R6 Revival

About 6 months ago my friend had an accident on his motorcycle ( a 2007 Yamaha R6) just after leaving his house. He was riding behind a truck when they suddenly braked for something in front of them, and my friend Austin, with his tires still being cold slid off to the right into the back of this truck. Luckily, He was ok apart from some stitches and bruising.

The bike however, she was hurt pretty bad. While we have been in quarantine together we took it upon ourselves to get the ole gal running on two wheels again.

There we several things that broke when he laid the bike over. The pegs needed to be replaced as one of them broke while another bent, the handle bar broke on the right side, the front fairing needed to be replaced and the clutch linkage started making noise so that needed to be addressed as well.

We began with the foot peg replacement. The first three pegs came off relatively easy but the one that had broke on the right side was held in with a washer that had been damaged making it near impossible to remove with hand tools. So, after consulting a “certified YouTube mechanic”, we got the grinder out and went to town. Trying to follow his instructions, we tried to be careful as to not remove too much material Austin ground the washer off and we were able to remove the foot peg.

The pegs were ready to give us more hassle though, when installing the new parts, the peg assembly was a tight fit. We had to shave down one of the retainers to get the peg to fit into its slot and furthermore, we had to install the spring and ball bearing. The bearing liked to fly off into dark corners of the garage and we probably spent a good 20 mins hunting them down.

Next, we moved on to the handlebars. We removed the shroud holding the assembly in place and swapped out the factory bars for some clip on replacements, using a marker we marked the previous alignment and were able to match it up when installing the new bars. Currently we’ve started on installing the replacement fairing, with the new one ordered we just have to wait on the delivery before we can finish up in time for summer cruises through the hill country.