bought it off my uncle at 22,000 (he gets a new one every three years and has never had a problem.) it was ridden up until 22,000k mostly on a farm, every day. with some highway trips also. never had a problem until a tiny noise in 3rd at about 30,000 (not sure if it's the whine everyone is talking about. it is pretty hard to hear with a noisy pipe and only occurrs when accellerating, not when you let off or pull the clutch in). just 2 days ago, normal ride and suddenly when i went into 4th it lost alot of power (like being in really low revs) and makes the worst constant clunking noise i have ever heard (in a way it sounds a little like machine gun fire if that makes sense) so i went straight into 5th and it stopped. went back down to 4th and the noise was there again so i went straight home (only about 5 mins away) staying out of 4th and i'm taking it to get checked out tomorrow.
Thank you very much for the write-up Jay! I will eventually do mine so this will help a bunch. Hope you are having a great trip!
just split the case on my 96 because it was starting to jump out of 2nd gear - 28,000 miles. 3rd driven gear had several teeth that had portions of their contact surface starting to spall off. not sure if this is related to the catastophic failure or not. I just wanted to inform group of my mistake so you guys don't make it also. as I was pulling 2nd drive gear off of the transmission input (driving) shaft, I put the gear puller push rod on what I thought was the end of the shaft. on my 96, the driving shaft has been bored to supply oil to the bearing journals of two gears and the clutch. what I thought was the left end of the shaft is actually a plug (with a drilled out oil port) pressed into the internal bore of the driving shaft. as I applied load on the gear puller to remove 2nd drive gear, the oil port plug pushed further into the shaft rather than the 2nd drive gear sliding off of the shaft. as soon as I noticed that the plug had moved and that the gear did not, I stopped and determined that the plug had shifted within the driving shaft. Hoping that the bore of the driving shaft had an internal ledge that the plug would seat against, I lighted tapped the plug and it continued to travel deeper into the bored out driving shaft. I stopped tapping when the plug traveled into the shaft far enough to block the first oil journal outlet hole. I assume this could have been catastaphic if I would have assembled it and then the plug would have continued to move until an oil journal feed was blocked and siezure would have occured. Ended up making an adapter out of a 3/8" bolt head to center and set on top of the shaft end that allowed me to pull the 2nd driving gear without pushing against the plug inside the shaft. If you are going to pull the 2nd driving gear off of the transmission driving shaft - make / use an adapter to prevent pushing against the plug inside the left end of the driving shaft. Bike Bandit lists the driving shaft as +/- $125. I will order a new one when the local shop opens on Monday.
Boy, do I wish I didn't qualify to join this jolly little club! Shifting from 4th down to 3rd, on the ride home tonight. Low load, low speed. Crunch, rattle, no power. Wheel locked up just as I got to the kerb. Could have been worse Haven't opened it up. Probably take it along to my local workshop and have them do the autopsy. But it all sounds very familiar. And I'd just had a bloody awesome weekend's riding, too. :/
I'll let you know the results of the autopsy. I may have helped it along a little -- stacked the bike a few weeks back hard enough to strip the splines off the inside of the gear lever. Spent two weeks waiting for a replacement lever from Japan. In retrospect, that downtime could have been usefully used to perform a leisurely inspection of the 'box. Ah, well. 2007, 39200km. Like I said though, I'm half expecting to find that I've borked one of the selector forks when I dropped it, and it hung in just long enough.
Called in to the workshop on my way to work this morning. They haven't finished stripping it down, but they've got far enough to show a few things. The gear shift shaft is slightly bent. Hard to see on the picture, but the two gears closest to the centre-line of the case have disintegrated.
Yep. That's 3rd alright. On mine only 3rd and it's selector fork disintegrated. But it destroyed the rest of the engine
If I remember this morning's conversation correctly, the parts list is: 3rd gear input 3rd gear counter input shaft selector fork gasket set They also confirmed that my drop a month back looks to have tweaked the selector shaft slightly, but not enough to cause a leak at the seal. I'm in two minds whether to replace it. I might, just because of the stress the splines took when I broke the lever.
The good news is that the guy stripping it down is amazed at how little other damage there is to the engine. He seems to think I got away with it.
NordieBoy (NZ) 2001 60,000km Transalper (NZ) 2001 55,000km Rosscoact (AU) 2004 13,000km Mardy (US) 1997 53,000km Haddon (NZ) 1999 40,000km RubberCow80 (AU) 2001 25,000km Philth (AU) 3 bikes <20,000km BikeRooter (AU) 2006 10,200km Madsdad (US) 2005 16,000km briangv99 (AU) 2006 21,000km bluebye (US) 2004 37,000km Coyote X (US) 2007 33,800km DRjoe (AU) 1997 100,000km DRJens (SE) 2001 23,000km DRjoe (AU) 2003 15,000km Helicopter (NZ) 2002 ???km Klay (US) 2001 29,000km Miniroot (NZ) 2007 39,200km
