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Thursday, May 3, 2012

Clutch pulled and problem discovered

I borrowed a clutch spring compression tool from a local indie and opened up the clutch. I found a disintegrated spring plate in the middle of the clutch pack and broken rivets all over the place. Also, the neighboring friction plates were eaten away by the broken rivets. Also, a groove has been worn in the clutch basket by the springs leaves from the spring plate that were no longer held in place by rivets. Argh! Terrible design. Terrible failure mode. Fortunately, I did not ride the bike too much after the failure occurred. The groove is not bad and and the burrs on splines where  the groove is can be filed down, I hope. I have decided to eliminate the spring plate from my clutch by replacing it with a St-F-St combination (St=steel plate, F=friction plate). I measured the thickness of the spring plate and St-F-St stack and they are within 0.005" of each other, so I think I am good to go. I ordered parts from LSHD1.com (Lake Shore HD) and am waiting now. Also ordered a Helicoil kit to repair the thread on the primary cover where the clutch cable screws in. That's been on my list for a while, but I did not want to pull the primary cover. Now I had to pull it, so...

Pictures:

Clutch spring compression tool doing its job by compressing my clutch spring
Disintegrated spring plate
Friction plate damaged by failed rivets

Primary cover off and clutch out

Another view of failed spring plate
Clutch out of the basket
Groove worn by failed spring plate

Another shot of the groove and burrs on the splines





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3 comments:

  1. John ByunSeptember 12, 2013 at 1:40 AM

    Hey, found your blog while searching for an answer but I have the same problem and found that my spring plate failed. I also have the same grooves on the clutch shell but I'm stuck as I can't seem to remove the plates that were behind the spring plate because the grooves created some burrs.

    Did you have the same problem and if so, how did you remove the remaining plates?

    I'd greatly appreciate if you could email me at ywbyun at gmail.

    Thanks in advance for your help!

    ReplyDelete
  2. pcontimanSeptember 21, 2015 at 6:09 PM

    This has happened to many many sportster owners, any idea why Harley did not issue a recall ?

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete

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