H-D's Hydraulic Tensioner and Oil Pump Upgrade

4. Once everything was out Brian inspected the main- shaft for any wear or discoloring, then did the same for the two cam bearings. This set was like new and did not need to be changed. Also all the oil ports and passages were inspected and everything checked out fine.

5. Here you can see the difference between the two pumps. First, the shape of the feed rotors on the newer pump, the cogs are rounder and the opening to the rotor is bigger for more oil (red arrow). Also, the flow port is bigger (yellow arrow) so more oil flows through. And with the new billet plate and improved design for a perfect fit you will notice there is no need for the inner O-ring, like on the old pump(blue arrow).

6. Next, Brian removed the cams from the stock cam plate with the help of a press.

7. The second part of this upgrade is the hydraulic cam chain tensioner; here is a look at the spring style with the load pin in place. The pin is used to unload the tension from the cam chain so that the cams can be removed.

8. Here are the new hydraulic cam chain tensioners, you can see there are no springs. How they work is as the motor builds up the oil pressure, oil is also pushed into the passages of the tensioners (arrows), pushing and holding the wear pads to the cam chain.

9. Next, the cams and chain were lined up with the timing marks then installed along with new bearings into the new billet cam plate.

10. This is where the inner hydraulic cam chain tensioners mount to the plate and how the oil flow ports lineup (arrows).

12. Brian installed a new oil seal O-ring into the oil port of the case, then installed the new style oil pump

14. Once the plate was torqued to 90 in-lb Brian needed to install the camshaft sprockets. With a small straight edge and a set of feeler gauges he was able to determine that 0.357 spacer was needed to ensure that both sprockets were aligned.

15. Then the camshaft drive sprockets, the primary drive chain, and the outer hydraulic chain tensioners were installed.

16. Wrapping up this install Brian reinstalled the pushrods, the rocker assembly, lifters, and the rocker boxes. Once the lifters had time to bleed down Brian adjusted the pushrods to factory spec.

17. Lastly the cam cover and the exhaust was reinstalled. The bike was wiped down then taken out for a test run. As soon as the bike started up it was easy to see that there was a difference in the motor. The idle seemed smoother but the oil pressure at idle was up 10 PSI at cold start up. This is what we found after testing the bike.