Getting my 'click' on. Setting the suspension baseline prior to Superbiking the FZ.

I finally got to wash the FZ after the 3-day trip I did last weekend. The dirt from the ADV roads got everywhere. While I am a big advocate of the any bike can do anything if you have the right rider philosophy, doing National Forest service roads on the FZ is not the best idea. After cleaning off the layers of dirt I decided to check the suspension settings since I hadn't done that yet. I wanted to know where the previous owner had things set and to baseline the suspension prior to getting to the track for the California Superbike School. Take a look as I go through it all.

The FZ is my first bike with fully adjustable suspension. To be considered fully adjustable a bike's suspension need to have preload, compression and rebound adjustability. If you want to be really fancy you can get adjustable swing arms and triple trees, but usually that is reserved for MotoGP level bikes. The tools above are what you need to get a handle on your handling. The spanner to the left is for the rear shock preload and it comes from the stock tool kit. I also have another similar spanner for other bikes. A flat head screw driver is needed for the FZ's compression and rebound adjusting on the front as well as the compression adjustment on the rear shock. The tape measure is needed to check sag. You need to have one that measures in metric as it is much easier to record your sag measurements in millimeters versus sixteenths of an inch.

The easy way to see how much suspension travel you are using is to put a zip tie onto one of the fork stanchions. As the forks move through the suspension range the zip tie will give you an idea of how much movement you are getting. I put this one on and then put a jack under the bike to lift the front fully off the ground. Once I had the fork dangling in the air, I gently set the bike down until the forks settled into their fully weighted position. I lifted the bike back again and could see the the bike's weight by itself took up about 20mm of fork travel before I even get on it. I will need some friends to come over to really get an idea of my preload settings and how to adjust them. For now I added a bit of preload to the fork from what I had been running since I bought it.

After doing the preload and playing with the zip tie, I set the rebound and compression. The rebound settings are found at the top of the FZ's forks for this model year. I had to remove the handle bars to get my screwdriver in place. The compression settings are found at the bottom of the fork. You will hear people talk about 'clicks' when it comes to the suspension settings. As you turn the adjusters, you will hear and feel the screw move through some detents giving you an audible click in most cases. These are what you count. You have to refer to your owners manual for the direction of turn and where to start counting, but it is a good thing to run the adjusters through the full range of adjustment once or twice prior to twisting the screws to the final setting of choice.

To set the rear sag, I set the bike on its center stand to get the rear wheel off the ground and to get the rear shock fully extended. I put the two pieces of tape you see in the picture above so that I could have a consistent place to measure the rear suspension travel. Like when I did the front, I just did a quick measurement to see where the bikes sets without my weight from fully extended. It doesn't matter where you measure the sag from as long as you do it the from the moving swingarm to a fixed point on the bike's tail. 

I used the included tool kit spanner to set the rear preload using the shock's adjustment screw. I added a couple clicks of preload to the rear to tighten things up in back. Mostly I'm just setting the bike to the owner's manual recommended baseline and recording where the previous owner had thing set. In five of the six settings I made things stiffer. It was only on one setting did I make things softer. I'm glad I did this as I found that the forks had the rebound settings set differently from left to right. I took the bike out the next day for a morning cruise through the Mulholland Drive canyons and it seemed to feel a bit more stable. I need to get some more seat time to really get a feel for where to adjust it next.

I still have my buddies FZ-09 in the shop though he now has the registration updated so it will be leaving soon. While I still had the bike in the shop I rolled them both out for a photo shoot so that you the viewer could see two generations of FZ at one time. So much sexy in one shot!

I also cleaned up my shop to give myself some more space. As my newborn rapidly approaches toddlerhood my wife is clearing out baby stuff freeing up valuable shop space for more motorcycle stuff. I have been flirting with a few bikes on Craigslist. The era of choice right now seems to be 90's sport bikes. I have my eye on a sweet early 90's Kawasaki that would be a welcome addition to the My Motorbike Obsessions stable. I will be prepping the FZ for the track soon so stay tuned for more Motorbike content shortly.

Blue