylinder being adjusted will be stationary at this point ,if you can see either lifter of the cylinder you are working on moving at this point you are on the wrong stroke ,,,use a plastic probe ,no screwdrivers ,scribers .or anything rigid ,I have repaired a few plug holes due to someone cocking a tool in there as the engine was pushed over by spring pressure from the opposite cylinder . As for the turns down from zero lash ,this is not super critical with lifter limiters as all we are chasing is the point the hydraulic unit seats on the limiter ring and holds the valve open ,so tightening the push rod rotation ,then completing the adjustment after a period of time for bleed off to find the point where the push rod just rotates freely then back of to the point you are going to use ,be it 6 flats 2 flats or barely off tight .When you tighten the adjusters use brand name tube nut spanners as this will give the widest flank engagement of the hex’s also they don’t need to be Kenworth stupid tight ,some poor prick might have to undo them in the future, but do recheck the lock nuts after a good ride just for insurance . The point I made about heavy and light push rods was to do with the horsepower chasers of the forum, the guy who has put in a mild cam and tune would probably enjoy the impact on his invoice by the simplicity of the easy fit push rod with no great detriment to his engines performance. PS: no aluminum push rods,, might as well cut up a pool cue and put that in.
Maybe I'm wrong but are we trying to make solid lifters out of hydraulic ones. If you need that type of performance maybe just use solid lifters, the stock ones are hydraulic for a reason. One way to keep the micro bubbles out might be to assemble them immersed in oil in an icecream container. Been a while since I touched mine, maybe I'll find out soon.
Not getting much work done either and the list is getting longer...
Last time my bike was apart, there were two of us doing it as my mates place had the most tools. I was moving house so all my tools were not readiliy accessable, he had a lathe in case we needed to make anything and mine was not set up, the only tools I had to bring were the bike lifter and the cam bearing tool. We set out to do it in a weekend but it went slowly. As he is not a Harley owner he got a lot of free laughs of me having to use the die grinder to get the clearances for the new bits in the heads. He rides Jap bikes and I coped a load of how a Harley is an expensive museum piece for two days as I had now become a retarded, dumb, Harley owner. Fitting bits that didn't fit took time. I think Harley just makes clearances bigger so that stuff fits easier. The result of this was he started putting the lower valve train back together so we wouldn't be still at it Sunday midnight. What he did was pull the lifter apart, immerse it in oil in an icream container upside down, push down the insides so the air bubbles could escape, filled and flushed with clean oil by pumping a more few times, reasemble without draining the oil out, didn't take long for each lifter. The only tools I remember him using was needle nosed pliers, engineers tool for picking out seals or circlips, a small screwdriver and a magnet on the end of a extendable tool like a car aerial. I told him to follow the F..ing instructions, thats why they are there, but he has been working on motors all his life and I trusted him as he wanted to do it his way. He's a fully qualifed mechanical engineer from uni, not the diploma job. He said he would have them back in and fully adjusted before starting the motor. As it was 18 months ago I can't remember every thing we did as I was busy with the heads on the other side of the bike or pinching tools back he had swiped when I put them down. But I think at one stage he asked me to turn the motor over by hand to pump some oil through or it might have been to check where the pistons were. I remember him insisting the piston at TDC firing stroke to adjust the push rods and wanted my help to check it or turn the motor over. Some of the theories and technical explanations he can come out with would decimate almost any ideas on how or why you think motors really run, kept us a bit distracted. He makes his own 2 stoke exhaust systems so he can tune his dirt bike motors to how he wants them, all pre planned out with maths before he starts making anything.
End result. He had the new cam in, all the lifters fitted, bled down and S&S pushrods adjusted, job finished, all done before the motor was started. My lifters which are the standard B motor lifters (which if what is often written on the web is true (lol), are the best ones to have) with a .625 lift cam selected for quick opening and closing, runs as quiet as a stock motor. NO LIFTER NOISE which I was not expecting to achieve as it seems a common problem. I joined in post to keep track about the limited travel hydraulic lifters as S&S sell a limiter which goes on the stock lifters which should do the same job for about 10% of the cost. In the next few months when there is free time will be feeding the Harley addiction by rearranging the motor again so want to know what to look out for when adding the limiters while its apart. He said that years ago they had 20 or 30 lifters to do for car motors, they would stand them all upside down in a pan with the oil high enough to cover them. Heat the pan and the air would expand and bubble out. For a standard car hydraulic lifter this was the quickest, easiest way of doing a lot in one go and he could be doing something else while the air was bleeding out. That was how they stopped lifters making a noise = happy customers.
Keep thinking that each time the motor is started there would have to be air bubbles pumped through the oil system or heavy use would aererate the oil as well, which would start it ticking if it is from trapped air somewhere, but not so far.
Not a tick or a tack or a tick ticky tick taack, did it work for anyone else?
Went to have a look on the S&S website to see if they sell solid lifters, but the website was unavailable and I don't have the time to go searching all day. I your talking performance, then if a Harley 120 was to make as much HP per cc as a 600 sports bike from 14 years ago back in 2000 it would be producing 400 HP, all day, every day and thats staight out of the box, unmodified, not struggling to get 120 HP. 750's from the late 80's (25 years ago) made as much or more HP than a 103 (1700cc) Harley does today and thats without the extra Harley weight penalty factored in. When people talk about race gear or performance for Harleys and race use only, race against what, it needs to be kept in perspective.
Anyway jokes aside, back to the the thread topic. Is the cam they are using is designed to run with hydraulic lifters or solid lifters. If it is an S&S cam and they don't sell solids (which I didn't find out), then you would presume that the cam profile was made to run with hydraulic ones and the amount of loss of length or variation in length from using hydraulic lifters would have been factored into the cam profile by the manufacturer already. If your lifters are working properly the gain might not be worth the extra noise of stopping the hydraulic ones working properly. Do you actually gain anything on the dyno by having the minimum possible amount of adjustment as opposed to what the manufacturer says to set them at?
Might borrow a ultra high speed camera one day and film a Harley valve train working, could find out a few surprising things, then you could see whats really going on instead of guessing. Don't know if this website could handle a file that size.
Didn't follow up on a lead I was given, that if my lifters were cr4p, then to try ones out of a small block Chevy. Not sure if its the twin cam or the models before it but apparently they can be a workable alternative. Mine ran fine, so never followed it up or bought one and put them side by side and see if it would work, was given a part number but its long gone, there was no need to buy a whole box full of lifters. The range of parts available if it did work would be much better and likely much cheaper as well, A set for one motor would do a few Harleys. Could probabley get a set for a V8 for the same price as a set for one Harley from Screamin Chicken.
Back to work again...........
S&S make an insert for there lifters that limit travel. The idea being that still have some hydrolic adjustment at low rpm but become solid as rpm rise. They were not expencive but I did not get them because I wanted to keep it simple as I had not chaged lifters before.
I should of read a few more posts. You guys already talking about them Hahaha
They looked like the best of both worlds to me, keeps the hydraulic self adjusting feature and a limiter to stop them squashing at revs if they get lazy, also a lot cheaper than a new set of lifters. Anyone tried them?