Adventure Bike Rider Forum

Thank you for all this input, I live in Dumfries and Galloway.

There are seemingly so many people's version if doing things the "right" way that I was looking for a definitive course to try and resolve these questions.

As an example there are people who swear that chain tension should be checked with OR without the rider on the bike - and they both can't be right !!

Dr Rich;)

DrRich wrote: As an example there are people who swear that chain tension should be checked with OR without the rider on the bike - and they both can't be right !!

At the risk of contradicting what I said above, this one did actually catch me out, put the new chain on, got it to what I thought was the right tension, but then my mate pointed out that when I was on the bike everything changed - it was far too tight and you could tell just by looking at it. I suspect this came about though as I had the bike of the ground on a lift-up stand, if I'd done it on the ground it would have been somewhere about right. Someone more practised may come along and say different, but in my case, it was check it with rider on the bike.

On most bikes I've never heard of a chain being adjusted with the rider on board, for two reasons that immediately spring to mind.
1) How do you do it if your on your own in the booies?
2)What happens if you have a mate of say 20 stone, and you are say 8 stone, assuming that the 20 stone bloke is clueless you will adjust the chain 2.5 x more than it would be for you.
The hand book will give the settings by deflection from the longest run, whether it be 25 mm, 30mm etc.

Glad we cleared that up then !!

Actually you can make an excellent case of either approach.

Shaft driven it is then !! No ABR merch for me :huh:

mark1150 wrote:On most bikes I've never heard of a chain being adjusted with the rider on board, for two reasons that immediately spring to mind.
1) How do you do it if your on your own in the booies?
2)What happens if you have a mate of say 20 stone, and you are say 8 stone, assuming that the 20 stone bloke is clueless you will adjust the chain 2.5 x more than it would be for you.
The hand book will give the settings by deflection from the longest run, whether it be 25 mm, 30mm etc.

+1, spot on.

Read and set it to the owners manual, these are the people who spend much cash testing and then compiling the settings and instructions.

This is what I do anyway and it's never caused any problems for me.

Btw, I'm not keen on complete novices just diving in to maintenance on bikes or cars etc.

I have an engineering background albeit I've been a self employed builder for last 7 years and I'm still wary of tackling jobs I've not done before.
I'll research jobs I'm planning on doing to discover any common mistakes, additional parts that the manuals might not tell you to replace etc.

The above said, some people are not methodical so I could see some potentionally dangerous bikes around if some of the jobs aren't done correctly.

There is a lot of precision jobs on an bike, torque settings, close tolerances, the average diy'er wouldn't do the job correctly IMO.
Rather than waste time doing it wrong then paying someone to put it right is crazy, do the basic stuff but leave the precision stuff to experts unless you're very competent or you are planning on being places where there won't be any support.

Spending many hundreds on specialist tools would finance a garage doing the work for quite a while.

Sorry for being negative but I don't wanna see a thread up in a few weeks, 'please help, my once working bike is now fooked, what have I done?'

Like a previous poster said, your local college is probably a good place to look. I know my hometown of Wakefield seems to have quite a few evening courses for basic maintenance stuff.
Here's link, not sure if it's much use to you.
http://www.wakefield.ac.uk/studywithus/ ... search.y=0
wish i could do the course, it's one of the few things about the place that make me wish i still lived there.

good luck

Hi we run an Evening class every Wednesday,covering from basic to whatever you want.
Its a bit of a treck from Scotland though.I would have thought there would be a College near to you running a similar class.
One of our Students travels from Norwich down to East London for the class another from Oxford.
Anyone passing is more than welcome to pop in for a chat and a cuppa ,6.30pm till 9.00pm term time untill Easter.

Waltham Forest College,Motorcycle Engineering Dept.Unit 10 Lockwood way ,
London E17 5RB
John

Slimbo of this Parrish used to run a basic mechanics course for charity.
I'll ask him if he intends to run another one in the near future