Confessions of a Motorcycle Newbie

I read somewhere that BMW actually bragged about how easy it was to take off the wheels (to enable a tire replacement, for example) on their F650CS motorcycles, which were, after all, aimed at people who were less hard-core riders and more dabblers in or utter newbies to the sport.  Let’s see if BMW were right about that… Step 1: find the hex nut. I’m not kidding: this is the first vehicle I’ve ever owned where the manufacturer decided to hide the rear axle nut behind some fancy plastic.  Simply pry the plastic shield off with a screwdriver, however, and you discover… …a metal retaining clip holding in place the biggest-ass hex nut I’ve seen in my life. My calipers measured it at 54.5mm.  2. Use that same screwdriver to take off the retaining clip 3. Now you need to get that pesky muffler out of the way. For this, you will need an external  torx socket, that is a socket version of the torx wrench instead of the star-shaped Allen wrench that I use for all of the other...

So you know how to change your bike’s oil, maybe you know how to change your tires, but what about that pesky air filter? Well, it turns out you have to take your V-Strom halfway apart to get to the darn thing. Here’s the process: 1. Take off the little black accent pieces under the side of the fuel tank. The front screw needs a size X Allen wrench to take off, the back two attachments just pop out.  2. Take off the little piece of cowling at the front of the fuel tank. It’s pretty easy: use the Allen wrench you have in your hand from step 1, or use the point of a Phillips screwdriver, to punch the center pin of the two attachment tabs out. Don’t lose the center pin, though - you will need to put it back in when you reassemble later! 3. Remove the front, bottom cowling piece - the one with the two little air intakes that don’t actually go anywhere. There are seven more of those little center-pin connectors on the bottom of the panel and then your first two Phillips screws are reces...