Miles Turner

$875 for a brake job I used to do at home 👆🏼

I am not a mechanic. I am not selling anything. I just need every Tri Glide owner reading this to know one thing before they end up letting a dealer touch their rear brakes again. If you have ever rode two wheels for thirty, forty, fifty years before your hip or your knee told you it was time to add a third — this is for you. If you have ever put a Tri Glide on jacks in your driveway with a brake job to do and realized your three eighths ratchet would not fit between the caliper bolt and the fiberglass fender — keep reading. If you have ever paid the Harley dealer eight hundred dollars for a brake job you used to do yourself in an hour — this is for you too. My name is Miles. I am sixty eight. I retired from the Phoenix Fire Department in 2022 after thirty one years on the truck. Most of those years on Engine 11 out of central Phoenix. I have pulled people out of cars on the I-10 at three in the morning and I have walked into burning houses on Christmas Eve. The job took my back, both knees, and most of my hearing. It did not take my Saturday mornings in the garage. I rode two wheels for forty seven years. Started on a 1978 Honda CB400T when I was nineteen. Moved to a Sportster in 1985. Never not had a Harley since. Last bike was a 2014 Road King I rode hard and put up wet for nine years. Then in 2023 I had my left hip replaced. The surgeon told me I could ride again at six months. He did not tell me about slow speed balance. The first time I tried to put a foot down at a stop sign in front of a Circle K, I dropped the Road King in the parking lot. Could not pick it up alone. Sat there on the asphalt at sixty seven years old waiting for a guy in a Tundra to help me get her up. He did not say anything. He did not have to. I sold the Road King the next week. I bought a 2018 Harley-Davidson Tri Glide Ultra. Vivid Black. 19,000 miles. I told my wife it was a graduation, not a retirement. Nobody at the trike rallies warned me about the rear brakes. Here is the thing about a Tri Glide that nobody mentions in the brochure. It weighs eleven hundred pounds dry. Add fuel, two-up rider, top case, and luggage and you are pushing fourteen hundred pounds. Most of that weight sits over the rear axle. Which means the rear brake pads on a Tri Glide eat themselves alive. Harley's own service interval calls for rear pad inspection at seven thousand miles. Every Tri Glide owner I have ever met replaces them at twelve. Twelve thousand miles is one Daytona, one Sturgis, and a couple of weekends to Sedona. First time I needed a rear brake job, I jacked the Tri Glide up in my garage and started looking at the bolts. The rear caliper on a Tri Glide is buried behind the fiberglass rear fender on the passenger side and tucked behind the parking brake cable bracket. The two caliper mounting bolts sit in a recess where the fender curves around the axle housing. Maybe an inch and three quarter of clearance. I could see the bolts. I could touch them with my fingertips. I could not get a ratchet on them. My three eighths ratchet handle hit the fiberglass fender lip before the socket could seat. My stubby ratchet got the socket on but only swung about ten degrees before hitting the parking brake cable. My flex head ratchet folded under the torque and the socket walked off the bolt. My universal joint extension deflected sideways every pull and twisted the socket off the bolt head three times in a row. I crawled out from under the trike, sat on the concrete floor, and looked at my hands. Bleeding knuckles. Sixty seven years old. Forty seven years of doing my own brakes. And I could not get a single bolt off this thing without rounding it. I called the dealer. Eight hundred and seventy five dollars for a rear brake pad replacement. I asked if I had heard him right. He said it is a flat rate job on these. The labor is the access. He told me to bring it in next Tuesday. I brought it in. They charged me eight seventy five. The rear brakes squealed in the parking lot on the way out. I drove home, jacked it up again, and looked at the caliper. The bolts were two foot pounds under spec. Same gap. Same access problem. Their tech had used the same flex head ratchet I had and called it good. Here is what nobody tells you about Tri Glide rear brakes. Harley designed the Tri Glide rear axle with the trunk and rear fender as a single fiberglass unit. The caliper mounts on a bracket inside that unit. The factory installs the caliper bolts on the assembly line with a custom angle spindle nobody outside York Plant has ever owned. After that, every brake job is supposed to require partial removal of the rear bodywork. Most dealers do not actually remove it. They do what you do. They snug the bolts to whatever feels right with a flex head ratchet that folds before it gets to spec. Eight seventy five gets you the same bolts torqued the same wrong way you would have done them yourself. Picture trying to thread a needle with a piece of cooked spaghetti. That is every flex head ratchet, every universal joint, every wobble socket I had under the trike. The bolt was not the problem. The bolt was just steel in aluminum. The problem was the geometry of every tool I had ever bought. Last March I went to Daytona Bike Week with my wife. We stayed at the Hilton on A1A. The trike lot at the Iron Horse Saloon is where the older guys park, and most of them are on three wheels. I walked the lot looking at builds the way I have walked it for twenty years. A guy named Charlie was wrenching on his 2014 Tri Glide. Seventy three years old. Retired Boeing machinist out of Seattle. Forty thousand miles on his current Tri Glide. He had a rear caliper off and the pads in his hand. I asked him how he was doing it without pulling the fender. He held up a blue steel bar. About fifteen inches long. Square drives on both ends. A bend in the middle. "Another bent bar," I said. Charlie laughed. He pressed on the drive end. Inside the bar, I saw something move. A chain. An actual roller chain running down the inside of a sealed steel bar. He told me every other tool in your box bends at the moment of torque. This one does not bend. The chain takes the bend for you and keeps the load moving in a straight line to the socket. He said he had been using it for six years. Said he had not pulled a Tri Glide rear fender once in that time and he changed his own pads every twelve thousand miles. Eighty nine dollars. The Daytona dealer wanted eight seventy five for a brake job that would come back in twelve thousand miles. Eighty nine dollars and a guy named Charlie next to a 2014 Tri Glide who handed me a tool and told me to bring it back if it did not work. I ordered it that night from the hotel. Saturday morning I jacked the trike up in my garage in Phoenix. Slid the bar into the gap between the caliper and the fender. Socket seated flush on the bolt. No deflection. I broke both caliper bolts loose on the second pull. Pulled the caliper. Replaced the pads. Re-torqued the bolts to factory spec for the first time since I had bought the trike. That was eight months ago. I have done one more brake job since. Twelve thousand seven hundred miles between pad changes. Forty five minutes from jack-up to rolling out of the driveway. No fender removed. No knuckles bleeding. No eight hundred and seventy five dollars to a dealer who could not do the job right anyway. I have used the same wrench on the front caliper. On the auxiliary battery box bolts. On the saddlebag mounting hardware. On the engine guard mounts. Every bolt that lives in a gap where my flex head used to fold. Every bolt I had been avoiding for two years because my hip would not let me crawl under there a second time on a Saturday. There are bars on Amazon that look the same from the outside but do not have the chain drive inside. Charlie was very clear about that. Without the chain it is just another bent bar that flexes under load, which is the whole problem you started with. The company only sells direct from their site. If you ride three wheels and you have ever paid a dealer eight hundred dollars for a brake job you should have done yourself, I left the link in the first comment. Just in case the next caliper bolt is the one your hip cannot afford. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench