. . . very common unfortunately, indeed. Just because it's happening on a large number of bikes doesn't mean that it's normal! 
There is a huge difference between "normal" and "acceptable". Harley doesn't care what we think is acceptable. If they can make extra bucks pizzing us off with cheap parts and cheap designs, that's all that matters to them. Sadly, enough people accept this sort of treatment that Harley can get away with it. When people finally get fed up with being treated this way and stop buying the products, it will change.
If you go back to 2007 and the fiasco known as the CVO110, Harley was also telling people all those problems were "normal". Only when the huge number of failures made it impossible to cover up did they finally do anything, and even then they called it a product enhancement in the interest of customer satisfaction, not the recall and admission of defects it should have been. And of course they never did address the "normal" crankshaft wobble, other than to increase the allowable tolerance by 400% and then institute a severe throttle limiting software solution to keep folks from applying too much torque at low speeds and twisting their cheap crank into a pretzel. Same thing when they started having a ton of brake rotor problems; blow everyone off first with the "normal" BS, then come up with a bogus runout spec that is four times what the industry considers acceptable. Get used to it, it is obviously the way the current management intends to shore up profits and executive compensation. Let the next generation of management deal with the fallout.
btw, in the case of the neutral rattle they most likely have a valid point that it won't do any harm. But that still ignores the fact that it bothers a large number of their customers, and they have made no effort since they released the Cruise Drive trans to eliminate the irritating noise in order to satisfy the customers. I never expected they would.
Jerry
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Topic: transmission noise in neutral (Read 13568 times)