Motorcyle Blog

On my way up to the university this morning, I was about 2-3 miles from campus and my shifter started to stick in the downshift position. I was like, what the crap?!

For those who may not know why this is an issue, I will go ahead and give a brief synopsis of how this affects me. Motorcycles are manual transmission. My gearbox has the following gear pattern. 1-N-2-3-4-5. The way that you switch gears is to pull in the clutch (left hand) and then use your left foot and go either up or down depending on what you are doing (higher gears = faster top speed, lower gears = lower speed).

So now I was trying to go from 5th gear and when downshifting on my lever, it was getting stuck, it'd click me down to 4th, but there's a red light up ahead and I need to be in 1st. Yeah... it took me a few seconds to realize that I could put my toe under it and raise it up and then slam it down again but that was annoying. I managed to make it on to campus.

So, I am on my way home and it's sticking still! So I had fun getting home and started to dread points where I would need to downshift. Luckily though, I didn't have too many red lights to worry about.

I get home and thumb through my clymer's service manual for anything about sticky shift levers and nothing. I've got a section on how to rip it all apart but that's not what I want. So I hop online and use my degree in google-ology (that's a joke btw) and find a rebel forum where there's three threads on sticky shifters. None of them give me advice on how to tear my bike apart to fix it. They all give generalizations like change your oil or lube the parts up. Gee thanks. How do I get to the parts so I can lube them?

Anywho, I go outside with my tools and start messing around with the compartment that the lever feeds into. I manage to figure out how it comes out (I am slightly mechanically inclined, but I just don't spend enough time working on things... I can only blame myself) so I get the compartment off and the shift lever and I'm looking right at my chain and omg there's all this excess lubrication and grease like balled up and all over the place inside there. Which is also where the rod goes from the shift lever. So, I reach in and start cleaning up all the excess and then I realize that I don't have anything here to lube up the moving parts in here. So I wash my hands and hop in my truck and go to autozone and get some white lithium grease, wd-40, and some liquid wrench, and some gojo. (I had been neglecting picking some of these items up because my dad has them at his house which is 15 minutes away but it's time I bought some of the small stuff to save myself some trips). Total came out to be like $13.

So I blast some white lithium grease around on the inside, on the shaft that rotates with my lever, the chain, and the housing by the chain, just in case. Can't be too crazy with lube. Then I reassemble everything I had taken apart. I take my bike down to the gas station, top off, and return home. No stickiness anymore.

I'm rather stoked--I'm getting pretty good at working on my bike.

Pictures, just in case someone with a rebel stops by wondering what all I did.

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