subject: Tips On Taking Care Of Your Motorcycle Or Dirt Bike [print this page] Purchasing a motorcycle or a dirt bike is not cheap so when you have a bike you should take the time to take care of it. If you take care of your bike before it has problems you may be able to offset the cost of riding, while at the same time extending the life of your bike.
Be sure to keep up the necessary routine maintenance. Here are some small things that you can do to help keep your bike like new.
First, cleaning and lubing your cables is one of the cheapest ways to keep your bike feeling new. Doing this not only eliminates the water and dirt that easily accumulates on your bike but also increases the cable's life and as a result your overall bike's life.
To clean and lube your cables, you have to remove the cable from the perch and lever. For throttle cables you must disconnect the carburetor end, because you don't want to flush water and dirt into the carburetor.
Put on a standard cable lube tool and flush the cable with contact cleaner. The contact cleaner will cleanse any dirt and grime in its path. Then you can flush the cable several times with a lubricant.
About every third time you lube the cable, reassemble the lever with some light grease around the pivot hole. The light grease will give the lever a smoother feel and reduce the effort required to operate the cables.
Keep in mind that the grease will also attract dirt and grime, so be sure to clean the lever and perch whenever you clean and lube your cables.
Second, spoke maintenance and tightening is important. A good trick to tightening spokes is to always space out the tightening.
That means skip five spokes at a time until you make it all the way around. It will take about seven wheel rotations for you to tighten every spoke.
Skipping those five spokes allows spokes to be tightened evenly across the entire wheel. By doing this you won't be pulling one side of the wheel more than the other.
When tightening, go a quarter turn at a time with your spoke wrench to avoid pulling and stretching the wheel. If any spokes are loose and hard to turn, give them a drop of assembly lube or motor oil so they turn more easily.
Third, if you have a break in the plastic you can fasten it until you can get it fixed. Repair any cracks if you break a piece of the plastic outside covering while at the track or on the road. You can do this by stitching up the plastic just as a doctor would stitch up a cut.
Drill a few holes on both sides of the crack and run a few zip-ties across. Also, you must drill a hole at the end of the crack so the crack doesn't continue to grow.
Don't space the holes more than 1/2 inch apart. It may not be the most appealing way of repairing your bike, but when you have a crack it is an easy and cheap fix.
Taking care of your bike is important and will keep it running better and longer. Always try to fix problems when they are small so that they don't turn into big problems.
