Gear change/front sprocket

[darrsi]

The gear selector on the FZS600 has a design flaw. Once the claw on the selector arm is a bit worn it struggles to pull the drum round far enough for the gears to engage cleanly. This particularly affects 2nd gear, but can also prevent 1st from selecting (the drum needs to be pulled round a little further for 1st and 2nd because of the neutral detent between them).
The solution (for me, anyway) was to grind a small amount of metal off part of the selector arm to allow it to rotate further.
It sounds to me as if your bike's in the early stages of the problem and so, with luck, you won't need to replace the selector forks and drum. Details are here (link takes you to the middle of the thread since the first bit is long enough that you'll have dozed off by the time you reach the useful section).

This was gonna be the next suggestion but thankfully Fazerider has explained it rather than me. 


With my bike it felt like it was trying to change into 7th gear, there was nothing there at all, then after a bit of clunking and clattering it would bang into 2nd, almost like a badly mistimed gear change without using the clutch.
All happened rather quickly for me though and i was about a mile from my mechanic so headed straight to him instead of going to work.
If i remember correctly there was going to be a big delay on parts, like 4 weeks, which i simply couldn't deal with, and he ended up changing a main gear selector spring and it actually fixed the issue perfectly.
It was a recognised problem that he'd dealt with before so i'm not sure if he did any other jiggery pokery but all i know is he sorted it out okay.