Mouse Maintenance

With the Dusty Butt not very far away at all, the WR has been getting a fair bit of care and attention - first all those farkles and now some actual maintenance!

One of the things it need was a warrant of fitness, and unfortunately the knobblies the bike had been rocking weren't exactly legal and the front tyre was basically evil on the road or hard gravel.  So I needed to do something about that...

Motoz Tractionator Desert H/T

After perusing various forums and obtaining quotes I decided to opt for the Motoz rubber over Dunlops.  They look nice and aggressive eh?

So off came the the old knobblies and the wrestle with the new tyres began.  But this time I had a few new tools to try out.

Valve puller

One thing that I'd hated when fitting the knobblies, was trying to push the tube's valve through the hole in the rim.  The front was hard because the rim is so narrow (can't get my big mitts in there) and the rear is tricky due to how damn strong the tyres are.  This cheap little valve puller worked a treat.

Next up was getting the tyres on.  Generally you need at least one extra hand than what people generally get supplied with but someone has thought about this too.  Enter the bead buddy.

This shiny (WR blue) little piece of aluminium does a great job of holding the tyre on the bead while you attack the bead elsewhere with ya levers and just the two arms you were born with.  I've seen reviews on Youtube where they reckon that sometimes you need two of these to make things easy but I had no problem with just one - once again, it worked as advertised.

And then, a little while later we had this:

Grippinessness

Next up I changed the front pads and even ended up bleeding the front brake after a little whoopsie.  Unfortunately I seem to have lost some photos of this so you don't get to see my $13 brake bleeder in action.  At least I've got brakes now.

Next up was chain and sprockets.  The front sprocket was a little worn and the chain starting to look like it'd done some work so everything had to be changed.  I also took the opportunity to gear the bike down just a little bit to make it slightly easier in the very slow stuff.  Riding the bike now it's quite nice, pulling away very nicely and yet still being able to hit 1**kph.

We had intended to change the clutch plates out but seem to be having difficulties getting the correct plates.  I still haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet but we have had the current ones out and they're actually looking ok so will do the trip and a lot more work yet.

Here's a few pics of us fluffing around with the clutch.

And the last job yesterday was to drop the oil out and change the filter (no pics) after taking the bike for a little 176km jaunt to test everything else out.

176km taken out of the top of the tank

And now there's just one thing to do - get down to Farlie and let the ride begin!