KrustyKush

I happen to be wrapping up new tire on my T9GT rear. When I get back out there this morning, I'll take a look at that hardware and see if I can help you in some way. I have no instructions, sorry.

Sorry for your cold weather, but welcome to the Forum! I also have a 21 Tracer 9 GT. Lately, I have been toying with the idea of selling it and getting an MT09, but every time I take the Tracer out, I trend away from selling it. Same motor, sits higher, has panniers, heated grips... lots to like.

Definitely could have been. My son's Sportster, an 04 model, had only 4k miles on it when he bought it. I have smelled this rich smell many times while following a "tuned" bike. You won't notice it while riding because the stink is behind you. People behind you may notice it, though. And when you pull into the garage, the stink will linger for awhile from the gas that is left in the pipes. It really stinks bad when the bike is first started cold and sits there idling for a few minutes. That is when I notice it the most. Oddly, my son hardly aware of it. I had to point it out to him. He evidently thought the stink is normal. It is not. Lots of bikes get dicked with before they even leave the dealer shop. New pipes, new tune. Less common for Japanese bikes to get this treatment on a new bike, but it does happen. Some folks start with the assumption that the factory tune is bad. With a carb, it is necessary to disassemble the carb to get at the jets, to replace them. Not so hard on a FI bike, just load in a new map. Also possible the carb on my son's bike has suffered from all those years of sitting still. It may simply need a good cleaning. It is harder to figure sitting still as a similar problem on a FI bike like the Yamaha, which leads me to think it was modified before you got it.

My son’s 2004 Sportster stinks like this. To ride behind him is to smell the stink. He bought the bike used, so obviously the previous owner dicked with the carburetor to richen the mixture, which is a common thing to do. I feel like they went too far in the rich direction. My son isn’t concerned about it. Best guess would be previous owner of OP bike did something to cause the bike to run rich. Too rich.

Welcome from Southern California!

Yeah I was going to say great color match to the wheels, but upon closer exam I can see the slight difference. Not enough to matter to my eye. Great addition. Where did you get them?

Yes, some parts are outsourced. Such as wheels, which are made in "Asia" according to the tour guide who answered my specific question about that. But frames are built here from scratch. Fuel tanks, fenders, etc are fashioned by press from sheet metal. Everything is painted in-house. When we toured the plant, they were making the model year change over and wouldn't let us see the assembly line. I was frankly very surprised to see the amount of fabrication going on there. Engines are built in another factory somewhere in Milwaukee area, I'd sure love to go in and see THAT place.

Yes, you can use a “regular” charger on a lithium iron, but it is complicated and risky to your new pricey battery. For sure, if you invest a couple hundred $ in a lithium iron, it makes a lot of sense to also buy a quality lithium iron type of charger to go with it. Your bike with a healthy charging system will maintain the lithium battery just fine and may never need to be put on a charger. It doesn’t make sense to try to get an archaic charger work on one of these new batteries. Lithium iron are as different from lead acid as fuel injection is from a carburetor. Few would want to go back to a carb.

No matter what brand you ride, if you get a chance to take a tour of the York plant, do it! Back when I was still riding a Harley the wife and I took the tour. Fantastic. At York, motorcycles are built out of raw sheet metal and tubing. One thing I would dearly love to do but obviously never will have opportunity, is to tour the Yamaha plant in Japan.

A standard battery charger can be used on a lithium iron battery as long as it doesn’t exceed 15 volt and doesn’t perform a desulfate program. However, a lithium appropriate charger isn’t very expensive. I use an Optimate charger. Very nice device. Costs around $100. Shorai makes their own branded charger that uses a special plug rather than going in thru the battery terminals. Truth be known a lithium charger is probably not needed. A bike will keep the lithium charged just fine. If the bike must go into long term hibernation, simply disconnect the neg cable to relieve the parasitic draw. If climate is extreme, remove the battery and store it in the house. These batteries don’t discharge much they way the lead acids do, just sitting on the table. I had a Harley lithium in my 2018 FLTRU and never put it on a charger in 2 years. ‘Cause I rode the bike most every day.

At nearly 15k miles, I've noticed some grinding vibration at low speeds with engine cold. Once it warms up I don't notice it anymore. 21 T9GT. I've thought it could also be my chain, which is original and possibly getting a little weedy. At idle, though, I clearly hear a basket of washers kind of rattle with the clutch relaxed and in neutral. Pull the clutch, and 80% of the noise disappears.

Got my eye on an MT09. I love my 21 Tracer GT. I don't need a "tourer" configuration, but rather a strong bike for navigating the highways around here, especially those between the lanes. I'm thinking of selling my Tracer and buying a MT09. Love this motor!

I've been running a Shorai LFX18L1 in my 2021 T9GT since September. Bike is now almost a year old and has almost 15k miles on it. Price is high: around $300. Shorai is very light. The oem Yuasa is heavy. You save several pounds of center mass weight with the Lithium. Lithium has a major advantage in that it holds a stonking 13.4 volts pretty much forever. You would have no trouble starting your Tracer with over 13v going to the system. The lithium holds its voltage high as it discharges, unlike the lead-acid which sags its voltage significantly, and pretty quick reaches a point where it will turn over the motor but not start the bike, as has been noted. My Tracer places almost no parasitic draw on the battery, so it can sit for days and days without a tender, and still will start the bike strong. I live in CA, and ride most every day, so my bikes don't sit for long. I also have a Shorai lithium in my 2022 Goldwing. The Wing has a high parasitic load, and likes to be ridden every day. If I can't ride it for three or four days in this chilly weather I will run a charge on it to keep it up and balanced. I also had a $300 lithium in my last Harley. The lithium saved many pounds of dead weight, and started the Harley day in and day out turning that starter motor over like I never heard from a lead-acid. I heartily recommend the lithium. Pricey, yes, but several advantages over lead-acid.

Bought myself a 2-ton mini-split heat pump for the garage. Elves are installing it now. Doing my valves this past summer in triple-horror heat in the garage was a final straw. Can’t take that heat any more. Happy New Years to all. May the New Year bring riding joy

Yeah, I argued long and hard for gear oil and hand oiling. I do take good care of my chains. My pea brain enjoys getting down into the creases with a hand oiler. However, a few here who use the Chain Saver product were so emphatic about it, I decided to switch over on my oem, which already had around 7k on it with gear oil and religious attention. I figured all I had to lose was a chain and a couple sprockets that were already half wore out anyways. I didn’t clean the chain before making the switch. I merely began using the Chain Saver instead of the oil. For a good while, the CS washed away the old oil residue during application, as it comes out liquidy and then sets up into a “dry” spooge. After a few hundred miles and repeated applications of CS the old oil was gone. I also lengthened my interval, from every 100 miles to every 300 miles. I have made one extremely tiny adjustment to slack since the switch. Now have more miles using CS than I did before the switchover. Chain looks and sounds great. The rear end of the bike is massively cleaner than before. No oil fling ‘cause there isn’t any oil! I no longer bother with the frequent wiping that the oil demanded. Just now and again wipe off the “dusty” fling. Easy to do. Around the drive sprocket, it does seem to build up into a kind of soft mound but can’t possibly cause any trouble there that I can see. Occasional wiping keeps everything dry and pretty.

I had been a die hard gear oil user all my life but several months ago switched over to Du Pont Chain Saver. A dry lube. This dry lube Chain Saver is very good. My original chain now approaching 15k miles and still in good shape. I bought a new DID chain and oem sprockets, thinking I would need them way back, but not yet. it flings a bit but isn’t oily. Wipes off like dust.

New Zealand must be one super groovy place to ride. Nevermind the absence of freeways. what you've got there is absolute Heaven.

I like a bike to behave like an old-tech machine. I like to hear gears whining and shimmering. I like to get a healthy clunk when shifting. I like the bike to be barely comfortable for an hour, such that I must push my 74 years old frame into an "athletic" posture. I like, when I get back home, to feel like I DID SOMETHING HARD. Not sure why I am this way. In younger, healthier times I was a daily habitual 5 mile runner. Could not feel satisfied unless I had thrashed myself completely. At this moment I am running a fever from Covid. Wife suggests I take tylenol for the fever, I decline, saying the fever is a good thing, I embrace it. In fact, I'm thinking of taking a solo ride today on Tracer. High temp will be nearly 80 with perfect conditions. Can't think of a better safer place to have covid than in the saddle of a groovy motorcycle.

I am fortunate nowadays to have a garage at home in which to park my stuff. It wasn't always like this. For years I lived in apartments. Bikes sat outside all day, all night, usually at a fair distance from my apartment. In those days I used a NY Chain and a heavy lock to tie my two bikes together, or if I didn't have two bikes at the time I would chain it to a tree or lamppost, or just wrap the chain around a wheel. Many of those years, I lived in Santa Fe NM, where property crime is huge, I mean huuuuuge. Never had a problem with the bikes being well chained down. Only time in my entire life a bike got stolen from me was a 1971 Yamaha RT350. Some kid hot wired it off my back porch and took it out for a ride. Cost me $30 in 1971 dollars to get it out of wrecker hock. I was in the Army and only made $250 a month. He tried it again a few days later but something interrupted him and he left the bike sitting in a field. Other than that, never had a bike molested in all these years.

Welcome from California! Good looking Tracer. How many miles on it?

I never had sex on a bike but I’ve done everything else including the finger thing.

Just in case nobody noticed, there is a healthy flow of US citizens INTO Cali as well as out. We moved here almost 5 years ago, from New Mexico. And no, you do not have to be a millionaire. Our new house, an easy 70 mile ride from Long Beach, cost us $430k, is in a lovely safe crime free city, and now claims a value well over $500k. We love it here. We loved NM also but NM cannot remotely compare to CA. I mean that in the nicest way. The CA weather is incomparable to any of the dozen other US states I lived in during my work life. If you are a daily must-rider like I am, there simply is no other place with anywhere near the riding possibilities. You think of all the things that can affect Quality of Life, put the weather at top of list. As for the odd belief that CA is home to weird regulators and tax collectors, keep in mind here we can legally split traffic. For me, that ALONE makes CA a Heaven on Earth. Taxes? Sure they’re high here, as they are in every other civilized state anywhere in the world. Yes you get what you pay for.

Interesting aside, not to derail the thread...Speaking of air filters. My 2007 Yamaha Royal Star Venture had two air filters, one located in each of the two air boxes, which were mounted high behind the lowers. This gave the Venture a large capacity air box to feed its powerful V4 engine. The filter elements were paper, and had no replacement interval. The instructions for service were to remove the filter element, blow from inside with low pressure air, and re-install. Every 4k miles, as I recall. I would do this, but it seemed like a waste of time to me. So I tended to simply replace the elements every 12k or so. As for valve adjust intervals, the Venture adhered to the 26, 600 (30km) interval, just like every other Yamaha.

Probably just depends on how much a stickler for precision you are. As long as the valve is somewhere between minimum and maximum, it is fine. Most would just leave it alone. Surely, a tech being paid to do this job would not touch a valve shim that was anywhere within the range. Doing it myself, I would bend over backwards to make each valve exactly where I wanted it, even if it didn't matter a whit, and it almost surely doesn't. By 26k miles, the valves are well broken in and shouldn't move much after that. I personally do not like the 26k interval. I had found a real tight valve on a Royal Star years ago after waiting 26k to do the first check. After that, I decided I would do it around 12k the first time. When I did my 21 9GT at 12k I found two exhaust valves that were closer than minimum. Both on cylinder #3. I adjusted those, and left the others alone, even though the other 4 exhaust valves were nearing minimum, but not there. I will do this again at 26k. It may also depend on how long you aim to keep the bike.

Fantastic Price! I don't think there is anything comparable to that here in California. You must have extremely low taxes out there in NC. CA has rules that inhibit ppl from going to another state to buy cheaper and then import the vehicle to CA. If you traveled to another state to buy new, cheap, you'd be unable to register that new bike in CA because it had less than 7500 miles on it. They will allow you to import a bike with less than 7500 miles as long as you are becoming a CA citizen bringing the new bike with you. But if you already a citizen, going to a cheaper state to buy cheaper, gonna have a road block. Can't register it, and they may even give you an order to remove the vehicle from CA.