Kickstand Assembly Installation

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Kickstand Installation

  The factory calls the kickstand a ‘Jiffy-Stand’ but to most of us it’s still a kickstand like the ones we used to remove from our bicycles to save weight.

Regardless of whether or not you’re running a foot clutch or foot shifter the kickstand is mounted ‘on top’ of the rocker clutch backing plate or the foot-shifter backing plate. Both plates share a common set of mounting holes, and the kickstand is bolted on ‘last’ in the assembly sequence.

The bolt pattern, the housing or ‘mount’ and the kickstand ‘leg’ have remained the same from model years 1936 to 1986 on the EL, and later FL, FX and FXWG 4-speed bikes so it’s not a problem finding these used and cheap compared to a new assembly that sells for around $70.

Nobody pays much attention to their kickstand until it fails, and the old original Harley stand is almost indestructible. I’ve heard of a few bending but never breaking or failing to function even when caked with grease, dirt, gravel and other crud.

You can buy some sleek new modern designs. Some requiring a little welding to install a new mount point and others bolt to the stock location. To me most of these ‘modern’ stands look like they belong on a decorator desk lamp but that’s just my opinion. These new stands also have a bad habit of failing to work and sometimes breaking completely.

Even though the old Harley kickstand design is around 80 years old even seven-year-old schoolboys know exactly what they are if shown one. Almost as much as the motor itself, the original stands just say ‘Harley’.

The mounting holes are obvious in the backing plates so just bolt the ‘housing’. In place with the bolts that are usually provided. Sometimes the spring tab is made integral with the mount and on some mounts it’s a separate little bracket.

Once the assembly is mounted insert the kickstand leg into the housing from below but don’t put the ‘pawl’ in place yet. To keep from busting a gut trying to stretch the spring into place just rotate the arm forward a considerable distance. Insert one end of the spring hook into the mounting tab on the housing and then the other hook into the eyelet on the arm as shown below.

Once the spring is in place Rotate the arm rearward until it’s almost perpendicular to the frame and install the pawl with the supplied washers and nut and everything is finished. Note that the pawl only goes on one way in order for the stand to work as illustrated below.

The ‘long’ edge goes to the front of the bike and the ‘short’ edge goes to the rear.

A lot of riders install a small rubber or felt adhesive-backed pad or bumper on the frame where the stand rubs when it’s folded back. When all is finished you should have an assembly that looks like this.

If you happen to get a spring and leg assembly that simply seems almost impossible to hook, together take a Dremel tool with a fine tapered emery point and radius the hole on the leg mounted spring tab and ‘round’ over the tip of the spring. Coat the areas where the chrome was worn down with clear nail polish to prevent rust. Slightly bending the hook so it approaches the hole at a different angle can help make things easier as well.

There is no rule that says you have to use parts exactly as they come out of the package. Almost everything will need a little work here and there.

If your bike is going to be one of those where the front of the frame is going to be considerably higher in front than what’s typical, you’ll need to order an extended kick stand leg like the unit shown below. This will reduce the bike leaning at an extreme angle when it’s parked.

When it comes to ‘bolt-on’ parts of any kind you’ll often have to ‘grind’ or drill a little on mounting holes even on custom made parts. Minor misalignments in bolt holes are common even with factory parts. The bolts included with most part kits are generally either too long or too short for the intended application so be prepared to buy some fasteners that fit properly.

For mockup work I just use cheap hardware store fasteners but make a list of sizes that you’ll need later on down the road when you start buying good fasteners. Colony and others sell a variety of chromed but good steel fasteners.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll get installation instructions with most part kits but unfortunately these more often than not show parts that don’t resemble what you purchased and are more or less kind of generic illustrations so be prepared to ad-lib as necessary. Since almost all aftermarket part kits are manufactured offshore nowadays don’t be surprised if you get a lot of metric fasteners and bags of nuts, bolts, washers, circlips and cotter pins that have nothing whatsoever to with the primary parts in your ‘kit’. What’s the most frustrating is to get SAE threaded fasteners where the bolt heads are smaller than spec, somewhere in between being metric and American so no wrench fits them properly.

During the mockup for this article, I found out the hard way that not all kickstand parts are interchangeable from one manufacturer to another even though all of the stands I typically use carry the same OEM part number. I’ve been putting this bike together from bits and pieces collected over the years and I had three old but still in wrapper kickstand mounting brackets (I call it a housing) and about five old legs but no two parts were compatible with each other. The are subtle but problematic differences in the various parts from various manufacturers. The point being that you should order the ‘entire’ kickstand kit from a single source to save some aggravation.