EeeTea's Tracer Blog

[EeeTea]

So folks, as I have done on other forums, I thought I would share my Tracer news, views, modifications, for the edification/ridicule of others Feel free to do either - I am well balanced (chip on both shoulders) and can handle the compliments and elation of my fellow Tracerites... but go easy on the ridicule bit - nah not really. Insult and larf all you like!



A bit about me:

I've been bikin since I was 16 (if you include my moped - Honda SS50. Remember those!. I took my test in 1979 (aged 17) on my z200, moved up to a Honda 400 four - from the day of the test.




Quite a few years away, being a ressurrected Born again biker in 2004

Born Again Bikes:

TDM900


XT660Z Tenere

KTM990 Adventure


BMW R1200 GS


Vespa GTS300


and, finally to where I am today...MT-09 Tracer



I work as a Consultant Engineer and have been known to draw a few cartoons (used to draw regularly for the BMF magazine)




What I'll do over time is add my mods and info - all up for debate and alternative comments - hopefully to help other's to know what to not/do to their own bike...

Thank you for reading

 

[EeeTea]

Just realised I missed out my XT660Z Tenere... Hmm do I have any piccys? <Edit> Yep found one and added it above

 

[EeeTea]

Purchase and Collection...

I bought the bike new from Alford Brothers in Folkstone Kent. It's a 2015 model I had registered on a 2016 plate. There was a choice of Red or Matt Silver - the silver wasn't available in the 2016 yamaha range, and rather like it (I know its entirely subjective - but everyone is entitled to my opinion )

The bike was picked up on the 3rd (I think??) of March, but as a precaution I had paid them to prep the bike ACF50 before collecting.

I'm glad I did! The ride back to Colchester was cold with surface spray and on salty and wet roads. Gross....but i was still smiling






The one comment I have, is that I found the clutch incredibly heavy, and whilst I had intended to ride on the twisty B roads home, I just couldn't change gear anymore - it absolutely killed me!!

I wasn't very happy... more on this to come.

NEXT: Coming up. ET fits his first bling.

 

[EeeTea]

...but first, a news update...


Just ordered these as xmas prezzie for Tracey.


V-Trec Vario III Brake + Clutch Lever Yamaha MT-09 Tracer 15-17

Except I've ordered Titanium and Matt Black configuration with an Essex Gold adjuster knob (thought it would match my forks a bit)



NEXT: Coming up. ET fits his first bling

 

[EeeTea]

Fender Extender

DATE: 12th March 2016
MILES: 273

Yep. That's right. The first bit of bling is a carbon fender extender

There is actually a really good reason for this.




It was that I ordered several things...and this happened to arrive first!

 

[EeeTea]

the next bit to arrive was a Scottoiler. I'm a believer!

I've had them on all my bikes, starting with the TDM990. I did 33000 miles on that bike from new before changing the chain and sprockets. with maybe just two adjustments in all those miles.

However, for this bike once the Scotty had arrived, fitting it was a bit of a challenge. I don't like the reservoir on show, under the seat, or hidden under the frame. This was a real challenge on the KTM990 - the forum consensus was that there wasn't anywhere for it other than slung underneath the frame...on view. In fact I managed to get it positioned parallel to the rear damper - towards the top and pretty much out of site.

For the Tracer I could find nowhere! Or at least there was, but it was so close to horizontal, and scottoilers are gravity fed, soit wasn't sooo good.

I flogged the Scotty on eBay, and looked for an alternative solutions....

 

[EeeTea]

PD Oiler

...the solution is a PD Oiler - recommended to me by a trusted forum friend on Commuter Motorcycle Club

See here Linky linky to PD Oilers

Rather than a gravity feed, with a valve opened by the engine intake vacuum like the scottoiler, this one is an electric pump - and is far less prone to ambient air temperature changing the viscosity of the oil and thus having to keep adjusting the flow rate - really you can use almost any oil in it, which makes it cheaper to run int he long term too.

This is how I set it up:

Here's the (large)* reservoir mounted under the seat securing bar


The adjuster knob is here:


The pump is tucked down the inside of the side trim by the pillion seat..you can't really see it here, but the routing of the pipes is clue.


The chain oiler itself is more like a wick than an oil dripper...



*6000 miles later I've yet to fill up the oil reservoir. And the chain looks new.

Thanks for reading

 

[EeeTea]

First Service

DATE: 2nd April 2016
MILEAGE: 784miles

Slightly overdue, mostly because I had to book three weeks in advance to get a slot, and when using the bike for work, it had to be used.

I bought it from Alsford Brothers in Folkestone, a bit far (120 miles too far) for serving, so I took to TK Cope in Colchester (from where I bought the TDM in 2003)

For the record I did try to support my local dealer and buy the Tracer from them, but they didn't want to compete on price - fair dinkum - I'll buy it elsewhere then.


Anyway, I paid £95-42 and I asked them to keep the chain slack to 30mm (I had noticed this on the ride home, shite gear changes and loads of transmission noise... 5mm slack FFS!). But they didn't want to, then said they would but they would make a formal note on the Yamaha service schedule.

They also stated that I was entirely wrong, and the chain gets slacker as the suspension compresses. Idiots. It's not going back there.


NEXT: Always use protection!

 

[EeeTea]

DATE: 17th April 2016
MILEAGE: 1060

My Mum told me to always use protection with my lady friends, so I took her advice and fitted an Evotech Radiator Guard

Linky dinky

I paid ...um about £60 from memory and it was a doddle to fit - with everything lining up nicely, and no jiggly jiggery to encounter.

Looks quite subtle on, and I like the simple one piece construction.

Sorry - tad dirty in my piccys:



Any Qs please feel free to ask..

 

[EeeTea]

Water Features

Around the same time, and on the subject of using rubber protection, I had a concern for all the crap chucked up by the rear wheel and landing all over the suspension linkages. Not good, and not easy to clean.

So I've come up with a solution.

POND LINER

Yes. okay. so I do gardening as well, and yes I have a pond, and water fall. However, the upside to that is having loads of spare pond liner kicking around.

It's fairly unobtrusive, as you can see it's sort of hidden behind the rear pegs


So you can see how dirty and gritty that is...


And you will notice that the spenshun bits are lovely and clean


Especially for you I have scanned my template with a scale, so if you copy and print out you are welcome to use this (or adapt)




Thanks for reading

 

[EeeTea]

Next up was some luggage.

Originally I bought just the SHAD SH48 top box and mounting kit, and fitted this.



Whilst that was great - somewhere extra to leave a set of waterproofs, extra sweater etc would be good. BUT, I didn't want the bike too wide, because of filtering. I settled on getting the GIVI E22 panniers. which only have a 5 kg load per side, i figured that would be enough for 20 cans of beer (crisps and pork scratchings can go int he top box) - enough for a day trip at least.




To do this I used two separate mounting kits.

1. Remove the OEM pannier mounts

2. Added the Shad topbox fitting kit (absolutely standard)

3. The Givi side mountings are standard, less some spacers. The result of removing the spacers is that the bottom edge of the frames are closer together. This means you cant use the cross brace bar supplied.


You'll also note, if your astute and a leading expert in Givi luggage, that Givi show the panniers mounted the other way round (givi logo at the back sloping away toward the back. The reality is that when I tried that it looked horrible, so I've elected to mount them this way round, which seems to follow the lines of the biker better (IMHO)

(view is looking forward from the back RHS)


4. The fix is to make a narrower cross brace (it's only a bit of steel tube, squashed in a vice, and bent slightly, then drilled and painted), about an hours work.


FYI: The Shad box and mounting kit (including a carbon fibre (look) trim panel...which is almost identical match to the Yamaha bike trim) was £208.17 from Motoblouz

The panniers and mounting kit was £275 from Mad4Bikes in Swansea.


So far they've been great and no handling issues at sensible speeds.

 

[EeeTea]

~ ~ ~ ~ FLASH BACK!!!! ~ ~ ~ ~

Something I didn't mention and may be a tip passing on for anyone that doesn't know:


I had an old hard drive kicking about, so I butcherised it and nicked the magnets. I don't know if you've ever played with those but they are absolutely awesome rare-earth magnets.

That went straight on my sump plug from new (I popped it on as soon I as got home onthe first day) to collect iron filings from running in engine.

I also understand (although I don't know how true this is - comments welcome) that they are strong enough to help the buried electro-magnetic sensor coils in the roads for traffic lights, barriers etc...

 

[EeeTea]

Navigation

For those what read the thread by "thegoat" about tyres , I burbled a bit on there about navigating by Dead-Reckoning. This is what I wrote:

... "Dead-Reckoning Riding"

Wazzat then???


So rather than navigate by maps and sat nav, I'll have a destination in mind - Say I start from home (Colchester) and I want to head to Leicester (why would I do that??...conversation for another day).

I look at the map and know that it is 100 miles (as the crow flies) NW. So all I do is follow my compass. Whatever road is closest to NW I follow, next junction, I might want to compensate for doing ten miles in an WNW direction, so now I want to do another ten miles in NNW direction etc. I do as sailors do and following a dead reckoning (guesstimate) of where I am, until I find a reference landmark that I can then reestablish a general heading direction.

In truth I might do some all day rides like this to get to an event, as it makes the ride more of an adventure... Once I discover somewhere new, I plant my flag (that makes it mine) and tell the natives that they are now under my rule. See here: Eddie Izzard explains about flags

Now the result is I end up riding in all sorts of obscure places I would NEVER go to ordinarily, all types of everything from main A roads to back single track lanes with fords, and road gravel etc. (okay I have a sat nav if I get stuck), so these tyres are grippy enough for peg scraping (far too easy to do, extremely confidence inspiring) but also copes well with the rougher gravel debris type single tracks.

...blah blah blah.

So you will see my Navigation set up on the bike here. Compass mounting was problematic as there is so much electro-magnetic interference that mounting the compass was impossible anywhere central on the bike - but it works perfectly there - though the compensators had to be set up properly. And it is reasonably unobtrusive there. When I park up and the steering lock is on the compass has the RH handguard obscuring it a bit, which I see as a good thing.



It is true that I can have a "compass view" on the nav...but I like the real thing TBH, and of course I can then have the map on too if I want to.



In terms of the SatNav - I thought I would do the deed and buy a bike dedicated sat nav. and after reading reviews decided on the Garmin. I know this becomes very personal and subjective. BUT. I wish I had bought the TomTom. I have a TomTom in the car and it is intuitive the maps are up to date (I mean they actually show new roads and new POI). The Garmin by comparison is slow, unintuitive, out of date (yes I do have the latest Garmin maps, complete with local garages that haven't been there for ten years and lots missing roads that have been in existence at least a year - last maps up date about two months ago). Never again. I virtually don't use it for navigating, just as a live map. I hate it TBH.

Choose bendy routes and it often takes me right through city centres FFS - It is a worse than useless for working out its own navigation routes in comparison to the TomTom.

Nor do I like RAM mounts they look ugly and crude (all be they very good at what they do)...so maybe I can add the word "functional". The Ram mount does't fit the Tracer bars in the centre. So I've bodged this with cable ties - I have been intending to tidy that up but just haven't got back to it as yet.

I've managed to mount mine hiding the mount as much as possible. And this really works well there(I don't like it too much in the line of sight, too distracting when there are far more important things to look out for)







I've also wired the power supply directly into the bike, so it leaves the fag lighter socket available for other things. There are three additional power take offs under the screen assembly. One is for the second socket if you want to fit it, then there are two others, that require a standard auto connector (It's so long since I actually did it, I can't actually remember what type it was...sorry)


All comments are entirely my opinion, and you are allowed to have different opinions of course (even if you are wrong )

 

[EeeTea]

Tired

DATE: 23 Sep 2016
MILEAGE: 5175

Over the course of the 5000 miles I've had two punctures. When you consider that I've only ever had couple in the last 50,000 miles, it doesn't say a lot for the OEM Dunlops fitted. They were okay tyres but, not fantastic.


Because puncture one was on the front, and puncture two was on the rear, and the tyres were getting a bit tired. In fact the rear still had a slow leak and some carcass damage I thought I might was well replace them both sooner rather than later. So reading around, and assessing what to put on next I decided.

Thought i try the new Avon Trailriders - they've not been out for long, but reviews were favourable. I bought a pair for £240 from Universal Tyres, with the view to fit them myself, as i have in the past.



In fact I found the Dunlops to be a bit of PITA to get off, and not wanting to damage the rim, decided to pop up to a local bike shop and get them both changed there.




Now having ridden a 1000 miles on these tyres- I have to say that have to be the best tyres I've used. Totally confidence inspiring and a nice quality ride.

Chalk Vs Cheese against the original Dungplops

 

[EeeTea]

2nd Service

DATE: 29 Oct 2016
MILEAGE: 6158


Serviced at Orwell Motorcycles in Ipswich. I'm always very impressed with Orwell, they are competent and as helpful as you could ever wish. Highly recommended from me.

A point of possible interest to others. Unlike TK Cope who did the first service and implied I was an idiot for wanting the drive chain left at 25-30mm slack, Orwell told me when I went to pick up that they had left it 25-30mm slack as the 5mm prescribed by Yamaha was clearly wrong.

Cost BTW was £111.08

 

[EeeTea]

MODIFICATION for a HEAVY!!!! CLUTCH

I absolutely love this Tracer, I've really bonded with it. The only other bike I loved as much was my TDM900, and possibly the KTM (but that now comes third). HOWEVER. The clutch is heavy. Really heavy.

Now its okay for the first hundred miles, but I tend to ride wibbly wobbly roads as much as possible - consequently I live going up and down the gear box. Even a "commute" to our Leicester Office and back 300 miles round trip, I take all back roads, apart from a little bit of A14 between the A6 and the A6 (one of those dog leg roads), is all back roads.

My arm is killing me and it is time I did something about it.


SOLUTION

The standard Tracer clutch cable is cheap n cheerful (£17 to replace). The R1 clutch cable on the other hand is chunky and silky smooooth.

Yamaha Part No: 5VY263350100 £40.52 +VAT


The other thing I did was to change the actuator arm for another which is 5 mm (10%) longer, which means more leverage on the clutch and 10% less pull force to do it

Yamaha Part No: 5S7163400000 £16.85 +VAT

(This is from a Yamaha Bolt, and not a model that I've seen in the UK ...unless YOU know different) ...anyway this part had to be ordered from Japan.


So here you can see the new actuator arm in place. It looks absolutely identical to the original - which has 40mm between centre of rotation and cable coupling, with the new being 45mm (about 10% longer)





Next critical thing is the routing of the R1 clutch cable. This is longer than the Tracer, and only just fits - I've had to set the actuator main adjustment to one extreme, and the fine adjust at the lever end to about half way.





The routing follows the original, coming out to the same point above the radiator:






Where the big difference is, is where it routes up to the handle bars.

Here's the fork leg and bottom yoke:



and up through the cable tidy, where everything else from the handlebars is routed:




And here you can see that the tight bend in the original set up has been alleviated




The result is a very smooth clutch lever action, and marginally lighter - but it makes it far nicer to use and control.


And a surprise bonus is that it makes get the ignition key in and out a lot easier too


Thanks for reading

 

[EeeTea]

Screen, Screen, Screeeen when I want yooou....

DATE: 19th December 2016
MILEAGE: 6295


There once was a thread on screens started by Griff1971 which I read with interest ...see here: Linky Linky

I like the angular look of the Tracer - of course I appreciate that looks become very subjective, but I like it anyway. The screen however...well...its okay, but there is a fair bit of turbulence around it, and as I wear a peaked helmet (Arai Tour X-4) it doesn't make it too great particularly if there is a strong side wind too.

Anyway, during this thread John Barlow mentioned the MRA screen, which after some magic electronic button pushing that just seems to pay for stuff for me, without me doing very much (there has to be a catch?) ...it was kindly passed on to me to try.

The MRA touring screen is a good looker. The Tracer is a good looker. The two don't match though. Angles Vs Curves. It just looked misplaced.

But I fitted it anyway, and what it did do is work brilliantly, a lot of turbulence and buffeting has gone (tried it up to 70 on the A12 too, just to see what it was like at cruzin speeds. Excellent.

Still looked out of place though (its subjective, just my opinion).


So today, I've modified it, taking a crescent out of the top, so when viewed face on the top of the screen is flat, this meant about 2" down on the centreline, and back to the top existing screen edge at the sides. (It's a similar shape to the top edge of the stock screen)

In my view it looks a lot better and I've tried it up to 96 LSP* (that, of course, is an exactly legal 60mph ) on a back road, and it was still really good - most noticeable when I look right or left (asI mentioned I have a Arai X4 helmet with a peak) with still no buffeting.


No hand guards it looks like this:




So the screen stays.

Here it is with the hand guards in place:
















*LSP is 'Lympic Swimming Pools, and what the media seem to measure everything in, (except double-decker buses) so I have added LSPs to my post to give an idea of my speed on a public forum, and it's equivalent mph figure too. nudge nudge, wink, wink, say no more, know what I mean, know what I mean, say no more, nod's as good as a wink to blind bat.

 

[EeeTea]

Screen Adjust

On the subject of screen adjustment, some while back I modified the adjuster knobs - again this is another crap aspect of the Tracer...Yamaha could have spend an extra 10p to get an adjuster that doesn't work lose and rattle.

However, once the screen is set up I'm not one to decide to move it around, so I took the crappo knobs and swapped them for some black broad head allen set screws.

 

[EeeTea]

Leverage

DATE: 21st December 2016
MILEAGE: 6325

Christmas comes early in the EeeTea house. What did Santa bring? New levers!


If you read earlier, I did a clutch modification to make the whole thing smoother and lighter - and with great success. However, the reach to work the stock lever is ludicrous - okay on a short run, but ride for 1000 miles over a weekend and I was getting arm pain!

So I wrote to Santa for some adjustable levers to make things more comfortable. I sent him a link to this website: V-Trec Vario III Levers so he would know what to bring me.


Good price too £104.33 delivered for brake and clutch. (Yamaha after market levers are something like £94 EACH!). Of course, you can buy cheaper, but for life safety I like having a fully tested and certified product - These are German made, solid billet aluminium with TUV Certificate of conformity.


So here they are fitted:

Brake:



Clutch:



Verdict - very nicely made, but only suitable for three finger action on both levers. For the brake I only tend to use two fingers anyway, and the clutch is light enough now for this to be comfortable and easy to use. The clutch especially is totally cured and very very nice to use now.

If I am honest, if I were doing this again I would buy these standard V-Trec levers instead (long version) only because I think they would suit the bike's looks better (and they are half the price!) linky dinky


So for those following my blog (thank you ) you will know that I've kinda written the whole thing over the Christmas break, to catch up since last March...but here I am, all caught up, and nothing more to report...



...for now!

 

[Hexme]

On the subject of screen adjustment, some while back I modified the adjuster knobs - again this is another crap aspect of the Tracer...Yamaha could have spend an extra 10p to get an adjuster that doesn't work lose and rattle.

However, once the screen is set up I'm not one to decide to move it around, so I took the crappo knobs and swapped them for some black broad head allen set screws.

Love all the pictures you've posted, gives other ideas. My job today is to remove those silly adjusters, I know where I want my screen. Nice one EeeTea.