Front universal joint maintenance

[rhubarbray]

Hey guys, new member here. I`ve been doing some research on these bike for when I pick it up (hopefully) in a couple of weeks. The question I have is I see several people on here talking about doing maintenance on the rear driveshaft/ pinion cup  joint but I haven`t seen anything about pulling the front u-joint and lubing the fwd splines that come out of the engine. Can this u-joint be pulled out? Or do you have to pull the swingarm? Is there a grease fitting on the fwd joint?

Ray

[John Schmidt]

First, there is no grease zerk on the u-joint, and it can be pulled without pulling the swingarm(see the link below). If the mileage is relatively low on the bike, you may only be interested in greasing the engine splines. Than can be done w/o removing the u-joint. Just pull the boot from the engine side and clean/grease as desired, then slip the boot back on the engine. There's not a lot of room but enough to clean/grease. When you pull the rear end and the final drive, the driveshaft comes out with it, with that now exposed you can clean/grease the shaft where it goes in the other end of the u-joint.

Keep in mind....if you pull the back end of the boot off the swingarm, reinstalling it will often test your religion, if not your vocabulary. 

http://www.rattlebars.com/mtz/ujoint.html

[Chrisj CMA]

First, there is no grease zerk on the u-joint, and it can be pulled without pulling the swingarm(see the link below). If the mileage is relatively low on the bike, you may only be interested in greasing the engine splines. Than can be done w/o removing the u-joint. Just pull the boot from the engine side and clean/grease as desired, then slip the boot back on the engine. There's not a lot of room but enough to clean/grease. When you pull the rear end and the final drive, the driveshaft comes out with it, with that now exposed you can clean/grease the shaft where it goes in the other end of the u-joint.

Keep in mind....if you pull the back end of the boot off the swingarm, reinstalling it will often test your religion, if not your vocabulary. 

http://www.rattlebars.com/mtz/ujoint.html

This could only be hoped to be accomplished once the wheel and final drive/driveshaft have been removed

[Thespian]

Keep in mind....if you pull the back end of the boot off the swingarm, reinstalling it will often test your religion, if not your vocabulary.  Wink
  X 4

[rhubarbray]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.

[gordonv]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.

Wing riders also say "O-rings? What O-rings?", and they have 100K's of miles on their bikes.

[Tfrank59]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.
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If splines haven't been greased that many km you'll have big time wear me thinks

[Chrisj CMA]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.

Wing riders also say "O-rings? What O-rings?", and they have 100K's of miles on their bikes.

I used to ride with the local wing chapter.  The reason they don't grease their splines is because for the most part they don't do their own maintenance.  The bike goes to the dealer for tire changes.  If they are getting hundreds of thousands of miles, someone is greasing them!

[hubcapsc]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.

Wing riders also say "O-rings? What O-rings?", and they have 100K's of miles on their bikes.

I used to ride with the local wing chapter.  The reason they don't grease their splines is because for the most part they don't do their own maintenance.  The bike goes to the dealer for tire changes.  If they are getting hundreds of thousands of miles, someone is greasing them!

Among the several salvage 1500 wing final drives I robbed parts from,
were some good ones that looked like they'd never been apart. The pinion cups
and pinion-ends of the drive shafts were glistening with final drive
fluid. It is harder to tell if someone crammed grease down in the
flange, but since I found a few perfect flanges, I have to guess that
they were greased at tire changes...

-Mike

[Tfrank59]

Mileage on the bike is 62,000km but the owner has never greased the splines. Claims he`s never heard of a problem and he rides with quite a few 1500 and 1800 Wings.

So what I was trying to say earlier (came out lousy because I was on my smart phone) is that you need to get in there not so much because of the u-joint, but because the PO didn't say anything about spline maintenance, which should've been done just about every tire change.  Regardless of what Gold wing riders do or don't do, Valkyries do require this maintenance periodically. You can read about the procedure for building a lift adapter, removing the wheel and doing the spline maintenance, all in the shoptalk pages. My bike had less than 28k miles on it when I bought it, and I didn't get in there for 5000 more miles before finding that the PO had not done the maintenance on my splines. There was significant wear to my final drive splines because of that. It was not a happy discovery. Had to buy some new parts.  My advice is get that work done and even if you don't want to do it yourself, try to find someone who is capable, a Honda dealer if need be, to get in there and perform that spline lube maintenance on your bike--or at least inspect it to determine whether it's been done, and what shape you're in at this point.

Afterthought: so it just occurred to me that you don't yet own this bike --duh!  in that case I'm almost inclined to say pass, because if this person can't produce any records of having this maintenance done, then he's pretty clueless about proper care of a Valkyrie and who knows what other issues it's going to have--for what it's worth

[Gryphon Rider]

While I would definitely grease the splines that connect the U-joint to the transmission output shaft if I had the U-joint out, I would never pull the U-joint just to grease the splines.  There is very little sliding motion there, and there should be no play to encourage wear or force out the grease, so there is really no reason for a re-greasing.