When I bought my bike, I didn’t see that it didn’t have enough maintenance.
The seller brought it to my doorstep (which was very friendly, because I didn’t want to spend money on a rental truck), but he had shown some paperwork that the front forks and carbs were cleaned and rebuilt.
When inspecting it after he left, there was an awful lot of gunk on the rear wheel and sprocket, everything was blackened by oil and roadgrime.
After some cleaning I inspected the chain and sprockets, which were in an “almost junk” condition, but I’ve still gotten about a 2000km’s out of ’em.
Maintenance if fairly cheap, If you do it yourself.
To replace the chain, I’ve asked my mechanic (well he isn’t my friend, but I know him) to change out the worn sprocket and chain, and that costed me about 20€.
He then also checked the bike for other worn parts, and saw that my rear brake pads were totally worn out, the front ones were almost at the end of their life.
The day after, I bought a set for the front and rear. The costed about 58€ for the set.
Installing went fairly easy, but it took some time to understand how the calipers worked.
Then it was time to replace the brake fluid that was darkened a lot. It was so dark you could swear it was motor oil.
All went well till I found a big oil spot on the ground, coming from the cam chain tensioner. It’s known that the DR650, XF650 and CCM R30 have leaking gaskets around the engine, but I didn’t want to wait to replace it. So I went on and cut a gasket out of an old milk carton I found in the trash, and it worked perfectly!
It was a tedious job because I never got the holes right, but with some help of the internet, everything is possible.
I used the milk carton gasket on my orange chinese moped to close off the valve cover, and it never leaked.
Now after a full maintenance (chain, tires, brakes, oil,…) the bike still runs like a dream, except when the battery died on me because the fog lights pull a lot more power than I expected.
Anyways: Never skip maintenance on your bike, because small jobs become big jobs in the future, just like keeping your chain adequatlely lubed.
As always, ride safe!
cda441.wordpress.com 