Wintersdark

Amazing. This is perfect. Now, I run my seat in the upper position, so things look a bit different, but this worked great for me. I went a little further than @smurph. What I did was removed the tank retaining bolts right there under the seat, lifted it a bit and slid a pair of washers underneat (one per bolt) - this raised the rear of the tank by 2mm. That same piece, of course, is the piece that has the slots for the seat height adjustment, so this immediately raises the front of the seat by 2mm. I then put giant 4.25mm fender washers taped to the frame, *under* the plastic seat base that @smurph taped the washers to. I did this because trying to tape washers to that plastic base (or the seat itself) was difficult: they'd get pushed off when I tried to slide the seat on. However, when taped to the frame underneath, they simply hold the rubber stops up and are never subjected to lateral stress. This made an *enormous* difference, the seat feels completely flat now, and I can move around on it without feeling like I'm going to slide into the tank as soon as I relax. It's more stable, too, less side to side tippiness. By raising the rear of the tank, you can get a lot more adjustment room, but to be honest you don't really need much. Even the little bit I got it up here makes a tremendous, immediately noticable difference. Lift the rear of the tank a bit. Washers onto the frame. And done! The advantage of going this way is you can still easily change the seat height in the normal way without needing to move spacers around. If you stick spacers permenantly to the plastic insert, you'd need to move them to still keep the slope when you adjust the seat height.

Heeeeey, interesting, and another (fairly) local guy too! I've always wanted to reduce the slope, and ride with my seat in the upper position as well anyways. I'm gonna go out and give this a look right now, see how it goes. Higher seat and less slope is all good for me!

Finally got around to ordering a 47 tooth rear sprocket, and made some minor adjustments to the rear wheel alignment. I've always in the past gone by adjuster bolt length given that the tick marks on the adjusters themselves are incredibly useless. But with the adjusters exactly equal in length - or as equal as I could get them with my calipers - the rear wheel was ever so slightly out of alignment. Not enough to cause chain issues, but while riding without hands on the bars I'd end up always leaning a bit to the right. I could offset this by putting my "everyday carry" stuff like my toolkit in the right hand saddlebag, but that doesn't help when I leave the bags at home, and of course the right hand saddlebag is the easier one to use for day to day stuff so I'd prefer to leave it emptier. So, bought one of those Motion Pro chain alignment tools that clamps onto the sprocket, and sure enough, just a wee bit off. I wish the nicer chain adjusters were available for the newer models, and not so silly expensive. I'm really not a fan of the stock ones.

! Yep! I never managed to really capture the pearl in the paint in photos, but when clean and waxed in the sun it's really nice looking.

All great answers here, but I'll weigh in too because it's a nice day and I'm sitting in the sun. The Tracer is a very manageable bike. Powerful, but easy to ride, and less violent than the base MT09 due to the longer swingarm. Because you've got good power across the rev range, you don't run into the Traditional I4 Newbie Trap where there's such a pronounced increase in power at high RPM so suddenly it's easy to get into trouble. You certainly can get going pretty fast - the bike will top 130mph in no time at all - but not accidentally. I wouldn't recommend it as a first bike (though I wouldn't dissuade someone who I felt wasn't stupid and was considering one) but after you've got the basics of riding down, it's an easy bike to ride. @keithu is very much spot on here that the weight is a very significant factor in terms of performance and handling. For it's class, the Tracer is a very light machine (particularly as he compared it to the Versys) and this makes it handle very easily. It also serves to make that 845cc powerplant much more effective overall, as it's the HP:weight ratio that you really care about for performance. While it's heavier than your 390 was for sure, it's still a pretty light bike overall and really agile - not a machine you need to wrestle around. @duckie is right too, the stock tires are pretty garbage. I'm also a huge proponent of Road 5's, but there's a wide range of very good tires out there. I recommend buying a set of good tires, then selling the largely-new stock tires on Craigslist, TBH. As for oil, what's important to know is you cannot harm things by changing oil too often. Well, other than the environmental impact, I guess. There's no benefit to "breaking in" the oil itself; it only degrades over time. It's REALLY easy to change the oil, too, so it's kind of nice "getting to know each other" time! Break in processes, well like @betoney I'm not going to firmly say anything is the "right" way. However, my experience is that there's not catastrophically wrong ways (within reason) - I've known people who just ride it like normal, I've known people to take the users manual to heart (I did on my MT07, in fact, as it was my first brand new 0 miles on the clock machine), and people who ride hard, revving all the way through the range. Fortnine did a comparison video on break-in methods too. In the end, it doesn't seem to really make much of a difference either way. If any particular way is actually better or worse, it doesn't seem like it is by any large margin. If I bought another bike at the start of it's break in period (bought the Tracer right after it's break in was finished) I'd just ride it exactly like normal, maybe give it a hundred miles or so before REALLY pushing it hard, but yeah. Just ride, and don't worry about it. The only important part is (as Betony said above) be *sure* to do that first oil change. Hell, do it early, and then do it again then. Oil is cheap, and particularly over the first couple hundred miles you're gonna get all kinds of sparklies in there.

Curious. I ride in Canadian winters - snow, slush, ice, etc - and it gets bathed in salt. The only corrosion noticable is the whitish oxidation that happens to the shiny bolt heads, and it comes off with a light scrub and some WD40. Even so - in a situation so salty that I've literally had to scrape off salt buildup, and would clean and lube my chain a minimum of once a week, and there's no noticable rust or such. My MT07 did just fine too. Maybe just the particulars of whatever compound is used over there? @clunkie66 If you're still around and looking for information this way, just let me know. I've more than a few posts on kitting up for winter riding here, and regularly ride down to around -25C.

Mine went in the trash the first time I adjusted my seat

2018 MT07 "Intensity White" colorway (this is the one I had!) it's a beautiful paint as a main color. I'd totally go for painting my gray Tracer in that too; it's wonderful. You don't see the pearl much when it's just the side panels here, but when it's the main color over the tank and all it's much more apparent.

Oh my, that's really janky! That nut right there, the one that's visible on top? You just tighten that a teeny bit and your mirror won't rotate in anymore. It's really not that tough to grind down a socket to get in there; a drill and some sandpaper or a file make short work of it if you don't have bigger power tools.

Pitbull stands are great, for sure, but also spendy. The best way to go for sure. I've got a rear stand, but still need to get myself a triple tree front stand. The ones that grab the forks are kinda sketchy, and obviously problematic if you're going to get into work on the forks themselves. --- My personal favourite method is a regular automotive jackstand under the H pipe up near the top of the headers. Being a horizontal pipe, and fairly far forward, it helps give the bike a better, more stable tri-pod - and jackstands are inherently stable, being specifically designed to hold things up I find this is much more secure feeling than having something back under the pipes underneath the engine.

I'm a 135kg guy. My kickstand holds me and the bike just fine, without any flex or "eeeeeeeh" uncertain feeling whatsoever. It's a sturdy sidestand.

You might not be able to get the nut off, or at least not easily; it doesn't really work that way. The "bolt" itself is just a threaded rod, with the large locknut (that tightens the mirror onto the bike) and the top enclosed nut. Mine - on my Tracer, and on the MT07 - both had kind of a center punch on the top of the threaded rod, expanding it outwards and preventing the nut from backing off. If you try and loosen it through that expansion, what's more likely to happen is that the threaded rod will turn along with the nut. This doesn't happen when you're tightening because of course the large nut is acting as a locknut against the mirror mount. Really, though, just grinding down a socket and tightening that nut a little bit will lock that mirror down great. Just be sure you get it where you want it. And try not to do what I did and lose that plastic cover 😫

I regularly run my bikes flat out, and having them rotate when you really get on it is infuriating, so once I get my mirrors where I like them, I *crank* that nut down, and they never move again. It's kind of challenging to do, though, as it's REALLY easy to have the mirror rotate while you're tightening it - in practice, it's best to pull the upper part in about an eighth of a turn, then allow it to rotate back out that eighth of a turn when you tighten it (keeping in mind that the right mirror is reverse threaded, so mirror towards you is loose, mirror away is tight). Once you do that, it won't rotate in again. Mine are nice and solid now, even with extended periods at 130+mph.

Yeah, if you swap out the rear signals this works. With the stock signals, you can't mount a tail tidy AND use the stock hard cases, they just don't fit.

The inside nut sets how tight the mirror is for rotation, but does not affect actually loosening the mirror in regards to removing it. What happens is if this nut is too lose, no matter how much you tighten the lower nut, the mirror can rotate around that stem. It'll not unscrew, of course - it's not threaded between the bottom of the stem and the bolt itself. What can happen (and I've had this issue with the right hand mirror on my MT07, and the left hand mirror on my MTT09) is that that particular nut isn't tightened enough on initial construction, so no matter how much you tighten the lower nut, as soon as you're going fast and wind pressure increases, the mirror starts rotating inwards. Typically, this is a "set it once and it's good forever" deal.

Twitchy throttle is pretty much a fact of life for Yamahas, but for these (2019+) it's really not bad at all, except in A mode where you need to be careful with the wrist. STD/B both tamp down that jerk quite a lot, though. But, that said, it's a Yamaha, and they're all like that to an extent. Mirrors: Yeah, for both my MT07 and my Tracer, I needed to grind down a socket to get into the mirror stem and tighten it up. I did this by hand, by sticking it in a drill and using some coarse sandpaper. Better would be proper tools, but it's what I had on hand when I first made mine. I've often considered swapping the pumpkins, but... They're so.... Yamaha. I mean, everything else on the bike is very modern and well kitted up, and those giant incandescent pumpkins that are exactly the same as every other Yamaha, I feel kind of bad about removing them. I like the running light functionality, too, and it's tough to find LED's that'll preserve that. Tail tidy: That's just a Tracer, right? Not a GT? A problem if you've got the GT like I do is that mounting a tail tidy can be very difficult with the hard bags on the bike, as the tail tidy will be in between the bags. Just something to keep in mind if you do have them or plan to get them.

I flashed mine myself (on my MT07); I already had a "stock equipment" tune from 2WDW, so mounted the exhaust and flashed the tune for the Black Widow. I didn't ride without the tune because despite what some people will tell you, you *do* need to adjust the fueling for major exhaust changes, like removing the catalytic converter. Doing that and not adjusting the tune causes the bike to run leaner, which will always make the bike run worse (if it ran better, we'd tune it for that mix!), and if too bad, can result in things like melting a hole through a piston. Flashing the ECU is a really quick job, and AFAIK all the major flashing companies offer unlimited free reflashes if you change stuff in the future, so it's worth just doing.

It's supposed to be done, is on the service manual list, but yeah a lot of dealers skip it because it's very time consuming to pull all the plastics and *usually* not really necessary. Except, of course, when it is. I know mine was way out, and I bought it with them throwing in the first service for free (as it had 800kms on the clock already, being the demo model).

For sure. Having owned an MT07 and the MTT09, if I where to buy an XSR, I'd get an XSR700. It's more fun in tighter, slightly "slower" situations. IMHO an 07 for in-town riding and screwing around over short distances, and the Tracer for bigger rides would be really ideal. I particularly miss the kick off the line the CP2 has over the CP3. Sure, in any measurable way the 900 is faster, but the feel of all that torque right off the bat from the twin; it's got a frenzied rush that just isn't duplicated anywhere else.

My BIL is a pretty hardcore ADV guy, does huge, transcontinental rides every year. He's been trying to get me into that forever, and while it looks like a ton of fun, I'd need a bike specced for it, and it'd need to be a big one. Sadly, those get really spendy, and tend to be bikes I'd be less interested in riding vs. the Tracer in day to day use which makes it a lot harder to justify. The Tenere 700 looks amazing, and I'd absolutely love one to play with (that CP2 is hella fun, and on an even more torquey geared setup!?) but I don't think I'd be into a week+ long offroad trip on one.

At home, usually use my torque wrench. Usually. Admittedly, sometimes it just gets a Really F'ing Tight rated crank on. I only religiously torque engine parts, really. On the road - and I do 2500 mile road trips fairly frequently - I do carry tools to do basically any work on my bike including wheel removal/installation, but roadside maintenance is 100% guesstimated torque. I'm just not packing a torque wrench in my travel toolkit.

Overseas is in fact often cheaper - I find I can get things from the UK faster and cheaper than from the US, more often than not. Even ~850 is enough that it's just not going to happen in the near future, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go @StealthAu's route and just grab a spring. Won't be ideal, but for ~$120 it should be Good Enough For Now, and I suspect I'd be able to sell it whenever I do end up getting a custom shock. The biggest they've got is the 105n/mm version, which would be 600lb/in, not even close to what Stoltec recommended but still a fair bit stiffer than the stock spring. Sadly, there simply are no local suspension shops. Or rather, there are no local suspension shops that work on street bikes, weirdly enough - there's a few offroad shops for sure, but they all where very hesitant about getting involved with a street bike. That said, I'll shoot Accelerated Technologies an email, and see if they've got any advice there.

I'm really curious what the Kappa/Givi relationship is. Kappa has basically a matching part lineup (with the same part numbers, just different letters) and is just branded differently but otherwise seemingly identical. I strongly suspect they are in fact the same company, just with a "premium" label and higher prices. The alternative would be that they're just straight up copying Givi products *exactly*, but I'd think they'd run into legal issues there. After all, even the included instructions in their products aren't "just like" the Givi instructions, but they are *exactly* the same instructions.

I only rarely ride two up, though I do take a bunch of longer trips packing gear, and push the bike really aggressively. Where did you get the spring for the rear? Realistically, I'm just not going to be able to afford a whole new shock any time soon ($1000usd -> $1350cad; ouch), so I'd be open to getting a stiffer spring, even if not as stiff as they recommend. As it stands now, I can bottom the stock shock out *hard*, which is both pretty painful and also super sketchy if it happens at speed in a corner.

I did indeed consider that, and asked them about it. They said: The service manual for the GT says 175mm. Stoltec said to use 140mm - a pretty substantial difference, which I actually confirmed with them to be sure. I'm curious how the oil level impacts the shock performance, to be honest. I understand how rebound and compression damping work with the valves, but don't really know how the oil level impacts things.