General Maintenance

Hey, Kevin Bass here. Vintage bike addiction. Bass, Metal Craft. I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about what you should know about your motorcycle before you swing your leg over. Now you think about road trips, miles stuff you do in your bike. Some people just ride and ride them, ride and ride them until something breaks. You don't wanna be that person. We want to really go through the bike every time before you swing your leg over to hit the road to make sure it's gonna be safe, comfortable and everything's gonna function. Right. We're gonna be going through this bike today and our friends from Dennis Kirk are gonna help us really do some upgrades on this. We'll be right back and we'll hit the ground running. All right. General maintenance on your motorcycle. This is one of those things that every garage builder out there can do themselves. You don't have to take your bike to a mechanic every day for every little thing. There's a lot of things you can do yourself and we're gonna show you today some basic checks, things that you wanna know about these bikes before you get out. I'm gonna take them mountain road. One of the key components I always tell everybody though is always get the proper service manual. The one that matches your bike, it's gonna tell you the ins and outs. It's gonna tell you tire pressures. It's gonna tell you oil capacities, uh viscosity, everything else you can keep your maintenance records in it. Get the manual, proper manual for your bike. It's gonna help you answer a lot of questions and make the work a lot easier. So starting with the general maintenance on a bike before you'd want to get on us to go on a road trip. Now I'm getting ready to ride to Sturgis. I wanna make sure this bike is ready to go. First thing you wanna do is what's touching the ground is your tires. So we always start the ground and work our way up. Always, always, always make sure that you have good tires before you hit the road. Improv inflation on those tires. Too much wear. It's gonna cause that bike to be squarely, it's going to be dangerous. The brakes won't function like they normally would and handling is going to be out of control. You want to be able to be safe, you want to be smooth, you want to be comfortable and you want to have a good ride. So we're going to look at our tires first and we're gonna work our way up from there. So with the tires in the manual. It states clearly that there is a side wall arrow, that arrow is located there for a reason and it has an indicator bar on the tire for you to look at. Now, if I turn my wheel so you can get a look at the tread, we are gonna see that this tread pattern has a nice deep groove zig zagging down what the type the indicator uh triangle says is a look in front of that. And once you see that the wear has been so much that this is no longer a solid uh groove going down, it actually is a flat spot that is definitely past due. You need to replace it. The other thing you want to look at is your side wall, make sure you don't have any cracks dry rotting. A lot of times these tires, they may look good just from a general visual inspection. But when you get closer, you might see some dry rot, they've been sitting out in the sun or they're old and that can cause the tire to uh fail on you going down the road. So really do a good job, clean your tire off. Good visually inspect. Look at your rim, make sure there's no dings or scratches or uh crack marks or anything that could have been a problem if maybe something got hit and then also um check that wear bar indicator. Look at your tire and make sure you got enough tread another way to do it as indicated in the manual. It says if it's 1 30 seconds of an inch or less, then, you know, so you can even measure that as well if you'd like to. So keep your tires good. Keep them in check, make sure you got good rubber on the road and you'll be safe and be able to go down those miles and have a smile on your face. All right, now that we've looked at our tires and we verify these have good tires on, we're ready for the road that way. Now we wanna look at our stopping power. You really have to have good stopping power when you're on the road driving, you wanna be on your defense. You wanna make sure that you can stop. If somebody doesn't see you, somebody runs through, um, keep yourself safe by having good stopping power in the manual itself. It does uh list that after the 1st 1000 miles, you should check your brake pads and after that, about every 5000 miles, um, they're looking at, you want to have the material friction to be about 0.04 of an inch. And if it's less than that, you want to replace it. A good, easy way for the general uh garage builder is just pulling on your brake levers or pushing on your pedal. What you'll notice is that when you have a real soft lever like this one and it comes really far in, that means one of two things. Ok. Obviously, it's uh, brake fluid could be low. Maybe we have a leak, but also as your brake pads wear and they get skinnier, it starts to get more throw. So it takes more of that brake fluid. So right now, just by me feeling this, I can tell either, I need to check my brake fluid first to make sure there's no leaks. And then I'm gonna look at my brake pads because this shouldn't be pulling in that far and easy. It should be a lot more stiffer and that's a good general way for you as a garage builder. Just to say, hey, you know what I get on here, that doesn't feel quite right. Maybe I should go look at it. Same thing goes for your rear pedal. When you're pumping your brake there, you should have a good firm pedal. And then if you see anything there that feels loose, check your uh, brake fluid, but again, check your user's manual measure that thickness. That's gonna tell you the, the replacement time that you really should have and then you'll be ready to go and get on the road and be able to stop safely. All right, now that we got our brakes and tires figured out now we're ready to swing a leg over this to check the oil. Now, to check your oil on this bike again. You want to check your user's manual. Look at the specifications, viscosity, things that you want to put into it. Good quality oil like spectra is always good to use, but you should get your bike warmed up to operating temperature before you do check that oil because your oil will expand and contract as it gets warmer and colder. So we've already pre warmed up the bike. The oil check on this bike here is right down here and you can see there's a little uh dipstick that I can pull out. I got a rag here, catch the oil. And what you want to do is you want to have a clean rag, wipe your dipstick off, make sure it's clean and dry to start. You'll see that there are some indicator marks on here, whether you need to add a quart, if it's full and you can see there here, it says full hot. So when it's all the way to the top, you know, you're good, then I'm gonna put it back in seat it and then pull it back out one more time. And we can see now that we have our indicator mark is up here where we're pretty good. We're almost to the full hot mark, just a little bit of a room there. But if we are below this, you can see in this area, we wanna add oil to it, add a quart. It says if it's down that low. So I may top it off with maybe a half a quart and check it again. But where our oil looks good. The other thing is to make sure that you change your oil regularly at the specified, um, maintenance, manual, uh, uh, recommendations. So, always be watching that keep track of your miles. Remember when you did your last oil change so that you can keep your oil clean and that's gonna keep your bike running really good and make it last a long time. Now that I'm on the bike, there's a couple of other things we can look at and one thing you want to do is just basic functions and controls of the bike to make sure everything's in working order. Now, do understand that these motorcycles do vibrate a lot when you're going on the road, things that aren't secured tightly will come loose, they could fly off. So if you have any aftermarket phone mounts, things like that always check them between each ride because they can come loose and I've seen it where these things come flying off and that can be a road hazard for somebody. If you're riding with friends, something goes flying off. You hit one of your buddies and they go down. Not a good thing. So always do a visual check things, just look for loose nuts bolts, anything that could be going wrong and then I'm gonna turn on the ignition switch and you want to let your bike kind of cycle up and you'll see that there's a little check engine light that comes on. When I first turn it on, it goes through a little cycle where it's checking everything. If you see any red flashing or any kind of warning signs after that, you wanna address that right away. And again, the warning signs, the, the uh, gauges will tell you what to look for in your manual. What's wrong. Now, you want to look at all your controls on this thing. Does my starter button work. Does my horn work? Do my high lows work, do my blinkers work? Ok. We'll start on the left side. Here, here's our lights. I can clearly see my headlight is on now, I can flip it to the high, I can see my high beam came on. I can flip it and see my O beam came on. That's important to do because sometimes if you have a burnt out high or low. Ok. That means when you're on a road, you don't have the other one. So if that one burns out now, you have nothing. So you always want to make sure you have both your high and your low before you start just in case one would burn out on a road trip. You're not going to be left in the dark. Ok. Then our blinkers got our left blinker. When I hit that button, I can see my indicator light here is flashing and I can look ahead, I can see that my blinker is working, front and rear, turn that one off. I'll go to the right. Same thing I can see my indicator lights are flashing and I can see it in the back. So we know our blinkers work. You really want to make sure that your blinkers are functioning because a lot of times people driving in a car, they will judge what they're doing based on if they see your blinker on or not. So if you're taking a left and your blinker is not working, they don't know that they think you're going all of a sudden they come up on you and they could, they could hit you from behind. So really, really be careful of that, make sure all your lights work. It's very important. Make sure that your blinkers work and signal and turn off in the proper times. I've seen it where the blinker switches get stuck on and somebody's going on the road while a car thinks that they're turning right and they go right through and they hit, they could get hit. So make sure everything functions properly. It's working as it should. Uh horn is always good to have that one. Took a little bit to warm up, but you want to have a good horn just in case something's happening. You need to, you need to put out the red alert like, hey, watch out, I'm here and then uh things like your stereo. Obviously, if you have a stereo, now you wanna check that for your speakers, how it sounds and just make sure that everything is in function in order. So before you go, you can trust that your gauges work, people are gonna see you, you're gonna be able to safely make your turns, make your stops and ride down the road without any issues. One of the easiest maintenance items that you can check always and it's gonna really help your bike run good. Is the air cleaner? Ok. This is a simple, simple fix. All you gotta do is Allen head screw, take the cover off, visually, inspect your air cleaner, make sure it's not dirty if it needs to be blown out or clean, clean it otherwise replace it. But if you have a dirty clogged up air cleaner that's gonna make your bike run really rich. It's gonna be hard to pull air. It's not gonna function and perform like it should. So one of the easiest, quickest things I always tell people before you go and before you swing your leg over is check that air cleaner, make sure it's nice and clean. Now, the other thing is when you get on this bike now and we want to start it. We've been through all of our checks here and everything looks good. We want to make sure our neutral safety switch works so that when we get ready to hit the starter button. This bike's not gonna wanna move out in the traffic. If I'm in gear, you'll notice that that neutral safety switch disappears. It's no longer there. So if I would hit the start button right now, this bike is going to lunge, it's gonna jerk forward and there's nothing worse than being in a crowd of people. And that happened. It looked like your first time on a bike, right? And also dangerous wise, you don't want to go run into somebody. So always verify, get it in neutral. See that your neutral safety switch is on. And I like to actually move the bike forward and back just to verify it is truly in neutral so that it's not gonna give me a false reading. And at that point, you got your neutral light on. Now you can hit the start button and see if it's gonna run when we hit our start button. We want to listen to how to start our cranks, make sure it's not stressed. It's not, you know, taking a long time to turn over and the bike should fire up fairly quick. So let's give it a try if it doesn't start up that quick or you hear a lot of stress in that starter, that's when you're gonna want to get into uh, mechanical stuff and pulling out that to rebuild it. But in this case, it sounded good. Uh, we're looking good and we went through kind of our basic before we get on the road to ride. Now we're gonna be ready to do one last major check. And that's something that a lot of people feel like they're not equipped to do. And that's the belt, this belt drive system on this bike. That's what keeps you going on the road. Older bikes had chains, chain drive that are rear, these newer bikes have a belt drive system. The belts last a long time. They're, they're very reliable. They do a good job but they do wear and you don't want to be in the middle of nowhere and have a belt failure. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn this bike around and go through the maintenance technique for checking your belt, make sure your belts got proper tension and it's not work. All right, now we're gonna inspect our belt drive on this again. You want to do that as the manual states, uh, at the 1st 1000 miles and every 5000 miles after that. But personally, for me, I like to check it every time I'm gonna go on a long trip because you never know when you might have picked up a rock. Some abrasion happened which is gonna cause that belt to fail. So if you know you're going on a longer ride, just check. Ok. Don't look at the mileage, just check it. It's better to be safe than sorry. Now, looking at our belt deflection um, we have a couple of different ways. You can check this. You can get this bike up on a lift which would have the tire hanging down or it can be, in this case, it's on its jiffy stand and you can still check it that way. Nobody sitting on it. No real heavy loads on it. Just natural. So looking at the manual, it does just state really easily. All we gotta do is remove the saddle bag. We'll be able to see the belt to inspect it. Obviously, you'd want to roll the bike forward and back, be able to check the belt all the way around it and then you're gonna check for that deflection to see what if your adjustments properly. So I'm gonna move around to this side of the bike. We're gonna take off the left saddle bag so we can visually see that belt open up the bag lid, carefully release the keepers and then we will carefully move this off site. Now, you can see where the belt is on this bike. You can see our belt drive system how it works. Again, on older bikes, there was a bracket here and it would have been a chain on these newer bikes. They went with this belt drive and this is a very reliable, lasts a long time. But again, you want to visually inspect it, look for any fray on the edges, any type of fray cuts, uh, divots racks that might have got stuck in there is gonna cause this belt to fail prematurely. So again, you'd want to have this bike up, roll it through so you can inspect the belt fully all the way around this one here. Just looking at it from what I see here looks real good, but I would check it all the way around. Now, it tells us for our tension. We, there is a tension gauge that you could use which most garage builders don't have. Um, you can do it just by using their built in adjustment here. So it says without a rider or luggage on the Jiffy stand, we want about a quarter inch to a fif uh 516 deflection. And there's actually a nice little built in gauge right at the bottom here. You can push on the belt and you can look at that gauge and see how far and ours is about quarter inch. So we're within spec right there. If it's too tight, that's not good because it's gonna pull on your main shaft, your transmission, it's gonna cause a seal to fail bearings to go faster. And if it's too loose, you could have a problem of it slipping, um, cogs here and causing problems that way. So make sure it's properly adjusted again. Follow your service manual for proper adjustment technique, how to do that and make sure that the belt's in good shape before you hit the road. All these things that we covered everything on the bike before you, you swing your leg over to get on the road. It's all general stuff that you can do as a garage builder. You don't have to take it to the a dealership. You don't have to take it to a shop. You can do this yourself. You just gotta understand that. Take your time, read the manual, do what's right and, and you know, you can do it and all these parts, components, anything that we do on these bikes, Dennis Kirk is there for you. They will ship today. You order your stuff in the morning. It'll be to you within a day or two. It's crazy how fast and things like new belts. If you would need them before you go new tires, fluids, uh, any kind of upgrade stuff, it's all gonna be at Dennis kirk.com and they will get you what you need and they'll give you a good price on it and you'll be ready to do your own customization maintenance and all these upgrades. So now that we've talked about general maintenance and before you would swing your leg over the bike, now we're gonna look at, we have this kind of stock bike. What can we do to do? Stage one upgrades? Make it look a little prettier, perform a little better and do things to it, to actually customize it, to become, you know, my own or your own in your case. And again, Dennis Kirk's there for you. They got everything, let's get this bike up and around and we're gonna get into it and we're gonna do a little upgrades on it.