Rear Suspension Joints

Hi All.

I thought I would post this to warn other SV owners. I have just stripped, cleaned and re-built the rear suspension and swing arm. The bike is now 3 years old and has covered about 12000 miles and has been ridden in all weathers.

Before the strip there was about 2mm of sideways movement in the swingarm and a knocking noise to go with it when all the weight was off the rear suspension.

Everything was plastered in chain fling and took hours to clean up using parafin. All of the needle rollers had got water in them at sometime in their life and rust was beginning to form on the bearing sleeves. All of the bearings felt gritty when you moved them by hand. I spent ages on each needle roller cleaning it with a rag and WD40 and used a green kitchen scourer to remove the very light rust marks on the sleeves. I then used a finger to force in new grease and kept spinning the needle rollers. It's amazing how much grease you can get in. I then re-assembled each unit also coating the sleeves in grease.

I have now re-assembled everying and before refitting the shock I checked for movement. There is now no sideways movement and no knocking noise. The natural movement of the swingarm is now very smooth.

All I can say is Suzuki was not very generous with the grease when the bike was built. The grease had also gone hard so was not really doing its job. Given how much Suzuki charge for the needle rollers and sleeves, (£90 just for the main pair in the swing arm), I would recommend that everyone should carry this out every 2 to 3 years/12000 miles. With the rust starting, I think another year would have finished them off.

There are 2 pairs in the swing arm and 3 pairs in the link arm so this could get very expensive if left for too long.

The Abba Superbike Stand with the swingarm removal tool was perfect for this job .

Tim

[rictus01]

Unfortunately all to common, generally it's a good investment it's worth spending a day greasing everything properly when you first get it, the factory grease is that white powdery stuff and not very (if at all) good,it's a simple task when new as nothing is yet corroded .

My SV covered 30 miles from before the rear linkage,swing arm,wheel bearings & headstock* were repacked with quality grease, after 100,000 miles it was all completely stripped & measured/checked and didn't need any replacement.

Cheers Mark.

*these were replaced once