Cows in the Mist

I finally got it! At last, the clutch is working correctly. Don’t know if I truly found and fixed the underlying problem, unless it really was just the cable adjustment. I sure went about it the hard way, though. Now that I have a shop manual for my bike, I see that adjusting the clutch cable is much simpler than I made it. The official instructions do not include threatening the cable with replacement, although I think ultimately that’s what worked. Replaced the tach cable, too, which is a relief. The speedometer cable I bought was not quite right. Thought I could get it to fit, but no luck, so I ordered a new one from Yamaha.

As of today, I also have changed the oil myself — the darn viewer window is so hard to read. I once again had too much oil in the bike. I had intended to drain about half of it, but, well, when you don’t really know what you’re doing, interesting things happen. I now know more about motorcycle maintenance than I know about maintaining my 2001 Exploder. Ordered a new air filter, too, since when there’s too much oil it gets forced up into the air box, fouling the filter.

So for a while I ignored the broken tach and speedometer. I figure the only reason it matters is if I’m a) riding a long way or b) pulled over. Since neither is likely to happen, it wasn’t a big deal. But when the clutch started behaving badly, I could no longer ignore the problem.

In the interest of saving money and learning something new, I decided to fix it myself. As a result, the bike has been sitting unridden for a month as I try to track down a repair manual. I thought I’d found one at RepairManuals.com, but they have not shipped the book (it’s been three weeks), nor have they returned my phone calls. I strongly recommend not doing business with RepairManuals.com.

In the meantime, I thought “OK, I can do this.” I found what I thought was the clutch adjustment cover referred to by the manual I do have (which does not cover my model, but similar ones from Yamaha up through 1982), removed it (after struggling mightily with stripped screws), and found. . . nothing to adjust. So I think I picked the wrong cover. I can see that soon I’ll need to take a one-day class on how motorcycles work. Some basic knowledge is going to be critical to my safety, not to mention my ego.