As many of you know, I have been bitching and moaning about my 2000 CBR600F4 and its handling. I have never been happy with it and have never trusted it. Early last month Kendog and I planned to spend a day helping each other with basic setups and "sag" settings. It's a two-biker job. Well we buggered off to Phillip Is and it never got done ... so when it was in at the Honda Service Agent, I asked them to set the sag to my height and weight. They did and I went on the Capital 1000k ride and still hated it. I didn't trust that bike as far as it could throw me. I had decided the frame was ferked and was telling Nasty I was going to sell it.
Well yesterday we were setting up the KB BBQ prior to the Cheescutter ride with the help of early arrivals Wannabiker and SweetP. Wannabiker put the new caliper on Nasty's CBR "Bumblebee" and took it for a ride - loved it. So SweetP had to go for a ride too with Wannabiker on my CBR. He came back with good news - I wasn't imagining it, mine was a pig.
So he gets me organised so we could measure the sag. This you do by one person pulling the wheels off the ground against the side stand. You then put a cable-tie around the fork tube, settle bike down and very gently sit on it. This moves the cable-tie up the fork leg so you can measure how much the suspension has settled.
The settings for my bike are 35mm sag front and back. What did we find? Front = 60mm, Rear = 2mm! No wonder it was a pig, it was standing on its nose, steepening the already steep steering-head angle and it had no rear travel at all.
Here is the lesson. The Honda Service Agent may have done the right thing by the book for a new bike but it doesn't work on a used bike. If you think about it, it could never work. Things age, people fiddle, wankers chuck 'race gear' on a bike without knowing what it might possibly do (like kill ya 4 corners from the top of the Takas)
So on my bike, the front springs have gone soft so the adjusters needed to be screwed full down to get 37mm front sag. I don't think we could have got less.
The rear has 6 positions with the factory recomendation being setting 3. Until we set it to 1 (full 'soft') we couldn't get any measurable sag at all. This means some wally has changed the back spring for a bloody hard one. So the setting where Wannabiker could measure any sag ended up with 40mm. Front and back now had settings perfect to the factory specs. Once you have set the sag, you don't need to change it (unless you put on the beef!). It should always be 35mm front and rear.
The CBR600F4 has fully adjustable compression and rebound front and rear. These can make a difference, but they are subtle and you can play with them for ages to get them to your liking. On this bike there are no 'clicks' for adjustment, just 5 half-turns stop-stop. So we set all the adjusters at + 2 half-turns as a starting point which is almost exactly midrange.
The bike is bloody AWESOME. It's not perfect yet but it is now rideable and it will go where it is pointed! It was noticable by the end of our road and so I had to go do my benchmark road Paekakariki Hill Rd. From not being able to tell what it was going to do or having it wallow or bump-steer or just throw itself off-line for no reason - it now did none of those things. I was able to feel what it was doing and was even able to come back and say it needed a 1/4 turn of extra rebound. It is like being born-again.
Wannabiker for President!
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Originally Posted by Drew
.........I hear you love caramel slice....
Mom
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