colinlinz

Hi Guys, I don't post much over this way, I usually hang out at the ozfirestorm bulletin board. I'm currently trying to build some data on Cam Chain Tensioner failures. To do this I have a short 10 question online survey that I hope to get VTR ridders to complete. The survey is for all VTR1000 riders (F, SP1, SP2), regardless of experiencing a CCT failure or not. The link to the survey is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VH7RB8R

Thanks
Col

Tweety

Considering that the SP's use gears not chains I doubt they will have many failures... but you never know...

996Riders

It should ask the milage you are at if you have NOT had a cct problem cuz ive made it to 54000 with not a single problem

lazn

How about those of us who replaced them as a precaution and had a drastic reduction in engine noise when we did? lol

nuhawk

I noticed a decrease in my Medicare payments for Pharms about this same time. It was about 16k miles.

colinlinz

Oops, thanks for reminding me.

I should have given some more thought to the structure, but it was a spur of the moment thing. I'm limited to 10 questions, so with the feedback from you guys I deleted the 1st question and added another for total kilometres of bikes with no failures.

Personally I haven't had the problem with mine, it has about 80'000klm on it. I did replace one on my Son's VTR at 67'000klm.

colinlinz

I've attached a pdf of the survey results as they are at the moment. There are only 66 respondents, but the survey will be kept as a live document, so we will see what happens. The results seem to have settled into some consistency, I don't think there will be any great changes. Thanks to you guys that took the time to respond to the survey. I had good responses from here, Aust, and the UK.

Here is a link if you want to see the pdf. http://tinyurl.com/24h7pd8

Vision001

I have 37,000 miles on mine with no change in the CCT. It isn't making any more noise than any that I have heard although they are all a bit whiny. I bought a low mileage engine with some parts missing and plan on rebuilding it slowly with more premium parts to swap out at some time in the distant future. After reading the concerns here, I may just swap the CCT's now as the one I bought has about 15K on it. I tried searching for instructions for modifying the stock ones but - despite people saying to just search it- I never found any information. If anyone does have a link to a thread, it would be appreciated.

I started the survey but it wanted me to sign up for yet another service and i just wasn't that interested so I hope the results are interesting. Maybe somebody could simply summarize them here.

colinlinz

I tried to up load my pdf to this sight, but the file size is a little too large. Did you try the link in the previous post? Is it the OZFirestorm site that wants you to join? Or is it Survey Monkey that wants to sign you up?

colinlinz

You guys are champions. The respondent numbers have jumped to 82 overnight, mostly from here. Thanks.

ranchomice

When I had manuals in mine the engine noise did far from reducing, it was so noisy I had stockers put back in!

Tweety

Then they where incorrectly tensioned...

colinlinz

This will be the final update. I have reached my 100 respondent limit for free access. The survey will be kept live. I may at a future date fork out some money for further results if the responses are there. I haven't drawn any conclusions, just included the questions and data. You can draw your own. Thanks to those of you that responded. I think a 100 is a meaningful size and some clear trends observable.

Survey Results

8541Hawk

Well I can't see the results but I believe you left out 3 important questions in your survey.

1- What rpm range do you normally operate the bike in? By reading this forum I have come to the conclusion a lot of folks tend to run the bike at low rpms. Without realizing it they are actually lugging the engine, there by causing premature CCT failure.

2- Do you let the bike idle during warm up on the side stand? This is another no-no with a VTR. Not to get into this topic to much but some very knowledgeable VTR people have stated this is a recipe for CCT failure.
I will also add the only CCT failure I have witnessed was on a bike idling on the side stand (not my bike but a co-worker who didn't believe it was a bad thing....)

3- Do you get into over rev (or above 9k rpms) and have a habit of slamming the throttle shut? Another bad riding habit that besides being a poor riding habit also tends to shorten the life of CCTs

So IMHO without the answers to those questions, any survey on CCT life span is incomplete and no real data can be had from it.

colinlinz

I was limited to 10 questions with the free membership. There are a range of operational parameters that I would like to explore, but at this stage I just wanted to quantify the problem and see if there were any trends regarding models and distance covered.

As for warming the bike up on the centre stand, it isn't something I would recommend regardless of what you own. It isn't good for the engine in a number of ways. We have two VTR's in the family, mine has done about 50'000 miles with no trouble from the CCT's. It gets a bit of hard time on the track, and I enjoy a decent ride in the mountains near home on weekends. I would say the throttles get slammed shut fairly often, though over rev is rare. I did have a few problems hitting the limiter on my local race track, coming out of one corner, but so far the engine has been no dramas at all. My Son has a VTR too. He did the front CCT at 67'000klm (aprox 40'000 miles), I don't know how he rides when I'm not around, but I wouldn't think he would be as mechanically sympathetic as myself.

As for rpm range, I would expect CCT problems to be of higher frequency in the range of low rpm, high load. To me the problems seem to be adjuster spring breakage. This spring carries bugger all load, the load is transferred through the helix. What will be transferred through the spring is harmonic vibration. With the right resonance the spring will move enough to cause a progressive overload failure in an area of stress i.e the sharp bend at the end of the spring. This is where I would really like to see some operational data. It's hard though, because this relies so much on riders own thoughts of what they are doing. From work with modern ecu equipped products that log hours of operation, throttle percentage, time at rev points, ect; I know that how an engine is actually operated, doesn't always reflect how the owner believes it is operated.

I'll try a link to the post with pdf. Let me know if it works. I can't post the pdf on here as the file size is too large (about 650kb).

Survey result post