Girl Rider!

Welcome to the girls club!

I did so much work on my old j model a few yrs back before i got myself the awesome looking 06 zx636!

i went as far as valve clearance adjustment. Bike ran better and strong after it, meaning i did everything right and didn't blow it up!

Curious what you plan to do for maintenance.

Only thing I gave to a mechanic was the forks for fresh seals and oil. With my fiancee now i could do it myself. No mechanic ever made money on me. Was cheap and a student until 2yrs ago.

iLean2much said:

Welcome to the girls club!

I did so much work on my old j model a few yrs back before i got myself the awesome looking 06 zx636!

i went as far as valve clearance adjustment. Bike ran better and strong after it, meaning i did everything right and didn't blow it up!

Curious what you plan to do for maintenance.

Only thing I gave to a mechanic was the forks for fresh seals and oil. With my fiancee now i could do it myself. No mechanic ever made money on me. Was cheap and a student until 2yrs ago.

Click to expand...

Fork seals and valve clearances aren't that hard at all (at least not in the older bikes like ours). The biggest pain in the ass about them is compressing the spring (in the forks) and if you have to shim (the valves). Once you get through it a few times it becomes habit pretty quickly.

I'm never all that cocky when shimming, but fork seals I've actually really come to enjoy doing. I don't know what it is, but I just really enjoy looking at all of the insides of front suspension and when I'm riding on the track, I am that much more intrigued by how everything is working - between the valves, the weight of fork oil and all of the other aspects of it, it's just bitchin' thinking about how much of a demand there is for everything to work precisely if you are going to get the most out of your front end. At speed and in a lean, it's just down right humbling.

To the OP: once you start delving into this stuff it really makes you appreciate your bike that much more. Kudos to you if you take the plunge, I've been known to take long moments of pause to simply swoon over the design of my bikes when they are torn down; the sultry curves of the frame, the way the motor is seated and pivoted, the camshafts and the sprockets, and ... gahhh... I could go on for days about this shit. At risk of sounding sexual here, it really is an intimate experience.

It's a straight fawwwking turn on.

That said: just remember to be patient. It's a learning process and you'll probably make mistakes, even experienced mechanics do. It helps me to take lots of pictures to remember how everything was fitted, and know that it may take you a couple of tries to get everything right. It's well worth the investment though.