How To Clean, Lube and Adjust Your Motorcycle Chain In 15 Minutes! (Yamaha R6 Demo)

So we're going to clean off the chain, we're also going to adjust the chain, and we're also going to lube the chain. So now that we're on on the lift, we can easily spin the rear wheel to clean it and lube it. What we'll do is we are going to use this brush right here called the grunge brush and this is meant for a chain and you can see the chain will just slide right through here and clean it off. As far as cleaning solution, there's a couple different things you can use. I usually will use maybe a little carb cleaner because this will take dirt and grime off and so what we can do is just kind of give it a light spray and what you can do is you just take this brush and you just brush it off and sometimes you don't even need any cleaning solution this is just really just to get kind of the dirt and grime off off of the chain. So what you can do is you can just spin the wheel and go in there and just brush it off and this will clean all the dirt and the grime off so that when we lube it up again we're not sealing in a bunch of dirt and grime and just go piece by piece in about three or four lengths at a time and you can just rotate the wheel as you go until you get back down to the starting point. So for chain lubes, obviously there's dozens and dozens of brands. You want to find one that you like. Everybody's going to have their own personal preference. I like to use mostly the Honda chain lube with moly. It lasts really good and the great thing about the Honda stuff is that it doesn't fling and when I say fling is when you lube up your chain when you start riding it starts shooting the the lube everywhere so this one is really good for not flinging all over your bike so you don't end up with lube all over your wheels. This one's also a good one. This one's more specific for off-road however any chain lube is going to be very very similar but today we're going to use the Honda chain lube. Now the way I like to do this is the best way is put a rag over the fairing so you don't get it on there and what you're going to do is shake your can of chain lube. You're going to take your can and you're going to start spraying right here. We're going to put the kickstand out of the way. You're going to spray from right here and you're going to spray downwards and you're not concerned about getting the outer part of the chain on the outsides. You want to get the the wheels in the middle here. This is where it makes contact with your sprocket and that's where you want the lube to be located. So we're going to shake our can and we're going to come back here and we're going to just start spraying and we're going to just spin our wheel and we're going to be careful to try to avoid getting it on the wheel as much as possible. This is the best spot to prevent it from getting on the bike or the wheel and we're just going to go through and do a revolution or two and make sure that it's nice and lubed up. And so you see on our rag down here we've got all the excess spray can wipe a little bit off probably get some on the ground or your lift or wherever you're working. Just clean that up and that's it for the chain lube. And so now you can see... Do you clean the excess chain lube off or do you just leave it as is? I usually just leave it as is and that's why finding a good chain lube that does not fling is essential because if you get one that has a lot of fling it's going to be all over your bike. It's going to be all over the wheel. It's going to be all over that. But if you want you can go through and you can you don't want to wipe off all the good stuff but you can just kind of hold your rag really loosely and just spin the wheel one more time just to make sure you get any big puddles off of there. As you can tell his chain has a little bit too much slack right? So the recommended I believe for this bike is about 25 to 35 millimeters of free play. And so when you measure free play you're going to pull the chain down and you're going to kind of make a static point of where it is and you pull it up. And so that to give you an idea we'll get out our micrometer. These are cheap great to have around the garage. Just turn it on 10 millimeters zero it off and what we're going to do is we're going to just open it up and we're going to start our measurement right here and we're going to see how high the chain goes. And you usually want to do it right in the center here. So the way I usually like to tighten them is going to be on the wheel so we're going to go ahead and take it off the lift here. Pull our stand out and sometimes the bike moves over so what I'm going to do is just straighten it out so it sits up straight. As you can see now it's still on the wheel we still have too much chain slack here. I mean this is way too much and if you leave it like this you're going to wear your sprockets out faster and you're also going to run a risk of running the chain off the bike. 32 millimeter all we're going to do is just loosen this up here and you don't need to take the nut all the way off. So as you can see this is our adjuster here. On this bike I believe it's 12 millimeter for a lock nut and a 12 millimeter for the adjuster screw. So we're going to grab our 12 millimeter open end wrench we're going to loosen the lock nut and we're going to start pulling this back. Now the key when you're doing a chain adjustment is making sure that you're even across the way. And most bikes have a little mark on here to make sure that you're even and we don't see any markings. So this one's oh here we go your marks are down here. So we've got a series of dots right here and what we're going to do is we're going to match up these dots to the dots on the other side and make sure that the wheel is perfectly straight. So as we go back on one side we're going to go back on the other side and we're going to try to evenly wiggle the wheel back till we end up with about about 30 millimeters of free play in the chain. So we'll grab a 12 millimeter open-ended wrench. This one is going to come down and you are just going to loosen up and this one moves relatively easy. Sometimes these are going to be locked in place and you have to be careful not to strip it. So then what we're going to do is we are going to start pulling the bolt outwards. If you can see it's already tightening the chain. So we're going to go a little more on this side and we're going to jump over to the other side and we may have moved it about a turn or so. So we're going to loosen this lock nut again and our dots down here at the bottom which were a little hard to see because of the dust on here. So from the back of the adjuster block we are one, two, three dots back. So we're going to jump back to the other side and you kind of have to keep switching side to side to make sure you're even and we are one, two, three but if you notice we are just past the third notch, third dot on here. So with the chain where it is we're going to do a quick measurement and we are going to pull it down. You want to do it kind of in the middle here is where they recommend doing it. So and we're going to open it up to where we want it at. So we're going to do a 30 millimeter chain slack here. So right about there. We're going to hold it in place with one hand and we're going to pull the chain up and right there we are just about exactly where we want to be. Pull it down, pull it up. So center of the pin to center of the pin. So we're going to tighten it up just a little bit more but we're going to go back to the other side to do that adjustment here and we're going to make the blocks the exact same. We are going to pull this back just a little bit further to match the other side. So you can see we're just past the third dot. We're not quite halfway between the third and the fourth dot. We're about a third of the way. So we're going to go back and we're going to jump back to the other side one more time and we're going to confirm that it's the same on the other side. And so if you can see we are just about a third past. Might be a little bit too much. All right so we're going to go back and we're going to double check that everything's perfectly even and it's really hard sometimes to get it exact but we are about a little over the third line just before the fourth line. It's about midway and if we go back to the other side it's the exact same. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to tighten up the lock nut here. They don't need to be overly tight so don't tighten them too much just like everything else on the bike just nice and snug and make sure that it doesn't back itself out. So we've got that and we're going to go back and we're going to tighten up the lock nut on the other side and snug up this nut right here. But now if you see our chain has a nice adjustment it's not flopping all over the place and this is about a 30 millimeter adjustment. That looks way better. Way better and you're going to the chain the sprockets everything's going to last a lot longer when it's adjusted properly. How much faster will I be? You will take five seconds off of every lap. Nice! Cool so the last step to doing the chain adjustment is to make sure that you retighten your rear axle nut. On this R6 it's going to be 80 foot pounds. Now if you don't have one of these in your garage don't worry 80 foot pounds is just really tight. What we're going to do is we're going to put this on here and we're going to start tightening and with a torque wrench what you're going to hear when you hit 80 foot pounds is a click. So as we go we're going to start tightening and you might not be able to hear it on video but we'll try to get you to hear it. Right there and so that's 80 foot pounds. So thanks so much for watching. Like, subscribe, leave a comment below on the video for Petrohead. He's doing real great things in the motorcycle community. If you ever want to come see me for something that you can't figure out it's wide open moto you can visit me at wideopenmoto.com. Thanks again for watching. Thanks bro.