With the bike off the road for a bit due to what seems to now be our annual "mini-Winters" with real snow & ice and subsequent sand & brine on the roads, it was a good opportunity this past week to tear her down a bit to do some extensive cleaning and checking, and to do the rear drive service.
Cleaned & polished the rear wheel, underside of the exhaust system, and all those nooks and crannies where you can't get to when she's all in one piece.
Everything was going smooth and got the rear drive unit up on the bench for servicing until, oh crap...yup, that's rust coming out of the pinion cup when I'm trying to yank the shaft end out of there.
Looks like it would have been a good idea to replace that shaft seal when I last did the service...it looked OK, but looks can be deceiving I guess. A perfectly decent shaft and pinion cup down the tubes...
A quick check on Partzilla (thank you to our friend NoGrey in Idaho for some sound advice offered during some back & forth texting over the weekend), and I was a bit surprised (pleasantly) to find out that even with our dreaded CDN$ exchange rate purchasing anything from the US, a complete new assembly (drive shaft, pinion cup, seal, rings, clip, etc. (and threw in a new wheel/brake side collar as it was showing a bit of scoring) delivered all the way out to little old Agassiz here came in under $170.00 CDN. Parts should arrive next week, so I guess I have more time to spend giving the old girl's underbelly some more attention
Wonder just how many km's I put on this past Fall on that dried out pinion cup? Pays to be lucky
Lesson learned....when there's an opportunity to replace rubber parts that you may not know how old they are...just do it!
