Mouth-watering!
By TMX Archives on 12th Jan 04
I'VE NEVER been so excited as I was when I found out that my gorgeous - and now sadly ex - girlfriend's dad was an ice-cream man. I'VE NEVER been so excited as I was when I found out that my gorgeous - and now sadly ex - girlfriend's dad was an ice-cream man. After that amazing discovery the second most exciting moment in my life came on the first day of the Dirt Rider Expo when Doc Wob said to me, "it's in the van kid, come and get it now if you want". Well this van didn't have musical chimes and 'it' wasn't a reference to a double scoop 99 with triple flake - oh no, he meant something much better...this year's dbr long-term test-bike.I was almost dribbling with anticipation when he rolled the green meanie down the plank. The bike sat on the dbr stand at the show for a tantalising four days - inheriting a trick Fro Systems fuel-cap along the way (cheers Mr McCann) before I could load it in my van and take it to its rightful home oop north!Since the Doc had already broken the beast in and changed the oil and filter the bike was pretty much ready to go. So after double checking the oil and water levels, making sure every nut and bolt was tight, popping in a clean air-filter and checking the chain and cable adjustment there was only one thing left to do - check the rear suspension sag.Now to do this properly you'll need your bike, riding kit, bike stand, a tape measure or a long steel ruler, two buddies (the editor and designer of dbr will do if you're really struggling) and the tools required to make the necessary adjustments.Step one is to place your bike on the stand so the rear wheel is clear of the floor and the suspension is at its point of furthest travel. Now measure from a fixed position on the swingarm (the centre of the axle is a good place) to a fixed point on the bike (I used a magic-markered mark on the rear fender) - on dbr's KXF it's 638mm.Remove the bike from the stand and with all your riding kit on and buddy #1 balancing the bike for you, get yourself sat in the middle of the bike in a relaxed position while buddy #2 re-measures the distance between the centre of the axle bolt and the rear fender. The measurement we got was 515mm. Now you need to subtract the second measurement from the first and this will tell you how much sag you've got.Here's the mathematics:638mm - 515mm = 123mmSimple huh? The amount of sag you need differs from bike to bike but on the KXF you really want to be running around 95 to 105mm which means the spring pre-load on my KXF needs adjusting.To do this the Kawasaki manual suggests you remove the seat, loosen the air-intake boot clamp, remove the silencer and then completely remove the sub-frame before attacking the lock and adjusting nuts with hook wrenches (Kawasaki Part #57001-1101). But on the KXF there's more than enough space around the rear shock absorber to turn the nuts with the aid of a long, blunt-ended punch and hammer - be careful when doing this as you really don't want to be damaging the shock body. Adjust the nut clockwise to increase spring tension and anti-clockwise to decrease the spring tension. Depending on the pitch of the threads on the shock body a complete turn of the adjuster nut will effect the sag by about 3-5mm either way so with this in mind adjust away.When you think you've adjusted it enough pump the suspension up and down a couple of times to re-settle it and then get your buddies (or colleagues) back to re-measure the distance between the axle and fender with you sat in the middle of the bike in a relaxed position. Hopefully you'll have got it right but if you haven't you need to re-adjust and re-measure until you get it bang on. Whatever you do, don't forget to tighten the lock nut up and, if you went through all the rigmarole of removing the subframe etc, make sure you put back everything you took off and check the air intake boot is properly sealed before you retighten the clamp.Now with the sag set correctly and seeing as I'm all kitted up, there's nothing stopping me from going out onto the track and getting my first impressions of the dbr KX250F.Sutty