VIDEO: How To Install S&S Cycles 1200cc Hooligan kit 883cc Harley-Davidson Sportsters - Part 3 - Assembly

Part 3 - Assembly - In this How to video, Todd walks you through the installation on a S&S Cycles Hooligan 1200cc conversion kit with oversized cams on a 2003 Harley-Davidson Sportster 883cc engine. These kits work on 2000-2018 Harley-Davidson Sportsters and can be installed on your motor with in a day spent in the garage. This episode covers from the setting of the rings on the pistons to installing the cylinders & cylinder heads and prepping the rocker boxes for install. If you missed part one the disassembly or part two of assembly of this series be sure to watch those first. These kits work on 2000-2018 Harley-Davidson Sportsters and come in silver or black.

So, break out the tool box and follow along. See how "There's no big mystery going on in there!" This step by step and does not skip anything, and will help you understand how easy it is to install this kit, beef up your motor and add some real horsepower to it.

Part 4 can be seen here.

Note: Disregard the cam portion of this video if you are only doing a big bore conversion kit install.

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Time Stamps:

00:01 - installing locating dowels into the top of the cylinders.
01:46 - Staggering the ring end gaps on the front piston accordingly.
05:00 - Make sure to remove rags out of the crank case from front cylinder.
05:06 - Install the base gasket on the front part of crank case, line up accordingly. 05:26 - Using a ring compressor, lube and compress the rings on the front piston. 06:14 - "Alright, let's give a whirl!" Introduce the cylinder back onto the front studs sliding it over the piston and rings.
06:37 - Take ring compressor off and slide the cylinder down the rest of the way. 07:49 - Be Careful and don't crunch your fingers.
08:14 - Repeat steps and do to install the rear cylinder.
08:23 - Staggered ring end gap overview.
08:51 - Using a ring compressor, lube and compress the rings on the rear piston. 09:24 - Install cylinder over the rear studs sliding it over the piston and rings.
10:14 - Scrape and clean gasket surfaces on cylinder heads
11:07 - Remove exhaust ring from the cylinder head.
11:20 - Remove the top pushrod o-rings from the cylinder head.
12:14 - Bath time! Scrubba dub dub, cylinder heads are going in the tub.
12:51 - Give'm a quick blow job. Ha!
13:13 - Installing the front cylinder head and pushrod tubes.
13:25 - Installing the new exhaust ring and upper push rod o-rings.
14:06 - Installing lower pushrod seals and pushrods onto the motor loosely.
15:58 - Put the MLS head gasket on and then introduce the cylinder head to the engine lining up the MLS head gasket and pushrod tubes.
16:53 - Installing the head bolts.
18:57 - Torque the front cylinder head properly.
22:15 - According to S&S, loosen and torque all over again in same sequence. 24:51 - Tighten the pushrod tubes at the bottom of the front cylinder.
25:35 - Installing the rear cylinder head and pushrod tubes.
26:38 - Torque the rear headbolts, note its a different sequence pattern.
28:37 - According to S&S, loosen and torque all over again in same sequence. 30:34 - Tighten the pushrod tubes at the bottom of the rear cylinder.
31:02 - Rocker box cleaning and preparation.
32:27 - Rocker shaft inspection and overview how to remove and reinstall.
34:28 - Clean up and remove any gaskets from rocker box ring and rocker box top. 36:48 - Need to replace gaskets on top 8 bolts or replace bolts with Colony
37:53 - Installing new breather valve on the intake side of the middle rocker box ring.
37:42 - Make sure to prep both rocker box assembly the same way.
38:24 - To Be Continued....

You can read the full transcription to this video here:

All right, you need to install these locating dowels in the cylinders before we put them on the bike. I've already installed one because I was trying to see what would be the best method. Technically, if you had a press, you could put this in the press and go down. Or you could put it in a hydraulic press and put something against it and press it in but since we don't have that, we are going to do it caveman style. I've got this brass punch.

That is softer material than the dowel I'm going to be beating upon here in a second, and immediately, it wants to go cattywampus. We're going to try to get it started. There it is. It looks pretty straight there. There she goes. You'll see there was no harm to the part because this is softer than that. Obviously, you don't want to use a steel punch on there, that may damage it, this is brass. It looks like it's just a little bit proud on that side. That looks pretty good right there. Install those four dowels then we'll be ready to go ahead and get these cylinders on there.

All right. The S&S instructions for the ring in gaps is just a little bit different than what I said previously about staggering the end. They've got it a little bit further apart. It's hard to tell in the drawing but you're basically going to find the end of that expander ring and then you're going to rotate that expander ring until that gap is facing the front. Then you're going to find the ends-- this is a tedious little operation. Sometimes you got to spin it around a couple of times. You got to find your ends of your rings. Okay, here we go again. I move that around, now, we need to see where the ends of the other rings are and you're just going to-- there is one of them. We're going to slide that away from the other one. Here's the bottom one. Oh, there we go. I'm going to move that away and then I'm going to find the top one.

Once again, we've got the expander in the middle, we've moved the bottom one over to here and we're going to move the top one over to about here. Sometimes you have to push these back out just to find that end and then you're going to rotate it back around so as long as-- Oh, wait a minute, there it is right there. Never mind. It's all good. It's right there. There's the end of the top one of the three on the bottom so we're just going to take and-- Sometimes you've got to use a pick or something just to slide that around. There she goes. There it goes. Basically, what we're doing is staggering the ends. Okay, there we go.

Now we have the top one facing here, the bottom on facing here and the middle one facing here. Now, according to what they want to do, they want you to do the top ring facing here. What we're talking about is the end where the gap is. There is the top one facing this direction. Then they want to do this next one down facing this way. Once again. You can see how everything all wants to turn so if something else turns while you're doing this, you can just put it back to-- There is that one. You just don't want all your end gaps to be lined up. Another good rule of thumb is you don't want it facing the intake or the exhaust if I remember correctly.

There we go. Now we have all our ring in gaps set to put this front cylinder on. We can go ahead and we'll take these out of here. Be careful with the piston and we'll go ahead and transfer those over to here. Then we can take our rags out of the crankcase. All right, we've got to put the base gaskets on. Don't be confused by the writing on there because one will go upside down because they're basically the same. This one's going to go over the four studs past your rings, down to the bottom. Then we've got a dowel right here to line up and a hole right there to line up and that's all there is to that.

Now, the next thing we're going to use is we have a piston ring compressor. This is kind of a necessity on this job. I don't really recommend trying to get it on there without the tool, although I suppose you could. I'm going to put a little oil on the tool like so and just get her lubed up so she slides. This is going to compress the rings because the rings need to be compressed to put the cylinder on like so. All right, let's give it a whirl. All right, that feels good. Take the compressor off. Hang on, let's take this off. It looks like one of the small rings may be popping out or if we just take it in with our finger, we should be good.

We have to take this out past the rod. It looks like in that very bottom. I think we're over it now. Don't crunch your fingers in there like I just did. There you have it, one cylinder installed. All right, so now we're ready to go ahead and put the rear cylinder on. We've got our base gasket installed. We've got all our rings located in their correct orientation according to the chart.

I will show you real quick here, there is that one, the end gap on the top ring, end gap on the middle ring, and the end gap on the bottom is kind of hard to see. We'll go ahead and get our ring compressor on there. Obviously, we took our towels out of the crankcase. Hopefully, this one will go on a little bit easier than the front one, it was hard to go in there at the bottom when it got to that last ring.

Take our stud protector off of there. I've put just a little bit of a Marvel Mystery Oil on the base of the cylinder. Again, proper orientation. There you go. After much difficulty we have both cylinders on.

We need to scrape the residue from the stock head gaskets off. The head gaskets off of there but look at all that scrub that's left on there. It's again razor blade at a 90-degree angle again like we showed you on the cylinder base and don't worry about this stuff going everywhere because we're going to wash these heads off too, but see if you just, you do that at a 90-degree angle it doesn't mess up the surface where the gasket goes but we got to get all this-- Look at all that screwed coming off of there.

We're not going to worry about that carbon on there. It's not a big deal. You also have an exhaust ring. It's easier to take these out with the head off the bike and also will reinstall them you just use a little pick and pop that out of there. That's your exhaust gasket. We'll be replacing those and we also have two O-rings for the top of the pushrod tubes. Those are going to get replaced.

We'll take all that stuff out of the head, head gasket surface cleaned. Now we're going to-- We'll give it one more shot here because it looks like there's just a little bit left right there. Then I'm going to spray some brake clean on it. We'll put it on the floor on a piece of cardboard spray some brake clean and then I think we might actually go over and wash these off with some hot soapy water and then we'll blow them dry.

The water won't hurt anything. The valves are closed we'll make sure we clean the ports and the springs all real good with, so there's no water left on there. They'll just look a lot better than they do now because we've got these nice new clean cylinders on there so we want to try to get these as clean as we possibly can. We're going to give this a little scrub down here with some of this cleaner and see if we can get these looking a little better than they do.

I would say that was worth the extra couple minutes we took there. Go ahead on back to the shop and blow these off. Let's go ahead and give her a quick blowjob. [blowing] It's time to go ahead and get the cylinder heads and pushrod tubes installed, whoo. Before we do that we'll go ahead and put our exhaust port gasket in there because it's easier to do it with it like this this, little chinga gets shoved in the hole there.

You got to push it in nice and straight, make sure she's bottomed out. It's hard to get to it when it's on there. There we go. We're also going to put the upper pushrod O-rings in these holes right here, like so. Then we're going to go ahead and put the lower pushrod seals in these holders with the tube. Well, hell, let's do it a different way. Let's put that on there first and then put this on here because you got to pull it over there. Slide it up a little. Putz around with it just a little bit more and then we're going to go ahead and put the pushrod tubes on the engine the right way around.

I'm not going to snug those all the way down until I get my head on. A new head gasket supplied in the kit. It sticks up funny. We'll be careful when we put the head on. It looks like it's located okay and we're checking up in the hole here to make sure that the pushrod, top of the pushrod tube is in that O-ring. That's what that will look like. Now, the next thing you want to do is you're going to go ahead and put your four head bolts in but you want to squirt some oil in here, like so. I go ahead-- I like to start all four by hand. As you'll notice as you snug those down it'll push the pushrod tubes up into those top seals and we've got these just snug, we don't have them completely tightened down yet.

You're going to be using a half inch 12-point. I'm going to go ahead and snug these down the rest of the way till I can feel that there at the bottom, like so. Now we're ready to torque the cylinder head. All right I was just reviewing the official S&S instructions here. Normally when you're using graphite head gaskets like what we removed from the engine you torque it 7 foot pounds, 14 foot pounds then an additional 90 degrees.

Well, since we're using these MLS gaskets which is multi-layer steel there's a different torquing procedure torque spec and so according to S&S they would like me to torque them to 10 to 12 then 15 to 17 and then the additional 90 degrees. Well, then they also want me to torque them all then loosen them then retorque them. We're going to follow the official instructions and they've also provided us with a nice little torque sequence. This is the front cylinder says drive side, cam side. This is obviously your drive side so we're going to go one, two, three, four on our torque sequence.

Let's go ahead and get started. I got my torque wrench set for the first round, this will be number one, there it is. Number two, there it is. Number three, then finally, number four. Okay, now we're going to go ahead and bump up. I'm going to do 10, 15 and then 90. I know it's the lower end of the spec but we are going to be loosening it again when we're done. Then we're going, number one, two, three, four.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and we're going to put a little mark on the head bolt, just a little die. I like to put them there. Then when it's 90, it'll be facing out. We'll go ahead and we'll do these from the other side because it'll be hard to see them from this side. As you can see, I've just put a little dot and then I'm going to tighten in 90 degrees, I'll end up right here. We're not going to use our torque wrench to go 90 degrees because that wouldn't make very good sense. We'll use this long handled ratchet here. Okay, number one. There's our 90 on that one. There's our 90 on that one. I like to do this all in one motion too, and number three is the front one. Then finally number four. Okay, so we went 10, 15, 90 degrees.

Now, according to S&S, they'd like us to loosen them and do it again. All right, let's do that. I'll be interested to see if my dots end up in the same place when we redo this. There they are, fully loosened. Okay, I'm just going to snug them back down to 10. I was darn near at 10 by hand. That's okay. Now we're bumping her up to 15. Whoa, would you look at that, our dots are nowhere near where they were before. We'll just grab a rag and spray clean, wipe those dots off and make some new dots. I didn't seem to have that much trouble getting on that one before. There we go. Got it. 

Okay, now we're going to do our final torque 90 degrees and be done with this one. Once again back to number one, number two, three, four. That's it. Front cylinder head is completely torqued. We'll go ahead and tighten these down now the rest of the way. I couldn't get a ratchet on there so I just grabbed a wrench, calibrated elbow method. Okay, this one's done. Let's move on to the rear.

We're going to go ahead and torque the rear cylinder head, the sequence has changed now. It's going to go one, two, three, four. Once again I got my torque wrench set on 10, same procedure different pattern. Now we're going to bump her up to 15. There we are 10 and 15. Now we're going to go ahead and do our 90 degrees. I did a little different on this one because it's hard to get in the back there so I put it here. I'm going to go to here. This will now go to here. Once again, this is number one and we're going to hear. 90 degrees. Number three is this one. Finally number four.

All right, now per S&S, we're going to loosen them and retorque it. We're setting torque wrench back to 10. Once again, 15 and ready to do our 90 degrees. Number one, number two, number three, and finally number four. Finally, we'll go ahead and final tighten the lower pushrod tube seal holders with the calibrated elbow torque method. Beautiful. That's it for the cylinders, pushrod tubes, and cylinder heads. All we got left to do is reinstall our front-rear rocker boxes in our intake manifold.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and get the rocker boxes cleaned up in preparation for putting them back on the engine. On an earlier model bike, you may find paper gaskets that you will need to scrape off. This year has metal gaskets, they come off in one big giant lump-sum. Yay. But you can see that the rocker box is pretty filthy dirty. It's got oil residue where the gaskets go. No scraping of gaskets. I think we'll just spray a little brake cleaner on or just try to get her cleaned up the best we can. I'm not so concerned about rocker shafts. We can show you how those work if you'd like. There's some rust on there. I don't think that's going to come off. We're also concerned with these grooves where the gaskets go. We want them to be clean. Once again a little brake clean works wonders, clean that off. Clean her off. Whoa, don't get that blue tile junk on there. That doesn't want to be inside the engine.

You may have noticed that I removed the bolts to do this. Well, we'll give you a little tip here. On the rocker shafts on these, they just slide in and out like that. Then your rocker comes off like that. Now if you may notice, we'll put her back in there because we're going to put it back together. We don't really need to lube this, they will get oil when she's running. You may notice there's that cutaway on there. Well, that is so that the ball can go past the shaft.

If you do take these out for any reason, you're going to put her back in there, like so. Then you could look down in the hole right there. Hell, you can push it out the other end if you want. Then you can see that needs to be lined up with the hole to put the bolts in. Oh, there's some stuff from our tile. You also notice the bolts that came out, if you do take them out they're all the same. Imagine that. That doesn't really-- Is not important. Then you got your three bolts that go here and your two that go here. We'll go ahead and--

I like to leave these in to start, it helps kind of locate the gasket, and so this is the front one because the rear ones over there remember we put our stuff on the workbench on the way it came off the engine so you do want to put things back the way they came for wear patterns. Technically they are interchangeable so it wouldn't be the end of the world if the kids came in and mix them all upon you. But you know what, I just like to put them back where they came from. Cleaned up.

We also have to clean these. Oh, now we'll scrape some gaskets. Here's our gasket here that needs to come off. Also our breather valve. You just get underneath it and pull it out of there like so. Not reusing the old one. We're going to put it in-- Oh, wait we got one more gasket there. Little gasket. Now there is a little bit of gasket transfer on there that we will clean that off. Definitely don't want, so you can see there's some of the rubber from that gasket on there. We're just going to give that a quick, get that rubber off of there. A little bit there. That's pretty good.

All right, then again, a little bit of brake clean on there, in those gasket grooves. Got old residual oil out of there. Any crap. Let clean these up a little bit too while we're at it. I don't see any gasket left on the other side. That's pretty good there. We'll go ahead and get this one a quick douche. Harley puts clear coat on all our aluminum so it's really not possible to polish this thing without stripping all the clear code off it. We'll just clean her up the best we can. Thankfully it's not super oxidized.

Okay, on all four of these bolts, the very top ones that go in those holes once this goes on there like that, and then this goes on the very top, there are sealing washers. They are stuck to these. Captive washer won't come off the bolt. Basically we're just going to get our razor blade, and we're going to get underneath that sucker, anyway we can. Oh, there we go. Almost there.

Hey, you know what? Forget all about it. Ah, let's use these, and we don't have to scrape any more gaskets. Yay. That ends that job. All right, then you just have to go ahead and repeat the same steps for the other rocker box assemblies. Now before we head over, I'm going to go ahead and put my new breather valve in and mention that breather valves there's two holes you could put them in because this could go front or rear, breather valves go on the intake side, so you're just going to stick it in the hole and there's a little titty sticking out the other side, hot titty and then you're just going to grab the titty and pull on it until the installed. If you look on the thing you can see there's a nubby along with the titty, and that little nubby just goes in that hole and keeps it in place. Bada Bing.