Steering head bearing replacement Part 1
The dis assembly.
" A heartwarming story of a boy and his beer"
I did mucho research prior to tackling this particular project. I would like to give a shout out to some of our more prolific advisors, who have laid the groundwork for poor slobs like me. gggGary, you may not even realize how many posts you have written on this subject, but I sure read a bunch of them, and 5Twins as always you have made many helpful suggestions and your photos are priceless, and also I dug into the old 650Rider.com archives and came up with a real gem from forum member Pumps who wrote a terrific piece called my 77 teardown. Here is a link
http://650rider.com/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=8413&highlight=Steering+head+bearings
For all you veterans this will be old hat to you, but for my fellow first timers I am going to try and document this with a lot of photos.
First off I got my bike up on my bike jack and thoroughly secured with four tie down straps.
No more accidents for this old boy.
Before I jacked it up I loosened most all of the larger bolts so I wouldn't have to crank on it while it was up in the air. Then off came the front wheel, brake caliper ( still connected to all the hoses and M/C, I never broke any connections) and the front fender. The brake caliper, master cylinder, and connecting hoses were just pulled back and hung on the side of the bike with wire.
At first I had planned to leave as much attached to the handlebars as possible and just lay them back, but I found that to be very unwieldy. So I popped the clutch cable off of the clutch lever.
For the throttle and right hand switch gear, loosen the two Phillips screws on the underside and everything just slides right off the end of The handlebars. Remember my headlight bucket was already off and all my wires were already hanging loose.
Now unbolt my handlebars and pull them off.
Now it's time to pull the forks, first I loosened the pinch bolts on the triple tree and then slid the forks down and out.
Now onto the steering head. Pull the bolt and washer from the top of the stem and now the top triple tree can come off, then remove the two notched jam nuts from the top of the stem using my el cheapo spanners that I got from EBay ( thanks for pointing me to these 5Twins)
After removing the jam nuts you can pull the dust cap and you will see the top race of the upper bearing. After removing them I see the ball bearings which don't look all that bad.
With those removed, the stem and lower triple tree can now be removed. Following 5Twins advice I made careful notes on how the headlight ears go together.
Now I can see the lower bearings still sitting in the race , held there by some rather gummy grease.
Now it's time to drive the upper and lower races from the steering head. For that job I put an 11/16 socket on a long extension and simply tap tap tapped back and forth from side to side until it popped out, not hard at all. Did top and bottom that way.
Now you have to get the lower race off of the bottom of the steering stem. I simply clamped it in my vise and used a chisel, working it back and forth, just lightly tapping it and it popped right off in no time.
Save the seal and reuse it.
Here I tried to show what the lower race looked like. You can see indentations from the ball bearings. This should make a huge improvement in its handling manners.
All in, being very meticulous, this only took a couple of hours. But remember I had the advantage of having my headlight already off and all my wiring loose.
Tomorrow I'll hopefully get it back together enough to be able to roll around at least.
Until then,
Cheers! Bob
