FTR coolant junction

wallycycle

wallycycle

Member
Charliemurphay said:
Did mine today. Installed the full Samco kit. I did it the longer way and went in through the top, removed everything down to the heads including throttle bodies. Getting that deep wasn’t difficult but finagling that new junction into place took some effort. I ended up removing the thermostat housing, setting the new junction in place on the two head pipes, then shimmying the thermostat housing back in place under it and rotating both together to get them to link up. I think going in over the top was definitely easier than only going in from the sides. But it depends on how deep you wanna get. This bike isn’t difficult to take apart imo, just time consuming. This was all part of my pre-winterazation maintenance.

They're calling for snow this weekend.
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I replaced my coolant junction yesterday from the side. Understatement: it's a bitch of a job, for many reasons. Access: there's so little room to work, so much in the way and the "arms" of the junction so short. Spring Clamps. Regardless if you use the 13mm socket to hold them open, the "arms" are so short that there's no room to slide them up out of the way from the clamping area as you're trying to slide them on the fitting. I had two different brands of the cable-remote clamp tool and neither worked as I couldn't get the jaws to ratchet open and stay open wide enough for the clamp to clear the fitting lip. Not to mention again no room for those jaws. Getting the OEM out was a job in and of itself but at least I could yank and pull with abandon. I purchased new OEM spring clamps from Indian to use in the installation of the new junction. After an hour of trying to get the new junction in I gave up and decided to try it from the top. That is until I realized I would have to remove so much stuff, and even then as mentioned by Charliemurphy, access still isn't easy and getting the three fittings into the three holes still requires a "lucky technique". I walked away from the bike and returned a few hours later determined to succeed. I held open the forward cylinder spring clamp with a small thin wall 14mm socket. The other two clamps I used 16" long nose needle pliers to hold open the spring clamps and a third hand to lever a long ratchet extension against the frame to press the junction into place over the fittings. For me, the sequence worked better this way: forward cylinder, rear cylinder and bottom thermostat (with a hard rubber support under the thermostat so it wouldn't move when levering down on it. Oh yeah, and a thin film of O-ring silicone in the insides of the junction openings to facilitate sliding on the fittings.

In retrospect, the job would have been easier if I didn't use the OEM spring clamps and had used worm-drive style or T-Bolt style clamps.
 
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