June 23rd, 2010
Easy Steps to Tighten a Motorcycle Chain
Tightening the chain on your bike is never any fun no matter how simple it is to do on your bike. However it is necessary to do before every ride and after every eight hours spent riding the bike in order to make sure you aren’t wearing it unnecessarily. Make sure you do it before every ride not after every ride. This will ensure that any tension that is loosened as it sits in its parking spot will be tightened out before you ride instead of tightening it and letting it sit and loosen up again. Like much of the information you will find in your motorcycle manuals you will notice that this is fairly simple and should not take you very long.
The first thing you want to do is put down the kickstand and let the bike sit on that. Depending on how low the bike sits you may feel like this is uncomfortable, but the only way to measure the slack on the chain is to have it sitting upright. If you must make it higher use something like a swing arm stand that will simulate the same thing as the kickstand while leaving the bike in the same general position. If you are looking into buying a bike and don’t have that kind of gear now, you may want to look at the chain when you are thinking about which bike you want to buy.
Look in the repair manuals for the exact measurements you will want to tighten up the chain to. Different bikes will ask for different amounts of slack. Usually the amount of slack in the chain is in a very small range such as 2-3 mm. This means that you will have to be very precise or else let the chain back out again if you go over the small amount. While one might think that the whole chain will have the same amount of slack, this is not true. Some parts will have more depending on where they are. You will want to make sure that all parts of the chain end up within the allowable range for the chain.
This is a good time to lube up the chain as well as tighten it. Once you have adjusted the chains on your bike you are ready to go out for a ride .