Tuesday, July 17, 2012

More SV mods

The rearsets worked VERY well.  LOTS better grip and feel than stock.  And I still have room to move the pegs up and back about another half an inch.  I’ve done 2 track days with them so far, and about 2 or 3 more coming in in the next 30 days.

Per the recommendation of the "professional" racer at the last track day, and after paying attention to what he said he saw on the track, I'm putting a steering damper on the SV. I think it'll settle it down a bit in the corners and add some stability during acceleration and deceleration.
Instead of spending several hundred $$$ on a high-end unit, I'm going the simple route. I found a damper from an 07 Gixxer 600 on ebay for less than $30, including shipping. It's over $400 new.  And to make it fit, there's a guy on the svrider forums who machines the necessary hardware to mount it. One piece attaches to the same location that mounts the upper cowl/cluster/headlight stay for the fixed location. The other attaches to the lower triple at the left fork tube. I already bought the parts from him and the mounting hardware is installed.
The damper has a drain/fill port that I can change the damping rate by changing the viscosity of fork oil. It seems that most people are happy with about a 15wt oil. I'm not sure how that compares with what came in the damper.
So, I grabbed from 15w fork oil. Now I just need to get a small piece of tubing to fit the raised part where the plug goes in. The tubing I had was too small ID.  Just need to fill the damper, test fit it, and then tighten everything up.


And while I was messing with the forks, I got out my calipers and set both both fork tubes exactly 10mm higher in the clamps than stock. They set them that height when I had the forks rebuilt, but then in some work, I let them drop down to about 7-8mm so I put them back tonight. After making sure the steering damper works well, I can probably drop them another 2-3mm before it just starts getting too unstable. OR I can change the ride height in the rear a few mm.
Then I also lowered my clipons 10mm below the top clamp. We'll see how that feels at the track (probably 7/28, but 8/4 and 8/11 for sure). I also got a new, clear windscreen, so I may be able to mount my camera at the front of the tank for some video showing the cluster and out the front. I'll try to test all of that this weekend. I'm going to modify the airbox a little for better airflow as well as raising the front of the tank about 10mm. Pretty standard things in the SV world.

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