Motorcyle Blog

I'm almost approaching 9,000 miles on the bike. It's amazing how many miles I accrue a month on my two wheels. Anywho, as the title may suggest I've been hearing a rattle for a little while, mostly when my speed decelerates and it has been making me rather nervous.

I took a look to see how much slack my chain had after taking some advice some totalmotorcycle.com's gurus there as I have quite a bit to learn about troubleshooting motorcycles. My service manual states I should have about 5/8" slack in my chain. I'm over an inch at this time and I would have tightened it up myself by now but the rear axle bolt is not loosening. I tried a 6 point socket, a torque wrench, and some other weird device which connects to a socket to try and get it off, all were a no go and by this time I was at my Dad's house as he has tons of tools. So after messing with this for a while having even used penetrating oil (liquid wrench) and putting so much force on the socket that I was literally picking up the rear of my bike, I call my Dad.

He recommends that at this point the only thing I have at my disposal is to get the blowtorch out and heat up the bolt and then let it cool down. So I do this, and it cools down to the point where I can mess with it, and still no luck. So my bike is currently awaiting to show up at Street and Trail on a saturday morning at 9am when they accept walk-ins. They have a rate of $65/hr and if they pop this thing off within 15 minutes, I will only get charged for 15 minutes. At this point though I'm going to want that bolt replaced and they might as well tighten the chain for me.

I'll post more once that is done to let you know if it fixed it. :)