New tires took a few days longer than expected, since I forgot to order them with new tubes. So those had to be ordered before the tires could be mounted. No problems apart from that though. And holy shit, I thought the old tires were still ok apart from the tread depth, but when I did the first ride with the new ones it felt like they were made of glue.
Anyway, went to get my T?V renewed, which went well. Except for the fact that the original examiner had to call somebody else to take over because she was too short for the bike.
And some vertical play in the swingarm, which had to be fixed and then reexamined.
So over the past two weeks I took apart the swingarm in search for the play. Once again the crate stand came in handy.
Took everything apart and cleaned it, but couldn't really find a definite source for the play. But there's quite a few bushings in the relay arm, and each individual play in each bushing adds up and is of course exaggerated by the lever length at the end of the swingarm. Bushings etc. looked quite ok as well, except for one on the bottom of the relay arm that had some pitting in one spot. The local Yamaha garage recommended to leave that bushing in, because replacing it would be too much effort, and try to grease everything up properly. So I put everything back together and tried to apply the grease with a really crappy grease gun we had lying around, which led to one of the grease nipples shearing off.
Luckily I got the reamaining thread out by punching an allen wrench into the bore and just screwing it out. Since the original replacement nipples are like 5? each I simply got a full set of standard nipples for 6? off ebay, and ordered a proper Hazet grease gun.
Turns out the Yamaha nipples aren't exactly standard. This is the standard one:
One of the key differences is that the indentation between the main body and spherical head was much shorter on the original nipples, which meant that the mouth piece of the grease gun didn't seal properly and all the grease went out the sides and not through the valve. Luckily I could just replace all the old nipple with the new, standard ones, even though I only noticed once I had the swingarm put back together and mounted to the bike.
So anyways, greasing everything back up seems to have done the trick, almost no vertical play. However that is with the original bolt for the lower relay arm mount, where it attaches to the frame. You see, that's also the spot where the aftermarket center stand attaches, which comes with it's own bolt that's longer to accomodate the mounting plates of the stand. I first put everything back together without the stand, and it was fine. Then I tried to put the stand back on, put in the other bolt, greased it up, and noticed that there was considerably more play than with the original bolt. Still a lot less that initially, but definitely noticeablely more than with the original bolt.
So I've left the stand off for now, went to do the reexamination at the T?V and passed without problems.
I'll have to see what I'll do about the stand, I guess I'll call SW-Motech and explain the situation to them. Either their bolt has the wrong diameter, or it's been worn out already (which seems unlikely, imo).
