A Killer Custom Look For Your ’91 – ’14 Sportster

 

This handsome ribbed Cam Cover for ’91 to ’14 Sportster applications was designed by the folks at EMD to mount on top of your existing cam cover. Why ? Because they wanted you to be able to make your engine cool without having to mess with your camshafts blocks and have to bore and align your engine case with a complete cam cover.

 

 Made from cast aluminum, the EMD cam cover uses a trio of longer-than-stock bolts and aluminum spacers that go between the new cover and the stock unit. You can chose to simply bolt the part and leave your stock cam cover untouched or go whole-hog and trim it to match the new cover’s contours. In this quick how-to, we show you how we do it.

 

Here’s a cover mounted directly on top of the stock cam cover, without modifications. It looks much better than stock already, but follow us as we take this one step further. 

 

The tools you will need : A sharpie, a disc grinder, a cutting wheel and electric file. 

Remove your OEM cover and place it on the workbench. Position the EMD cover with the 3 supplied bolts and trace the cover’s contours. You will need to keep the bolts in place during the whole operation. 

We traced the outlines of the EMD cam cover.

 

You can either keep or lose the centering pin at the back of the stock cover; we decided it was wise to keep it.

 

Before you fire up the cutter make sure you remove the vent bung at the back of the stock cam cover.

 

Here’s the rough cut done with a cutting wheel. The idea is to get close to the outline; the rest will require more precision.  

 

We find it best to use a thin cutting wheel to get to your final shape. We make a series of cuts very close to one another. Next you can easily knock the remaining bits out with a grinder. 

We use the tip of an electric file to fine-tune the cut so both covers are in perfect alignment. 

 

You can grind down and bevel the shoulder on the vent boss because there’s plenty of meat left on that bone. 

 

After properly smoothing all edges until you’re satisfied with the fit, this is what it looks like. 

 

You MUST use the 3 supplied aluminum spacers in order to position the EMD cam cover over your stock part. We purposely made them a bit too long so there may be a gap between the two covers. You will have to grind them down until you get the perfect fit.

 

You may have to cut the three bolts down a little bit if they hit the bottom of the engine case before making the cover tight, but here’s the final fit.

 

Here’s the EMD Cam Cover installed on our show bike.