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.
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?
Anyone else?
The point I was trying to make earlier is to do with vibration or frequency of vibration. If you drop a ball bearing on a steel plate it bounces. Strike two hammers together and they spring apart. Weld a big flat bastard file to a old flywheel or a bit of thick plate and film it with a high speed camera when it hits the ground, it will flick and bend like a fishing rod. If you tried to bend it that far it would be close to snapping. Some metal parts will make shapes like a guitar string vibrating. Everything vibrates, we just don't see it happening if it is not in our range of vision. A couple of classics are, one of the Holden tailshafts, which if kept at 120 or 140 kph will start to try and shake the car apart. Another is a bench grinder, when it starts up and stops it goes through vibration periods, that is why something that seems well balanced will shake the bench as it goes through these vibration frequencies that have nothing to do with it being balanced. If you've ever been in a shearing shed when the grinder used for grinding the combs and cutters is slowing down it will shake the shed if the mounts are in some way connected and you will hear it over 100m away, this is a balanced machine. Keep that picture in your mind of metal things vibrate at speeds which you cannot see, you usually just get to see or hear the effects of them doing it. Which was the reason for suggesting a high speed camera, then it would be possible to see if it was lofting, bouncing or something else. If things didn't vibrate you wouldn't be able to hear anyone speak, in some cases that would be an advantage.
Take a spring, if there was anything which was designed to vibrate it would be near the top of the list, somewhere near the guitar strings. The old fashioned way of trying to cure valve bounce was to use multiple springs of noticeably different rates so that there was one or more springs that were not in a vibration period at the same time. The solution was to make a spring of a varying diameter and spring rate so that no two parts would be in the same period at once. Then one spring can do the job of two or three springs with reduced spring pressure, wear and tear on the valve train. We have a spring, a valve, some metal parts all in a row, being impacted at 50 times a second near the rev limiter. Any play in the system is going to cause a party to happen at some point, multiple points more likely as each bit of metal tries to bounce off the other ones. Back to the first line again if your trying to picture what the valve is trying to do, the spring is trying to do and the pushrod and the lifter are trying to do all at once. If you dropped a valve on the floor, does it stay there, no it bounces. The thought of what the cam is getting at one end is not pretty as it is the one fixed thing in the system if there is any free play in it. Makes an overhead cam look really good in comparison, much less weight to push back and forward, a lot less harmonics to deal with. Sure if you spend enough you can make a Harley rev, but is it worth it?
How to cure what is going on, one option might be to adjust the lifters as per the instructions and then they will take play out of the system and also reduce the stress on the system with the dampening effect of the oil. No cam information supplied, so will assume that the cam is made to run with hydraulic lifters. Then cam manufacturer would then have made the cam profile to allow for the hydraulic lifters being used, hydraulic lifters are already factored into the profile. Is there any evidence that running a Twin cam (assuming that it is a twin cam as not stated either) with as little clearance as possible in the valve train can actually show an increase in the power output ? Nothing to show it does from what I've seen so far. If your trying to get the valve to do something different, why not use a different cam that gets the valve to do what your trying to achieve and set the lifters as reccommended, everything might be happier in there. Was there something about instructions still being in the packet unopened.
Anyone else used the limiters and how did it go as its not looking good so far. Thats the problem with the net, one problem and every one hears about it, something goes right and not much gets heard.
Captain, as you are aware the function of a Hydraulic lifter is to maintain as close as possible to zero valve train lash.
I'm absolutely positive that the function of a hydraulic lifter has very little effect on valve train harmonics.
As you mention, the spring would have the most effect, the very small amount of damping available in the lifter would be hard to measure. Pushrod flex would have a more dramatic effect.
Solid lifters can be a good choice for the simple reason that they offer the best valvetrain control at high rpm, and suffer no problems with lifter fill, bleed rates or pump-up. But they will require constant adjustment, and that's where they fall down in a production vehicle. I'm not sure if have taken into account that when setting a lifter near the bottom of it's travel when using a limiter, the lifter is still running within the designed adjustment window, and when the engine warms up and the valve train clearance grows, the lifter will pump up to compensate. What do we now have ?.................... A functioning hydraulic lifter.
Hoody has stated most of this in his earlier post.
This thread is deteriorating. The guys who make the lifters probably thought of that, after the first few hundred thousand units, that would have been well covered, if they are making or designing the cams as well it would have been well covered too. If the pushrods start to flex far enough to effect the valve lift, it might not be working anymore. Its interesting that all the S&S lifters are not fitted with the limiters, only one set is, and there were a couple of performance ones listed from the quick look I had the other day from the main page. A lot of their stuff is available if you have the right part number but not shown on the website unfortunately.
I tried to think of another example to try and make it clearer and the only thing that comes to mind is the toys that people used to have on their office desk, with about 5 ball bearings hanging from bits of string, Pull the end one out and let it go, they bang backwards and forwards for a while. The same thing in slow motion. As for the valve spring, a camera is about the only way I can think of to catch it in the act of dancing, or trying to slip a bit of paper under it with the motor running. If the bit of paper can be pushed under the spring, it has started to bounce away from the head and is not perporming its function properly anymore. Using heavier valve springs may not be fixing the problem. I haven't looked on Youtube for an example as there is so much junk on it and I see it the same way as I see facebook. Remember the old stereo type of going to someone's slide night of their holiday pictures, getting bored to death = facebook and much of the web. Most of the action stuff seems to be from kids who's biggest source of excitement has been a Nintendo or someone who doesn't get out much. Real useful content is nearly always missing. Was going to put a suggestion about something else to put on there but, sense of humor is unknown.
The original post was about how loud the valve train was, just tried to filled in a few blank spaces. Hoody had some good stuff, most of which is not new to me, but I don't agree with all of it.
Back to work...
edit in, look up; "Vibration, sheet metal hit at 1000 frames per second"
another edit in, went web searching; google search "valve spring float movie" First one that comes up shows a valve spring going through a vibration period, not the best video to watch but it shows it really well, after going through the vibration period it goes on to higher revs working fine, it looks like they change the movie speed a bit which does not help. Can't see what the rest of the valve train is doing either. About the third video is one of a 14,000 RPM BMW bike engine, not the best video either as the the camera speed is not matched to the revs of the motor very well, so its hard to see if its going through any vibration periods other than possibly the speed of the spring rotation. Would show what the cams are doing as well if the camera speed was better matched up, notice the spring type/construction that they have used to get to the rev limiter of 14,000 RPM. Neither of these movies had a tacho in there unfortunately. Getting bored and distracted, must be time to knock off and go home.
