Bolthero Facebook ad: “I almost gave up on a Shovel I've owned for 44 years”

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I've owned a '78 Shovelhead FLH since 1981. Last summer a vintage Harley specialist in Albany quoted me $1,400 to fix an oil leak my brother Eddie showed me how to fix on his Shovel in 1981. If you've ever wrenched on a Shovelhead, you already know which bolts I'm talking about. My name is Mike. I'm sixty-five. I retired two years ago after running an auto body shop in Schoharie County, New York for thirty-eight years. Sold the business to a kid who'd worked for me for nine years, took an eight-month break, then started showing up two days a week to help him out because retirement was making me crazy. My wife Patty and I have been married thirty-eight years. She retired from the school district business office in 2022. She gardens in the morning, reads on the porch in the afternoon, and tells me when I'm working too hard. The bike is a 1978 Harley Davidson FLH Shovelhead in midnight blue. Original 80-cubic-inch shovelhead motor, 4-speed transmission, kick-and-electric start, dual-disc front brakes that were Harley's first attempt at a modern setup. I bought it used in 1981 from a guy in Cooperstown for twenty-two hundred dollars. He'd put nine thousand miles on it. I've put a hundred and four thousand miles on it since. My older brother Eddie taught me to ride. He was eight years older than me. Started riding when he came back from Vietnam in 1973 — drafted in '71, two years in country with the 4th Infantry Division near Pleiku. Came home, bought a '69 Shovelhead the next month with his GI Bill money, and rode it until 1995 when he had to stop because the cancer in his liver had spread far enough that he couldn't kickstart it anymore. He died in '96 at forty-one. The doctor said it was Agent Orange. The VA agreed in '02 and Patty and I helped his widow get the benefits. Eddie's old Bell Magnum helmet sits on a high shelf above my workbench. White with a black checkerboard band around the bottom. He wore that helmet from '74 to '95. His widow gave it to me at the funeral and said, "He'd want you to have something that fit him." I've never moved it. Patty asked me once if I wanted to put it in a glass case. I told her no. It's a working helmet. It works by being where I see it from the lift. My garage is a 24x30 detached I built in 1998. Concrete floor. Wood stove I run for ten minutes when it's below thirty. Saturday mornings I'm in the garage by 5:30 because that's the time I've started Saturday mornings since 1973 when Eddie first put me on a bike. Coffee in a mug that says 1B FORD AUTO BODY — the shop I sold in 2024. The radio on a Schenectady classic rock station. Patty doesn't ask when I'll be in for breakfast. She brings out a thermos around eight. The Shovelhead is the best motor Harley made before the Evo era. It'll go forever if you keep up with it. But there is one thing every Shovelhead does eventually: it leaks oil from the oil pump. The Shovel's oil pump mounts to the front of the timing cover area on the right side of the engine, held in by three bolts. After enough heat cycles and gasket compression, the pump-to-engine interface starts to weep. It's not a catastrophic failure — most guys live with it for years. But eventually the gasket fails enough that you need to pull the pump and reseal it. The job is straightforward. Drain the oil. Remove the lower frame guard if you have one (I don't). Remove the three bolts. Pull the pump. Replace the gasket. Reinstall the pump and torque the bolts to spec. The catch is the lower bolt. The pump's three mounting bolts are arranged in a triangle — two on top, one on the bottom. The two top bolts are accessible with a regular ratchet from the side of the bike. The lower bolt sits between the pump body and the lower frame rail with about three-quarters of an inch of clearance. With the bike on a lift, you can see the bolt. Reaching it with a normal tool that has any swing arc is another thing entirely. Last spring I noticed the leak getting worse. Big enough now that the cardboard I keep under the bike was getting stained instead of just spotted. Time to do the gasket. Three-eighths flex-head ratchet. Folded at twenty foot-pounds. The bolt needed twenty-five. Wobble extension on a deep socket. The socket walked off the bolt every time I leaned. The bolt is an Allen-head — a cap bolt — and the wobble made the Allen socket cam out of the head. Caught it twice. Stripped it the third time. Stubby ratchet on the Allen socket. Five degrees of swing. The frame rail is right there. Five degrees on a forty-seven-year-old Allen-head bolt is meaningless. A "Shovelhead oil pump bolt wrench" I bought off V-Twin Forum classifieds for thirty-two bucks from a guy in Pennsylvania. He sent me a video of it working on his '74. My '78 has a slightly different lower frame configuration. The wrench wouldn't fit. Sent it back. In the bottom drawer of my chest there's a row of these. A Mac flex from the early '90s. A Cornwell wobble. A Lisle universal. A Husky stubby. Combined: maybe a hundred and seventy dollars of tools that all flex when you load them. None of them fit between the Shovel oil pump and the lower frame rail. That's how I stripped the lower oil pump bolt's Allen socket head. I sat on the wooden stool next to the lift. Looked up at Eddie's Bell Magnum helmet on the shelf. The wood stove ticked through a heat cycle. Patty walked through the garage on her way to the garden, looked at the bike, looked at me, and said, "Eddie used to do this on his bike, didn't he." I told her yes. She said, "Then you'll figure it out." She kept walking. She wasn't wrong. I called the vintage Harley specialist in Albany Monday. They quoted me $1,400 to do the oil pump gasket and another $300 to deal with the stripped Allen socket. Seventeen hundred dollars to fix what Eddie taught me to fix in 1981. I sat in the kitchen and Patty asked if I'd called anyone else. I told her I was thinking about driving up to the AMCA Wauseon Meet in July. Patty said, "Drive. You haven't been since '08." In July I rode the Shovelhead down to Wauseon, Ohio, for the Antique Motorcycle Club of America national meet. The biggest vintage US motorcycle gathering of the year. Three days, every bike from 1900 to 1985, swap meet that takes a full day to walk, and a campground full of guys who've been wrenching on shovels and pans and knuckleheads since most of us were children. I'd been going off-and-on since 1996. Saturday afternoon I was walking the antique row when I noticed an older man — late seventies — trying to lift a vintage carburetor out of a cardboard box. His left hand wasn't cooperating — looked like a stroke had taken some of the function. I walked over, asked if I could help, and we lifted the carb together onto a folding camp table next to a '47 Knucklehead. His name was Sterling. Seventy-five. Retired tool and die maker from Toledo, Ohio. He'd been to every AMCA Wauseon Meet since 1972. Owned three Shovels (his '69, his '78, his '83), one Pan, and the '47 Knuck he was working on at his folding table. He had a USMC eagle-globe-anchor tattoo on his right forearm, faded but clear. The kind they did in Vietnam. I said, "Marines?" Sterling said, "'67 to '70. Two tours, Khe Sanh and Hue." I said, "Thank you for your service. My brother Eddie was Army '71 to '73, 4th ID near Pleiku." Sterling nodded. Didn't make anything of it. Then he said, "Eddie still around?" I told him no. Cancer in '96. Sterling didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "Sit down." I sat at his folding table. He poured me coffee from his thermos. We talked about Eddie for a while. Then he asked about my Shovel. I told him about the oil pump leak. The lower bolt. The stripped Allen. The dealer quote. Eddie's helmet on the shelf above my workbench. Sterling listened. When I was done he said, "You ever try a chain-drive bar?" I said I didn't know what that was. He went to a hard-sided motorcycle bag on the back of his folding chair and pulled out an orange metal bar. About fifteen inches long. Solid steel. Square drives on both ends. "Press on the end," he said. I pressed on the square drive. Inside the bar, something moved. Not flex. A chain. A roller chain that transferred torque through the offset angle. The bar stayed rigid. The chain inside did the work. Sterling said, "There's a guy four sites over with a '76 Shovel that's got the same oil pump leak. He's been working on it all weekend. Let's go." We walked over. The other guy — name was Bobby, in his sixties, from Indiana — had his '76 on a stand with the oil pan drained and the pump halfway off. He'd been trying to break the lower bolt loose for two days. Sterling slid the BoltHero between the pump body and the lower frame rail. Allen socket seated on the bolt flush. No rock. He handed me the ratchet. "Pull, brother," he said. The bolt broke loose on the first pull. Forty-nine years of heat cycles on a '76 Shovel. First pull. Bobby said something I won't print. Sterling just nodded the way old wrenches nod when they've already learned what you're about to learn. We did all three of Bobby's oil pump bolts in five minutes. Then Sterling told me to bring my Shovel over. Mine was in the trailer next to my truck — we walked it over and got the lower bolt out next. Took Sterling's trick of approaching from a slightly different angle to get past the stripped Allen socket, but it came out clean. Sterling told me about the company. www.getbolthero.com. Sixty-nine dollars. He said order direct — there are knockoffs on Amazon that look identical but they don't have the chain drive. Without the chain it's just a hollow bar that flexes like the hundred and seventy dollars of tools in my bottom drawer. I ordered one from his folding table on my phone. Sterling said, "Tell Eddie I said hello, when you get a chance." I did. Patty knows the cemetery. We go in May for his birthday. I rode the Shovel home Sunday with the oil pump gasket in a fresh padded envelope in the saddlebag. Did the job the next weekend. New gasket. Three new bolts torqued to spec. Bike hasn't dripped a drop since. I've used the BoltHero twenty-six times since July. Other Shovel bolts I'd been working around. The starter solenoid bracket bolts buried behind the oil tank. Two primary inspection cover bolts that I'd been adjusting with a 1/4-inch open-end wrench. A cam cover bolt I'd been working around since '97. Three bolts on Patty's brother's '83 Sportster Ironhead. The dealer wanted seventeen hundred for a job Eddie taught me in 1981. The wrench cost sixty-nine. The math is simple. The math always was. The hard part was riding to a meet I hadn't been to in sixteen years to find out a Marine named Sterling knew exactly how my brother died and exactly which bolt I needed to break loose. Patty asked me a few weeks ago what was different. I told her the Shovel didn't drip anymore. She said, "Eddie would be proud." I told her I knew. Eddie's Bell Magnum helmet is still on the shelf. Sterling and I write each other letters once a month — actual letters, on paper, because Sterling doesn't do email and I don't mind. He sent me a photo last month of his grandson sitting on the '47 Knuck for the first time. The kid's seven. The orange bar sits on top of my workbench. Where I can reach it. If you ride a Shovelhead, a Pan Head, a Knucklehead, an Ironhead, or any Evo — you already know the bolts I'm talking about. The oil pump mounting bolts on the lower side. The starter solenoid bolts behind the oil tank. The primary inspection cover bolts. The cam cover bolts that nobody can reach. You don't have to call the dealer about it. www.getbolthero.com Sixty-nine dollars. Order direct.

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getbolthero.com

I almost gave up on a Shovel I've owned for 44 years 👆🏼

The BoltHero PRO is a chain-driven offset extension wrench that reaches bolts your ratchet never could. At 0.63" thin and 15.4" long, it slides past cables, pipes and engine blocks with zero swing arc needed. Works with 1/4", 3/8" and 1/2" drive sockets. Rated to 72 Nm. Backed by a 2-year warranty a...