Selector rod, sticking in neutral and jumping out of gear back to neutral

[Triggergee]

Hi everyone hopefully one of you will know what I need to do...Recently my bike has stranded me twice when accelerating from first into second gear, getting stuck in neutral during the gear change. The problem seemed to be a tab on the selector rod bending and preventing a gear change, I changed the rod and it fixed the issue for about a week or so before the same thing happened again.


Yet again I replaced the selector rod as well as the clutch friction plates, springs and cable. Now the bike decides to develop another fault in the form of jumping out of gear and going back into neutral, doesn't happen in first gear but at around 5-6 thousand rpm in jumps out of 2 and 3, probably the others too but I've been un able to get to that point.


I'm guessing there is a reason why the tab on the selector fork keeps bending and it's probably related to the new jumping out of gear issue. Does anyone have any advise?

[Fazerider]

Sounds very like the problem I had here (sorry, it's a long read).

[Triggergee]

Yes I've read through that many times already which is what leads me to think trying the selector forks and drum but saying that it didn't fix yours did it?

[Fazerider]

Yes I've read through that many times already which is what leads me to think trying the selector forks and drum but saying that it didn't fix yours did it?

Mine isn't quite perfect, very occasionally if I get the revs wrong whilst flicking to change up I'll get a false neutral... second and sixth are the ones that show the problem. I guess there's some damage to the dogs themselves, but that's more of a job than I fancy tackling. So far as the main difficulty of being unable to get out of neutral goes though, yes, it's fixed it. 

[Triggergee]

What problems do you get with second and sixth? Did you end up filing the end of the tab off?

[sasu]

My mechanic told me that just one botched shift from first to second can be enough to cause this problem. In the transmission there are pins on the gears that enter holes in another gear. Those pins have a small shoulder. If that shoulder gets rounded by a hamfisted shift, the pins tend to drop out of gear. The damage to the shoulder is so small that you have to look at it in certain light to see the change.

This is second hand information so no guarantee of accuracy.

[Fazerider]

What problems do you get with second and sixth? Did you end up filing the end of the tab off?

They just fail to engage if my gearchange is particularly hamfisted. Bear in mind that second gear suffered a lot of this as the fault started to develop and before I fathomed out what the main cause was (hence the state of the selector forks/drum). If you've not had many horrible graunched upshifts the dogs are probably still in useable condition.
I'd certainly recommend grinding the tip of the tang down as described: don't bother attempting to bend or file it, the metal's too brittle and hard. It's a job that only takes a couple of hours and if it doesn't solve the problem completely a change of drum and forks probably will.