How to know when rear shocks are gone?

Some of the roads around here are pretty crappy, i often stand 3/4 of the way up driving down my street to get to the main road (multi-decade-patch-jobs-fail), so how do i know when the shocks on my '85 VF500 are "gone"? Even on the main roads, all the freeze/thaw around here there are often long dips and bumps in the road that have me feeling like i'm on a roller coaster instead of a motorcycle. What's a good test?

 

You could try measuring your sag to start with to see where you're sitting on ride height. As far as damping is concerend there's no real way to measure that other than position sensors and data loggers. If she's bouncing around too much over bumps and continues to bounce longer than normal then you know your shocks are shot. More than likely you need smoother roads tho.............

 

when you hit a bump and your butt feels a whack, you've lost compression damping and need a better shock.

 

If the original shock is on there it is well past it's prime- replace with a new or rebuilt used shock with new springs adjusted to your weighted spring rate.

 

If it's still the untouched original, at bare minimum the shock oil should be replaced.

There are lots of other (more modern design) swap opinions available.

It all depends on how much you want to spend....

 

poor student amounts

 

Oh boy, bad news.

About all you can do is maybe drain the shock and replace with a 15 w fork oil. It takes a looooong time to drain the shock and once refilled, you probably won't notice a huge difference. Some, but not a lot. Try running minimal air pressure or none at all if you can get away with it.

You should probably do the front fork oil too. Again, minimal air pressure if you can get away with none even better.

Anything more and you're into the hundreds of dollars....

hey, just noticed you're in NS. I'm a Haligonian myself. I've probably hammered my vf750 across the same roads you have. That sig pic to the left is in Margarettesville on the Bay of Fundy. The military seems to think I should be somewhere else besides NS, we tend to disagree on that point....

 

Yeah, don't expect much from the rear shock. In fact, don't bother changing the fluid but the beast that lies beneath is better left alone, IMO.

The forks would probably use a good servicing. More that likely you could use bushings, etc., but if you are on a budget a good cleaning and a quart of 15w fluid should help things a lot (less than $20 job).

Good luck!