15 No-Cost Tips To Improve Bike Performance

hey everybody this is scott gustafson with vitalmx today i'm going to show you how to do some no-cost to low-cost tuning tips that are not going to cost a lot of money it's going to help your bike perform better without breaking the bank now the first area we're going to look at are your forks your forks are generally what you're feeling the most on the bike so when you get an improvement here it really comes out besides general maintenance and having your clickers in the right spot one of the single best improvements you can do is getting your fork seals lubricated i know you can buy real expensive dlc coated fork legs and they move real freely but just getting oil on the oil seal is a good improvement and what you're going to do is just take a simple feeler gauge you're going to insert it up here and you're just going to twist it sideways and by doing this you create an air gap and the oil will fill behind the oil seal and it's just going to lubricate that fork seal by doing that everything is going to slide up and down a lot easier now a second tip to make your forks work better is really going to be to uh to get the fork legs to be perfectly straight a lot of people when they install their front wheel they're actually going to bind the fork leg and the forks will work best if they're working in parallel as opposed to something like this where they're binding you'll find that the fork gets real harsh if you do this now you're going to be loosening up the right fork leg here and you're just going to do it down here at the axle now what you notice is that the axle block actually moves back and forth a lot so you know this is the adjustment you you want to get completely centered so you can take the bike off the stand push the front end down you can leave the bike on the stand just pull the forks up and they'll center themselves once they have themselves centered you're going to want to screw the bolts back in and torque them down torque is always important with your fork next area that you're going to get some improvement in without spending a lot of money are going to be your brakes and two areas one you're going to want to keep your rotors extra clean and two you're going to want to keep your brake fluid fresh and free of air so first thing you want to do every time you ride is going to be to clean your rotors you're just going to use a clean rag and some contact cleaner or brake cleaner the next area to get some real good performance gains out of your bike is your brake fluid you're not going to need to do this every ride but it is a good idea to do it every race or once a month brake fluid basically it can attract water and water is kind of an enemy here it breaks it down makes it dirty so if you bleed your brakes once a month really good idea you want to use a really good quality brake fluid you're either going to use dot 4 or 5.1 in your brake system they're both interchangeable so you don't have to worry about that but one good indicator that you do need to bleed your brakes is if you just look at the sight glass and if it's dark that generally means that it's absorbed some water and you need to refresh it the other thing this really helps with too is if you get air in the lines and which is another you know hindrance on brakes so this saves you from buying an aftermarket brake rotor set that costs hundreds of dollars one of the areas that professional riders are real particular on their bike are their controls now you can spend a ton of money on levers and everything but if you find that you just clean and lubricate your controls they'll work a lot better you also want to keep in mind bent levers and levers that don't necessarily fit real well are a problem but basically taking out the pivot bolts on your brake and clutch lever occasionally cleaning and lubricating them will go a long ways one big area of concern is going to be your throttle tube now on a new bike you get a real good action like this now after this bike's been ridden a lot plastic throttle tubes can deform from crashes or just holding on and you'll get a throttle that doesn't work so good you'll actually think that your bike is losing power so if you replace or lubricate areas like this you'll get increased performance out of it okay one good way to clean your throttle tube is simply remove it uh flush it out with a good contact cleaner and then i like to use a good molle based engine oil on the handlebar itself i'll just put a thin layer on the handlebar lubricates it real nicely it doesn't attract a lot of dirt and grit like let's say grease would do then when i install it back on what i'll do is i'll push it on completely and i'll bring it out just about an eighth of an inch so the end of the throttle tube is not touching the end of the handlebar and creating some drag or friction now a good way to get the most out of your chassis without spending a lot on engine mounts or other trick parts is really just going to be to torque your nuts and bolts to either the manufacturer's spec or sometimes less if you have a very rigid chassis like you would on a honda or suzuki so what you want to do is maybe once a month loosen all of your engine mounts and your swing arm nut and bolt and just re-torque everything when you do tighten these areas back up generally what we like to do is we'll tighten the motor mount to the frame first and then tighten the motor mount to the engine last now an area that i see a lot of people make a big mistake with are skid plates and a lot of aftermarket accessories they put on the bike and what will happen is if you use let's say a metal skid plate you'll tie the frame together and you'll find that it creates a really harsh rigid chassis if you do have to use a skid plate glide plate or any of the those things it's best to use some type of plastic something that will flex and not tie the frame together as much the same thing will apply to handlebar mounts obviously rubber mounted handlebar mounts are great and they do damp a lot of vibration but the same thing could be said too with uh some handlebar mounts that are one piece on top create too much of a rigid platform so you want to have something like this that gives you a little bit of flex in your handlebar one area the motorcycle i'm really critical of is the front end i like a bike that has a lot of front end feel has a lot of weight on the front end so steering is real precise you can get this by let's say changing the offset on your triple clamps or putting something very unobtainium like offset bearing races on there of course both these items cost a lot of money now you can do it for almost free by simply if you raise the fork tubes in your triple clamps you're going to get more front end bite if you lower them you're going to get more stability maybe a little less front end bite something that's desirable depending on your bike now the other thing that will give you more or less front end feel depending on what you're looking for surprisingly is how far back the axle is in the swing arm if you pull the wheel back you're going to get more front end traction if you push it forward you get a less little bit less front end traction maybe a little more stability now you can move the axle back simply by adding links to your chain adding a link to your chain is going to move the axle back 14 millimeters and adding or subtracting one tooth in your sprocket will move the axle four millimeters front or back depending on what you do so those are two different ways to to change the feel of your front end now engine mods can cost you a ton of money porting pistons pipes ignitions uh coatings um not in this case but cams there's so many options to to pump up the power in your bike um one really simple way to pump up the power in your bike without spending a lot of money is in this case is to reject your carburetor you'll need to reject for different temperatures altitudes humidities etc so if you maximize the jetting you can probably get two or three horse power more out of a bike just by doing it the right way okay now on a modern fuel-injected four-stroke bike you have a couple different options to change the power on your bike you can either increase the power or get more manageable power on some bikes you're merely going to replace a ignition clip that will change the mapping of your bike some bikes will have plug-in tuner that will allow you to fine-tune fuel and ignition mapping and then some bikes will have the same thing but on your phone and transmit wirelessly another way to regain some lost power is going to be to repack your muffler now fmf recommends that you repack the muffler after every 20 to 30 hours of use and their dyno testing has shown that muffler will lose approximately two horsepower once it's blown out so this isn't going to get you any more horsepower but it's going to regain the lost horsepower that you once had now the last tip i'm going to give you is regarding your drive train this is going to get you any more horsepower it's going to regain some lost horsepower one is worn out chain and sprockets will lose about one horsepower from your bike so if you once you put new chain and sprockets on there you're going to regain that one horsepower you've lost also the difference between say an o-ring chain and a non-owned ring chain is roughly half a horsepower and so that's something you can determine whether you want to do depending on your uses if you're an off-road rider you may decide oh it's worth to negate that half a horsepower by putting an o-ring chain on there if you're a motocross racer especially on a small displacement bike you'll probably want to run just a standard chain and you'll have a little bit of an advantage there finally the last thing is chain lube surprisingly in this i actually spent maybe a few hundred dyno runs to determine this but chain lube is worth about three quarters of a horsepower and so think of it as normally you would spray chain lube on uh let's say before your first moto and you may not put it on after your second moto but a dirty chain and sprocket um is gonna lose about three quarters of a horsepower if you just apply chain lube it's going to get that back so something you don't think of but it may be the difference between you getting one bike length ahead of the next guy so that's something to think about next time you're at the racetrack so those are a couple different ways that you can increase performance out of your bike without spending a lot of money i think the most expensive thing i did today would have been to tell you to put muffler packing in your bike and that's about twenty to thirty dollars um little things as surprising as just putting a little chain lube on your bike getting half a horsepower three quarters of a horsepower um you know these are substantial things when it comes to racing so you can spend a lot of money on your bike get really cool triple clamps or you can spend a little money on your bike and move the rear axle move the front forks doing these simple things just some some smart tuning will get a lot out of your bike so anyways i hope you've liked these tips if you have any tips of your own let us know in the comments below if you want to see any other videos or you want to know how this works a little better maybe we can explain it to you once again this is scott gustafson from vitalmx and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Vital MX

Views: 101,979

Rating: 4.8721805 out of 5

Keywords: Vital MX, VitalMX.com, motocross, supercross, dirt bikes, mx, motorcycle, Vital Tech Tip, How To

Id: Sxf1fJ7K9X0

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020