American V-Twin Motorcycle Torque Manual (Measuring Proper Fastener Tension For Installation Of All Parts and Components Book 1)

As you probably already know, there are hundreds of nuts and bolts that hold the components together on your motorcycle. And, these components need to be fastened together correctly to make sure that your bike performs as safely and flawlessly as it was designed to.

Many mechanics and garage type motorcycle builders do not correctly follow torque specifications or, sometimes, completely ignore them altogether. Although there are some bolts that can simply be “snugged down”, the majority of the hardware on your motorcycle should be torqued to the design engineer's original specs.

Here's why:

The contact surfaces between any components that have been thoroughly analyzed for stress, fatigue, strain, or thermal expansion need to be fitted together within a certain tightness tolerance in order to successfully meet the design requirements.

The reason is the tightness between two components will affect many variables, including, but not limited to, vibration, stress, fatigue life, strength, thermal cracking, and durability.

With insufficient bolt tightening on a specific component, there is an obvious problem because overtime the normal thermal and vibration cycles can loosen the bolts and lead to particular component failure. And, if the bolts are loose, they may be subjected to abnormally large amounts of shearing force and can easily break.

Over-tightening is also a huge problem and sometimes even worse than under tightening. The bolts need to be able to stretch to compensate for the increased thickness of the parts due to thermal expansion. If the bolts are too tight, then they lose their stretching ability and can fail when a component expands due to high operating temperatures.

A good torque wrench is a necessity when you're doing any assemblies. However a torque wrench is meaningless with having the proper torque specs!

In this torque manual, you’ll find the torque value for virtually every nut, bolt, screw, stud, etc., for every component on an American V-Twin motorcycle. Something you need to keep in mind when dealing with various aftermarket parts and components is that the manufacturer of a certain part may have their own suggested torque values.