Help Looking - Low Profile Oil Fill

Glenn Boglisch said:

V-Man,
Does your tank sit that much lower than my 98. I have an edlebrook one and no problem adding oil without moving the tank. BTW what do you ride when you arn't riding the Hoss.
Glenn

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Glenn

I never really noticed that my tank sat lower. I guess I just assumed they were all the same. My bike is an 03, I will post a picture of my filler cover tomorrow. Maybe different covers were/are used :?: or maybe the tanks are lower now :?:

Here are a couple pictures of my other rides ...


Supercharged Valkyrie - not much "Honda" anymore!

Aprilia Caponord - Great "dual sport" motorcycle. I ride this one this time of the year ... NO chrome to clean and polish!

I try and put a few miles on my wife's Yamaha Warrior

Sorry for the quality of the picture ... I took a couple and this one is actually the best :roll:

This is my "pinky" finger shown between the oil fill cap and tank. I squeezed my finger in here, it is tight ... also gets tighter furthur under the tank. My finger is about 9/16" wide (when not squished).

Is this the same type cap you have Glenn?

V-Man,
If this works I will have attached a few pics of my collection (without a nice background like you have) and a pic of space on my 98 valve cover.
Glenn


The Wife's Toy ( I am not allowed to play with this one in the snow)


My winter beater. Use as everyday during the winter when snowing or roads loaded up with salt.


Old Suzukis (used in summer when raining and trying not to crap up the Hoss


And finally the space under my tank. I think it is quite a bit more than the new ones. ???

GRUMPY said:

V-man,

I think if you look at your front tank mounts, you'll see where they can be set up higher by losening the bottom of the attachments and rear clamps. Then slide the front of the tank up and slightly to the rear. Wag & I have '03 and have a lot more clearance than that.

We also remounted our tanks this winter. Drilled the frame out and tapped for the rear mount, raises it about 1/2" so it doesn't sit on top of the seat pan so hard. On mine, the front mount was also redrilled and moved so the entire tank moved to the rear about 1" to allow clearance for the NOS controller bracket.

It think all of the '04 bikes have the tanks mounted to the frame from the factory.

Tim

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I talked to Doug at the factory today about the way the '04 tank is mounted and he said they have welded a tab on the frame now so that the back tab on the tank bolts directly to the frame and the frame clamp is no longer used. Tim, your idea sure sounds like a clean way to get the tank relocated. I was never satisfied with the way the rear of my tank looked over the seat pan on my '01 and just yesterday I took some tabs I made for mine to the chromer so I can relocate the back of my tank. I am a little worried about drilling in to my frame even though its probably no big deal. The fix I am trying was to make a couple tabs that are longer than the ones welded on the tank. I am attaching the tabs I made with a button head bolt to the existing tank tabs and then the tab can extend farther down where i can use another button head bolt to attach to the clamp and get the height i was wanting for the rear of the tank over the seat pan. I also took the little extension tabs off of the front frame brackets to make the front of my tank lower. I was told that the '01 bikes have the front frame brackets welded in a little different location than the bikes that came later. I like the look of the tank low over the valve covers just high enough that I dont have trouble putting oil in. Just thought I would pass along what the factory told me about changes they made in the tab locations.

I thought i should revisit this subject since I had a problem last weekend with my bike and my low profile cap from Edelbrock. I had been running the low flat style cap from Edelbrock for over a year and 10,000 miles with no problem but last weekend I was riding and heard a pop and felt something hit my leg. I thought I had hit something on the road but when I went back to see what it was since I was riding slow around downtown Denver I found my oil fill cap on the street. I put it back on and went a couple more blocks when it popped off again. I then pulled the pcv filter out to the valve cover and held my finger over it and blipped my throttle a few times and when I let go a whoosh of air pressure came out. I wasnt sure what was going on so I called Adrian and he said that you must run a vented cap on our bikes or risk creating a vaccum in the crankcase and sucking in a gasket in engine. I had heard once someplace that you had to run the vented cap but wasnt sure if it was true or not. Sure would be a bummer to have to do major engine work to replace a sucked gasket. Like I said before I had ran this cap for 10,000 miles with no problem but maybe the rubber has swelled creating a better seal now? I like the flat cap better for looks and drilled some holes in the sides of the rubber seal where it plugs into the valve cover and have a good amount of air moving throught it now so I think I will keep running it but would like to hear what those in know have to say about it and maybe it will save someone from having a problem if they are running flat non vented caps and not aware of the potential for problems. Adrian said he had helped someone that had a squealing noise coming from their engine and traced it to this type of cap. :roll:

I had the exact same problem with my current bike. I bought the bike in Houston with less than 5000 miles on it . Rode it all the way home to central North Carolina and everytime I shut off the engine it made a real quick hissing noise. It seemed unusual but this was my first 502 and I was thinking it was just the nature of the beast. Put about another 2 or 3000 miles on it and someone at BikeWeek said hey do you know your bike is not vented? It may have been V_man now that I think of it. Same deal as you with the Edelbrock piston cap (solid). When you'd go to pull it out it'd pop off. Pressure. My bike has an unexplanable vibration around 18-2000 RPM that I can feel in the foot pegs. It doesn't effect the handling so it must be engine related. I have no desire to pull the engine to chase it down and figure that I'm riding it till I have to fix whatever. Runs like a scared rabbit but does use oil. I thought I was the only one but see where other 502's use oil, too so the oil issue may not be related to this. Gotta vent it. Some engine builders don't vent but ours needs to be. I have a general idea as to why but don't know enough about it to explain it. I used a Harley chrome breather (thanks for the tip , Neil) and mounted it up in front of my tank and it is connected to a gutted PCV valve. I finally broke down and paid for a valve cover from Mountain with the oil fill cap on the left end of the cover so I can now add oil and not even use a funnel. Well worth the money cause the other way was an extreme pain in the &%@.

Chris