As many of you know, I recently bust my swingarm. I needed the bike again in a few weeks, so I did a "patch up" job reinforcing it with flat bar and angle iron after I pulled in straight and lined everything up again.
The enduro was going well, one of the best I had ever done until about 5km from the end when, after a fantastic section of short 3-4th gear flat out straights then in winding hairpins along a forestery service road under a canopy of indigenous forest, the trail led out into a track on the side of a rivine, i was going pretty fast in top gear when suddenly the bike dropped and slammed me instantly into a flat track super motard quad!
I threw anchors and ground to a halt, thinking my patched swingarm had given up the ghost again, only to find that the majority of my rear 400ex shock had gone amiss...alas, there were but remnants of what had been. No spring, no shaft, only the bottom clevis, and the upper housing with a piece of bumpstop...
After dodging some speedy YFZ's and 2 wheelers who no doubt had enormous grins on their faces seeing that I had passed them unceremoniously a few minutes before, I went in search of the missing parts and found my spring nestled neatly some 100m back, thank goodness nobody was behind me at the time, they would have been killed by a flying spring!
I think, the shock must have taken some damage when the swinger broke last time and it eventually just gave in... bad to worse sums it up about right...
What was 10 minutes from the finish became a 2 hour mission to get myself out of the rivine and back to the base. The marshalls would only sweep the track at the end of the day and I wasnt intent on waiting that long! I pushed the bike for 3km then eventually just rode it like that along a gravel road for 30km with the shock housing resting on the swinger....
You can see in the pics below how the bike collapsed with the reserve fuel tank (old oil bottle) and bracket grinding into the chain.
Moral of the story? anything you plan to fix will take longer and cost more than you initially planned on...
On the plus side the reinforced swinger was 100% But since I have now broken the shock as well, this puts my designs for a new swinger on ice. I will now look into a linkage system and PERHAPS a roundhouse carrier.
The enduro was going well, one of the best I had ever done until about 5km from the end when, after a fantastic section of short 3-4th gear flat out straights then in winding hairpins along a forestery service road under a canopy of indigenous forest, the trail led out into a track on the side of a rivine, i was going pretty fast in top gear when suddenly the bike dropped and slammed me instantly into a flat track super motard quad!
I threw anchors and ground to a halt, thinking my patched swingarm had given up the ghost again, only to find that the majority of my rear 400ex shock had gone amiss...alas, there were but remnants of what had been. No spring, no shaft, only the bottom clevis, and the upper housing with a piece of bumpstop...
After dodging some speedy YFZ's and 2 wheelers who no doubt had enormous grins on their faces seeing that I had passed them unceremoniously a few minutes before, I went in search of the missing parts and found my spring nestled neatly some 100m back, thank goodness nobody was behind me at the time, they would have been killed by a flying spring!
I think, the shock must have taken some damage when the swinger broke last time and it eventually just gave in... bad to worse sums it up about right...
What was 10 minutes from the finish became a 2 hour mission to get myself out of the rivine and back to the base. The marshalls would only sweep the track at the end of the day and I wasnt intent on waiting that long! I pushed the bike for 3km then eventually just rode it like that along a gravel road for 30km with the shock housing resting on the swinger....
You can see in the pics below how the bike collapsed with the reserve fuel tank (old oil bottle) and bracket grinding into the chain.
Moral of the story? anything you plan to fix will take longer and cost more than you initially planned on...
On the plus side the reinforced swinger was 100% But since I have now broken the shock as well, this puts my designs for a new swinger on ice. I will now look into a linkage system and PERHAPS a roundhouse carrier.
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