Heavy Clutch - Modification


EeeTea

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This is an excerpt out my EeeTea's Tracer Blog (located in "The Bar" on this forum) , but thought it might be useful to post here too, under modifications, in case someone else is looking for a solution...



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 :cool:
 

Cippy

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Nice solution, I remember I did the same 36 years ago (so old!!!) on my Fantic Trial 50, and it worked. Just one question: does the clutch completely disengage after modification or do you feel the rear wheel pulling a little (like I rember happened me to my Fantic). Theoretically the clutch arm traver reduce a little, by increasing its lenght.
 

EeeTea

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Hi Cippy. No problem... In fact I've done a further mod that I still have to catch up on. I still had issues with the span/ergonomics of the cheap lever. I've got reasonably big hands XXL / size 12 gloves and still struggling with comfort for distance ...so I changed levers this last week. Chalk n cheese. I'll stick it on my blog over the next week.


I was concerned this would be an issue but thought I'd take a punt. As you know, when its cold the Tracer has a lot of clutch drag anyway. This remains, but when its all warmed up I can happily push the bike about when its in gear. Good enough for me!
 


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