Since my new tanks should be here tomorrow, I went out today to yank the cruddy old ones off the bike. First thing I did – I had drained the tanks the other day – was remove the fuel crossover line. Holy WTF is THAT Batman… I was using a small glass dish to catch the little bit of fuel in the line, and the gas that came out was full of black schmutz and a pretty sizable piece of tank liner. Sumbitch.
A closer look at the schmutz revealed it was full of tiny shiny bits. Hoping that it found its way into my tanks via a dirty fuel tank at a random gas station. Otherwise, not even sure how that happens.
Moving on to operation yank the tanks…
Generally, this is a simple process: unscrew the trip odometer stem, remove the acorn nut that holds the dash on, pop the dash off, and then unbolt the tanks. Maybe an hour’s work by myself because it’s a bit tougher to manage both tanks when they are loose, right? Oh. But. No.
No. No. No. No.
It took me all day. ALL DAY.
The trip odometer stem would not unscrew. Well – it turned just fine, but whatever it connects to in the speedo clearly had broken, so all it did was spin. It caught in the other direction just fine, but unscrew? Nope.
I felt like a complete idiot. I tried everything I could think of, but this tiny little aluminum stem was holding up progress. I called the master of all things Harley, Chris Tribbey, to see if maybe there was some sneaky trick that would magically back that stem out. He suggested a couple things – neither of which paid off – maybe because I was already impatient, maybe because I didn’t have quite the right tool. Regardless, I ended up zip wheeling the stem off so I could remove the dash. I was careful but still nicked the dash with the zip wheel. Sumbitch. The dash was still tough to remove, and in so doing, I snapped the male part of the trip odometer. So the speedo is now completely useless to me.
FINALLY removed the damn dash, ordered a new speedo and odometer stem. Then I got busy pulling the tanks. At this point, it was near about 3:00 p.m. I think.
Meanwhile, in the middle of this shit show, my IT guy got back to me about my computer, which crashed yesterday. So I had to put the tanks on hold to give him remote access to my PC, only to say that he couldn’t find anything, so I should plug it directly into the wall to see if that fixes it. Guess I will crawl around under my desk tomorrow and do that.
Regardless, operation Yank the Tanks is complete, and operation Battle Rattle will commence once the new tanks arrive. I have a very busy weekend ahead. Goal is to have the bike running by Monday. We will see how that goes….
The Atomic Shovel 