Author Topic: What's it all about then?  (Read 5288 times)

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Offline sharealike

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  • Bike: DL650, SV1000, Triumph Street Twin, Yam XT350 and Hon CX500
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What's it all about then?
« on: October 12, 2013, 15:52:20 »
Thank you so much for taking the time to visit this area of the forum. I hope it proves a valuable use of your time. Particular thanks go to Fat Rat who owns and runs the whole shooting match for inviting me to open up this section which is dedicated to clutch modifications for the Vstrom DL1000.

Will try and cut what is a very long story as short as can be. There is so much more from me about this topic all over the various forums for bikes which share the same or similar clutch, but from now on this is where it will be posted. A sort of all you need to know to save the trawl round the www.

Some shocking engine vibrations developed in a K3 SV1000 about two years into my ownership from new. Different bike but much the same engine as the DL1000 with much the same character from this fantastic Vtwin engine. And as you follow here will realise a very, very similar clutch. As an engineer of many years spent playing and working with engines, I set out to fathom what had gone wrong. The bike had been so noticeably refined for a 1,000 cc Vtwin when new, but slowly deteriorated to being really annoying to ride because of engine vibrations. The shocking bit was a loud clatter at idle and just above with the box in neutral and clutch lever released.

Being an early SV I separated the bikes symptoms from a less well known problem of the crankshaft hammering at idle (Idle Hammer = big loud hammer in the engine when it's hot). After some research and a lot of prototyping, my clatter and vibrations were tracked down to being from the clutch basket. The very thing designed to add refinement to our engines and keep harsh engine vibrations down to acceptable levels was doing just the opposite at certain engine speeds and idle. To be correct it's the engines torsion damper, which is built into a convenient place at the back of the clutch basket. To be even more correct it was coming from the Gear Primary Driven. The main gear that's driven by the engine to drive the bike which has a special ring of six or twelve coil springs that many folk don't even know exists. Why would they? Don't give any trouble, never talked about down the local by the technical types and fairly well hidden deep in all engines.

Having then just taken early retirement, with a bit of free time, the tools and engineering knowledge I set about building something I would be happy to leave in my bike long term. Took my final design out of the bike a few times just to be certain it was holding good and it's still in the same bike having done over 30,000 miles to date. There was also a novelty value in sharing what I was up to, hence the name sharealike from share and sharealike. This was with a few like minded owners of SV's in Australia of all places. They had idle hammer and the clutch baskets damper clatter down as one and the same (few bikes do have both). That forum was SV Down Under but sadly now closed and it's content gone for ever due to it's owners interest moving on. Not long after hooking up there I shared my findings on other VStrom and SV sites round the world. They all took some convincing that what they had named "chudder" could be banished without the cost of a new clutch basket. Plenty just accepted it was as the dealers said "a characteristic of the bike" while others just sold the bike, some after spending a fortune on everything but a new basket. Some owners were on their third - "fitting a new basket most every alternate new back tyre" was worst case reported buy an owner in the US. The offer to modify a few for just the cost of shipping convinced them "sharealike's modification was the way to go".

Six owners volunteered to be road testers of the sharealike re-engineered baskets. Came from all round the world I was truly astonished at their complete trust in a bloke they met on an internet forum, they were soon rewarded with VStrom 1000's and SV1000's that ran smoother than ever. They went on to cover many thousands of miles and report back. That "their chudder was gone". The bike was "like new" or "better than new". That was close to four years ago. One bloke doing over 50,000 miles on the modification before writing his bike off after crashing in the deep sand of a desert in the US.

Simply intended to be a share and sharealike gesture between motorcyclists, demand now means the sharealike modification has become a very small business. The design, inspection and modification process is just the same today as back then, performed within two days and returned quickly to owners all over the world from here in Yorkshire, England, UK.

Fuller details here to ask any questions about the modification and help with diagnosis.
http://www.v-strom.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=20036.new#new
Please contact me directly about clutch basket modifications. john@vibefreev.com
Website http://www.vibefreev.com/