How To Set Sag on a Dirt Bike

what's up guys taste it rockin on HD MC and today I'm showing you how to set that alright guys so today I'm going to walk you through and I'm going to show you how to set tag on your motorcycle now before we get started got a few things we need to talk about now first and foremost studying your stag is absolutely crucial it's probably one of most important things you're going to do when you are setting up your motorcycle it's going to make sure the balance of the bike is right that's going to handle the way you want it to it's all just going to make for safer riding as well now when I say stag if you're not familiar with that term what it means is essentially it's how much the bike's tags are in other words how much your shot compresses when the rider is both sitting on the motorcycle and also when the bike is just on the ground by itself now you're going to have different types of sag now when I say a raised sag or Rider sag that is when the rider is actually sitting on the motorcycle and the bike is on the ground by itself and nobody on it that's going to be called your static stag now for most your big bikes on you 250 to 450 is your adult riders your size usually going to be a right around 100 millimeters and now it's going to be about 4 inches now when you think about it your rear shocks going to have about 12 inches of travel so if you're at 100 millimetres or 4 inches that's about a third of your travels going to be used in the rider stag now keep in mind though whenever you're setting stag doesn't matter what motorcycle it is always look your owner's manual that's going to give you a window of where your stag should be so once you get it within that window then you can use some fine tune to get it to where you want it now remember Moore's Agony's of the rear ends going to fit lower now it's going to main mean the bikes going to be a little bit more stable at higher speeds and then if you have less sag and these bikes the bike is going to steer or corner a little bit better so if you're a desert race or maybe you want a little more sag if your track guy you might want a little bit less again you're just going to fine tune it to how you want the bike to handle now sunny stag is actually fairly simple all you're doing really is just adjusting the preload on the spring that comes on the shock and remember everyone's different shape and size amount of what bike you're on you always want to get the sack set up for you so now I'm going to show you guys how to do it step-by-step ok so before we get started today there's a couple of things you're going to need when we in order for you to set your stack first you're going to need a friend or two and I'll explain that here why in just a minute another you're going to need a way to measure your stag so you've got two options today we're going to be using the motion pro stag scale it's really nice it makes it convenient if you don't have one of those a tape measure will work just fine if you are going to use a tape measure you're going to want to piece of paper to write down your measurements and also you're going to want to pen to do that I'm going to be using a sharpie a Sharpie is also nice and you see why when we're measuring the sagol mark a reference point on the fender to make sure we're measuring the same spot and then you're going to need a punch tool or a preload adjuster tool if you don't have one of these you know you can use just a long screwdriver but these because they are curved at the end it does make it a little bit easier you need some sort of hammer that's going to be used to you know loosen or tighten the locknut strings on your shock and if you're going to be doing this solo a really nice tool to have is is Motul Digital stag scale this is making it to where you can take a two or three man jobs you can actually set the stack by yourself you know when you're out riding you're out the track so those are the tools that we're going to need to set our sack today all right so the first step that we need to do is we need to measure the free stag on the motorcycle now free stag refers to when the bike is on a stand and there are zero weight on the shock now you have a couple ways to do this like I mentioned before you can use a tape measure I'll show you how to do that with the tape measure first so what you're going to want to do is you're going to measure from the axle up to a reference point on your fender so you can see right here I've actually already marked the place this is where we're going to measure the stag from each and every time so I'm gonna place the tape measure here just in the axle I'm going to raise it up right to that point I'm going to be a ride it 60 centimeters so if I convert that to millimeters that's going to be 600 millimeters so you want to take that number 600 you want to write that down in your piece of paper you don't want to forget it and then we're going to subtract the rider stacks from that here in just a second now so that's how you do it the tape measure and now here is why we like to use this motion Pro static scope so much it really it takes all that math that equates you don't need to be writing down any numbers what you're going to do is you can take the static scale and you're going to see that reference point that we have and what you're going to do is you're going to zero it out I'm going to loosen this nut down at the bottom and then I can just slide this down and once I have that zeroed I can just tighten this back up now when I measure the rider stack and the rider sits on the motorcycle I'm going to know exactly what might fit my sag is I'm not going to have to do any claims from there all right so what steps to now what we're going to do is we're going to measure the rider or the race tag now something to keep in mind before you do that is you have the bike in yourself set up as if you're going to go out riding so I've got Gavin here but Gavin's wearing boots pants jersey helmet you want to have the bike set up too so you want to have at least a half tank of gas or more you know if you wear a tool belt you wear a backpack when you're riding you'd also want to keep that in mind because you got to remember any way that you add is going to affect the stag your motorcycle so remember have the bike set up as if you're going to go riding all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to have Gavin get on the motorcycle and we're going to get them in the correct position to where we want to take that next measurement for the sack so I've Gavin get on the bike and also is a good time to point out that's why I mentioned you might want to have a buddy with you chance gear is helping us out he's going to be holding the bike stable so when Gavin gets on the bike he doesn't have to support himself that allows them just to be natural on the bike so Gavin hop on there now on Gavin's on the motorcycle you want to always measure when you're the riders in the same position because if you move if you change your position on the seat that's always going to change your stag so you want to be a little bit forward of center on the seat so a little bit farther towards the gas tank and then you want to have your hand your hands on the handlebars you wanted to pretend like you're in your riding position now once Gavin set a good idea there's always just give a couple presses on the rear that's going to compress a shock a little bit and get rid of any fiction you might have it's just going to help the shock settle into its natural position so now once that's done I'm going to take that measurement on the sagging okay so now I'm going to take that measurement again so I've got my sag scale here again I'm going to go to the exact same point that I already marked on the fender so with Gavin on the bike right now you can see were sitting right about 96 millimetres of stack so like I said we want to be a right around 100 that's what this bike call for so what we need to do from here to get an extra four millimeters of sag is we're going to need to loosen or lengthen the spring on the shock which is going to allow for a little bit more sag so we're going to do that next okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to lengthen the spring on the shock now we're at 96 millimetres of sag we want to be at 100 so how we're going to get those extra four millimeters is we're going to loosen the lock nuts that are on here to allow this spring to be a little bit longer now in your Japanese bikes you're going to have to lock nuts the upper lock nut is what's going to hold everything in place from your lucky nut and the bottom that's going to be where your spring seeps against and adjusting that either loosen your tightening or tightening that is going allow us to adjust the compression on the spring so what we're going to do oh and one thing to keep in mind as well is on your KTM your Husqvarna models a lot of those will actually have a plastic lock nut that has a tinge bolt so it's going to be the same thing you just need to loosen up pinch bolt before you adjust it so what I'm going to do is going to have these two lock nuts I'm going to take my punch my hammer I'm going to put it here on the top lock nut and I'm going to loosen this and move it up the shock so I'm hit this now once that breaks free you can actually just go ahead get your fingers in there and you can start to loosen its give you a little bit faster if this get in binding if it's binding offers it's hard to get going a good idea just get some wd-40 sprayed on the threads that's going to help you loosen it up a lot easier ok so now I've loosened that upper lock nut so now what I need to do is I need to do the same thing and I'm going to take this lower lock nut and I'm going to loosen that as well nuts going to allow the shot or the spring to lengthen we're just going to give us a little bit more sex I'm going to do that next now what you can do another tip is if you want you can take a Sharpie like I showed you earlier and you actually mark one of the notches on the nut that's going to let you know when you've done the full circle and people might not usually one full rotation is about two to three millimeters so we're going to do a full rotation and then see whereas in there so all right so now I've got Gavin back on the motorcycle so we adjusted this tag the first time we measured it again we're still off this a little bit so I loosen that lock nut one more rotation so in total we came out about two full rotations we loosened it now remember if you don't if you have too much tag on your motorcycle well then you would want to tighten that nut and that's going to allow the bike to sag a little bit less so now Gavin's back on the motorcycle again exact same riding position he was in earlier so I'm going to take my sag scale put in the exact same spot you can see I am right at a hundred millimeters and that is right where we want to be so that's what the SAG scale now if you're using a tape measure now you've got your first measurement that you took earlier and you wrote that down a piece of paper so what you would do now is you do the same thing you're going to measure from your axle to that reference point and whatever that number is a millimeters you're going to subtract that's from that first number that you wrote down and that should be right around 100 millimeter so in our case the second measurement if it were 500 millimeters to subtract that from 600 which was the first number and that gives you a hundred millimetres of rider stag so now what we need to do is we need to put the bike on the ground with Gavin off the motorcycle and we're going to measure our static sag to make sure that's what we wanted as well okay so now we've got the raised sag set now the next step is going to be checking your static sag on the motorcycle now like I said before static sag is when the bike is off the stand and there's nobody sitting on the motorcycle you're just checking the weight of the motorcycle on how much you compress the shocks on its own but just like you did before you take your static scale or your tape measure come your axle come to where you March your fender previously so right now we're at thirty four millimeters of static sag so if you're taking your tape measure you measure that millimeters and then subtract that from the original measurement for us it was six hundred and that's going to give your statics tag now for most big bikes you're going to be right between about thirty to forty millimeters of static stag now but make sure check your owner's manual that's going to tell you what you need to be at but in this case we're right where we need to be what if you were to say well under that say you're at twenty millimeters but what that means is you put so much preload on the spring supports a rider's weight that you now don't have any static sag and you're well over that so you're at 50 millimeters well you might want to look into a softer spring and again it's your will under that you want to look into a stiffer spring but now that you've got the race tag set your static sags right Swee right is right where it needs to be now what you want to do is just tighten up that lock nut or that pinch bolt if you have a husk up under a KTM and you're ready to go out and ride all right guys so that wraps up our how-to video on how to set tag on your motorcycle now I can't reiterate enough how important it is to make sure you have that setup correctly for you again it's going to really affect how your bike handles it's also going to make it safer and always refer to your owner's manual if you guys have questions if you need to know where your race tags should be at you guys have any thoughts come up with questions on this video we'd love to hear those comment below write your questions we will always get your questions answered you can give us a call here at Rocky Mountain or chat live online we have techniques and standing by ready to help you guys out and see the tools that we use in this video if you want to pick some of those up just click on the link you can see everything that you're going to need to set stag on your motorcycle I'm chance at Rocky Mountain and we'll stay on the trail [Music] you

Channel: Rocky Mountain ATV MC

Views: 637,814

Rating: 4.911068 out of 5

Keywords: Rocky, Mountain, ATV/MC, rmatv, rmatvmc, atv/mc, atvmc, rockymountain, dirt, bike, Motorcycle, honda, Race tech, Sag, Suspension, Rebound, Compression, Clickers, motocross, enduro, Trail riding, Dirt Bike, Off-road, Adjusting your sag, Race Tech, Set sag, setting, adjust, rear shock, shock, forks, offroad, setting the sag, track riding, 4 stroke, 2 stroke, service, maintenance, fix, DIY, Sag tool, how to, stiff, stiffer, soft, setup, set up, spring, motion pro, sag tool, tools, motool, sag scale

Id: ZXCOoy9T0vc

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2017