....However we have an audience that never gets any smaller.....
and is also global, and full of brand new motorcyclists, let alone those that are just experienced enough to be a danger to themselves and others (such as the comments that TwoManyXS1Bs made about "stick welded front ends falling off on the starting line".). Yea, so I'm gonna go "mom" on ya here and say that "if everyone were jumping from a cliff would you as well?"
The problem is that so many people take what they read in forums as some sort of sacred wisdom. And when the logic of "everybody is doing it, so should I" is thrown around, then it becomes dangerously benign. See, as soon as someone that is reading this stuff decides that member so-n-so has integrity and practical wisdom (or is just someone that is saying exactly what the reader wants to hear, whether it be good or bad dope) they begin taking anything that particular member has to say very seriously. Even if that particular member that the reader has placed on a pedestal is wrong. Which brings me to ......
....This is complete and unconscionable , irresponsible behavior . Writing such unfounded and unsupported crap is nearly as bad as someone reading it and believing it to be true. We have a responsibility to our our judgment and it's consequences to be sure but what is missing here is personal accountability for how our opinions affect others . Have a care . What we write here becomes the recorded history of who we are and what we do .
~kop
I could not agree more. We have a responsibility, and we must remember that we are NOT only speaking amongst ourselves, but that we have a global audience that has 24 hour per day access to every word we publish ..... for as long as this forum exists (and perhaps longer).
I could give a damn less what the OP does, what anyone does, but what I posted is 1000000% legit and is a fact. Tell me it isn't and that people don't? It has been done and it will continue to be done regardless of what anyone says. Again there is a thing called common sense. If you feel that you need to have it then by all means keep it in, if you feel like taking it out go for it. I get get sick of hearing people say it's there so it ends to be. That's just bullshit.
~Ahem~ ... well then. Ok, I'll play. Um, yea. There IS "such a thing as common sense" .. yup, I could not agree more. And we should show some of that common sense when we post. (touché! wink wink!)
The problem with "common sense" is that .. well .. it's neither. It's neither common, nor sensible. Another problem is that there are MANY MANY motorcycle enthusiasts/riders/owners/forum readers that
do not possess that thing called "common sense". Am I right? You bet I am (that lack of sense in many riders, y'know there's one of those "facts" that seem to be so important in a thread that is based on opinions).
So anyhow, I feel the same as some members here, that we have a responsibility to those that are less experienced and yet take what us "experts" have to say very seriously. We need to respect that reverence that others pay upon us, and make sure we make it perfectly clear that what we're saying is our opinions. And that what we suggest as "good stuff" may not be good stuff for novice and or naïve riders.
If we're gonna throw around statements like "ten bazillion people do it every day, and will continue to do it for a long time to come" (wow, reminds me of the excuses my dad used to use regarding his choice to smoke cigarettes, right up until about a year before he died of smoking related diseases) we need to qualify what we're defending.
My unwillingness to go along with the non-use of the mount on the stock frame comes from my experience on both the racetrack and the street. The bike won't have any greater tendency to slide sideways on unexpected surfaces (sand or fluids on the road, let's say it's on a blind corner, your speed is roughly 60mph+) .. no no .. the slide is the easy part. It's when the rear tire re-hooks once you clear the sand/water/gasoline (hey, dumasses forget to put their gascaps on all the time, when they go around a corner gas sloshes out of the fill-hole onto the road .. very slick stuff when wet) the un-braced frame may have a greater tendency to load and unload, causing an increasingly violent "tank slapper" (more like bucking bronco) until it pitches the rider off, hopefully NOT into oncoming traffic.
The stock frame ridden without the upper bracket may cause a loading/unloading situation in a hypothetical episode as described above. What happens is the frame sortof "winds up" like a coil spring when the rear tire suddenly gains traction when the bike clears the slide. The frame will wind-up (aka "load"), and then it will need to un-wind (aka "unload") which can be a violent experience if the entire motorcycle does not properly disperse that pent-up "wound-up spring" energy slowly and in a manageable manner. The upper mount may be a part of an entire system that the engineers at Yamaha designed into the stock frame to disperse that pent-up energy (that wound up spring that every motorcycle turns into to various degrees) in a slower and more predictable way. Remove that bracket and you may have totally defeated that dispersion system that Yamaha felt was required when using their stock frame.
So, to the OP ..... take what you've read in your thread here, add it to whatever else you may have read. Make your choice. You've asked the membership for it's opinions on a topic that has no facts, so I guess you may have to take what has been said and make a choice on your own.
Yup, thousands of people may indeed have removed the upper mount without any problems they wish to report. But there are far far more thousands of people that have not removed the upper mount as well, all of whom have nothing negative to say about it's use. So, no help there using that logic!
Have fun, be careful. Do whatever you think is best for you. It doesn't seem that anyone here has anything super-conclusive or definitive one way or the other. It sounds like we have a lot of opinions here, but I've not read anything that fer sher fer sher says to go one way or the other. All we seem to have here is a collection of yay/nays based on experience. It sortof ends there.