yeah thats my dirt bike riding buddy Travis and that's his first street bike. He wanted cheap (to see if he liked it) and small to get used to it. Perfect bike to learn on. 200 miles in he is ready for a bigger bike. He loved my Buell.
Travis I get it! Bought my first roady after riding dirt bikes for over 40 years. Don't quite know what to think of the pavement yet but I'm liking the the adventure vibe. Going on a 250 mile ride around south Gifford this weekend and can't wait.
Quick super fun 135 mile rip yesterday when I had a few hours free. The Buell Uly is perfect for me and my choppy back road riding.
It's been hot here, and I had all the FZ suspension stuff ready to be installed. My WR250 is off-line for a while until I get new fork seals. Too hot to ride anyway. There is no water to go fly fishing. My lower back is acting up. So I figured wouldn't put off doing the work on my FZ. Put in new, heavier, Sonic front springs with heavier fork oil. Also put in a freshly rebuilt 2008 ZX6R rear shock with heavier RaceTech spring. While I had the tank off I also wired my Garmin AMPS connector and removed the CA emissions charcoal thing. So after some of this: I did some of this: No, it wasn't a dirt ride. I just pulled a couple hundred yards off the main road in my now favorite street riding area to take a leak and have a snack: Even with approximate sag settings The new rear shock is worlds better than stock. No more butt-clinching porpoising coming through corners. And the scary front-end dive on decel (and brake dive) is gone. For a few hundred bucks the bike went from just a notch above dangerous in corners to pretty amazing. The fork work got me though. On work day, I put the whole bike back together. Loctited and torqued everything to spec. My buddy and I took her for a couple quick spins in the neighborhood and high fived each other for a job well done. Then I started putting tools away, look on my work bench and what did I see sitting there? Why that's the right side rebound adjuster rod! Well, I had to break it to my buddy that we weren't done. Even though I only had to pull one fork tube, I cannot compress the spring myself. So we decided to meet after work the next night and finish the job. It went fast. Maybe a half hour to pull the right side fork, compress the spring and drop in the rod. Put everything back on, and retorque to spec. Take it for another ride. High five again. Then I tried to adjust the rebound on the right side. Huh, the adjuster won't turn. After some swearing and a bit of rumination, we figured the adjuster rod was bent or jammed somehow. Back onto the stand she went. Pulled the fork again. And just as I pulled the fork I remembered reading something on the FZ09 forum about setting the rebound adjuster back a few turns prior to reassembly. So, it was at that point I decided to open the service manual to the fork section. Sure enough, you need to back the rebound adjuster out so it is at 13mm from the base of the cap bolt. Then you set the damper rod locknut to 12mm from the top of the damper rod. Thread the cap bolt to just touching the damper rod locknut, hold the cap bolt and tighten the locknut onto it. In the end it was worth the aggravation. Now, though, I'm committed to helping my buddy do exploratory surgery on his Toyota Tundra's transfer case to find a leak. I think I'll leave the looking up of things in the manual to him, though.
its nice to put some labor-hours into the bike and get a better performer back out. nice pitbull stands, i have two different brand stands for mine but it is nice have them. people will spend hours trying to figure a way to jack their bike up with wood, jack stands, and floor jack. i just spent the 70 bucks and got a front steer head stand, done deal.
[quote="justintendo, post: 543918, member: 6445"nice pitbull stands[/quote] Yea, those stands were a Craig's List find! $180 for both. The pin I ordered for $8 on ebay got stolen out of my mailbox. So I did what any normal garage tinkerer would do. I started looking around the place for an approximately the same sized piece of bar stock. Found an old bar that was pretty much exactly 20 mm or 3/4". It was some kind of landscape bar with a bunch of holes in it and a pointed tip. I cut it off so one of the existing holes would line up with the bolt hole in the pit bull stand. Lightly tapered the end with a grinder. Painted it with rust inhibiting primer and called it a day.
The Pit Bulls are awesome. They made a custom stand for the weird Ducati Sport Classics at first and the we all complained that we wanted something less prone to the bike slipping off and they offered up a new model and a good trade up. I need one of the front stands as well. At times one does need the floor jack and the wood blocks, like when you need to remove the rear shock to send off to be rebuilt. I blocked the frame with a block over rear tire and under fender/frame as well as jack and wood block supporting under engine while shock was away
