Ye saga continues...!
I decided to have another go at the screw fittings on the brake hoses that go to the ABS modulator after squirting them with Plusgas for the last few days, but still no luck
I may have to resort to a blow torch at some point, although I'm going to have to do that carefully because a) there's bits of bike right behind them and b) from what I recall, brake fluid is flammable!
In the mean time, I figured I'd have another go at the rear shock. I'd been up to B&Q (now open, but with 2 metre lines all over the place) to get an M8 bolt and some appropriately sized washers to create a "bearing puller" that should (supposedly) mean I can remove the sleeve at the bottom of the shock and get it out, because, at present, the shock is stuck against the underseat storage compartment.
I did think about trying to remove the underseat storage, but that's attached to all sorts of other stuff such as the seat lock and, it seems, even the wiring at the left rear of the bike, so that was a non-starter.
Anyway, I got a piece of aluminium tube that would go over the metal sleeve at the bottom of the shock and started trying to pull it out.
And tried...
And tried...
And not a bloody millimetre of movement could I get
(I'd been squirting that with Plusgas too...)
Ho, bloody hum.
Might be another blowtorch job...
Alright, I've got to remove the exhaust because I want to check the swingarm bearings and also (as mentioned in a previous post) it's blocking the way to get a stupid metal plate out of the middle of the bike (another piece of ridiculous design by Yamaha
) so I can get access to the ABS modulator.
So off with the header bolts (dead easy, fortunately, because I'd taken them off and Copperslipped them when I had the new engine installed a couple of years back
) and then removed the bolts holding the bottom section and the cat pipe and silencer section.
I decided to try to do this without removing the silencer too and, fortunately, after a lot of wiggling sections around and so on, I got the cat pipe out.
Just as I was doing this and feeling relieved, there was a "Clonk" as the rear shock suddenly pivoted on its lower mount and dropped to the ground and I'm staring at it thinking "How the FOC did that happen...?!
)
Eventually, after looking a bit more, I realised that the cat pipe was blocking the swingarm from dropping all the way down, so, with that out of the way, the shock (which is still attached to the swingarm) could drop an extra inch which meant that the underseat storage was no longer blocking its path!
So that also meant that I'd FINALLY cleared the way to get this bloody ridiculous metal plate out of the way to let me access the connectors on top of the ABS Modulator!
I'm not actually sure what this plate is actually supposed to do, but I'm seriously thinking of cutting it in half and then sticking it together with a couple of flat metal pieces and some heat resistant aluminium tape so that it'll still sit in place, but, if I ever need to get it out again, I can just cut the tape off, remove the plates and take it out in two sections, making life a hell of a lot easier.
At this point, I decided to chalk that up as another win for today and leave anything else for another day.
Here's a pic of the offending article (the thing at the top left is the ABS controller)