Which needle bearing??

spoonz said:

I believe Aprilia did use the caged bearing very very early on but found it had accellerated wear and the cage would distort from the twisting action of the linkage.

Whilst i don't think anything sinister will happen in the short term i would be tempted to reduce the maintenance schedule on them to make sure they are not falling apart or something.

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Agreed, now that I know this is an issue on RSV's I am pretty sure that this will become a permanent part of my winter overhaul.

Judging from the bearing stats on my previous post this bearing should have no issues with load capacity, however the twisting is something I'm dealing with at the moment.

KZmille on the AF1 forum has designed and made some plastic washers that fit either side of the dogbone. This stops the dogbone from sliding around on the bearings as it has been noted that these dogbones bearing bores are not well made and they are not in parallel alignment, this causes the dogbone to slide across to one side and sits pissed, this rubs on the side plates and can damage them.

Kzmille made teflon spacers from memory. I think Sabre has them on his machine.

One point on that though was that whilst it solved the dogbone movement Aprilia did say that the movement is there by design. Mass produced castings are not 100% accurate and the movement was to allow for misalignments between frame,swingarm etc and to allow things to move without stressing the dogbone.

By locking it all in place any movement or twist will be transmitted directly to the components as it has nowhere else to go. To my knowledge no one has had an issue with the spacers but i'm just making you aware of the comments that came about at the time.
One of the theories on the linkage failures has been bikes with out of tolerance castings twisting the linkage to fracture point. If you linkage shows little sign of rubbing you are probably one of the lucky ones and it won't be a problem.

Mine rubs for england even with Af1 links installed. I'm sure with stock linkage mine would have let go by now.

Just for info I rang yorkshireaprilia monday as I have decided to do all the bearings and I needed another 2 bearings and 2 seals.

They sent them out and I got them this morning!

While I was in bed with a hangover and the wife was playing holy hell about me ordering more bits for my bike!!! LOL

danf1234 said:

Just for info I rang yorkshireaprilia monday as I have decided to do all the bearings and I needed another 2 bearings and 2 seals.

They sent them out and I got them this morning!

While I was in bed with a hangover and the wife was playing holy hell about me ordering more bits for my bike!!! LOL

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That just about confirms it, I must have spoken to the ******* cleaner or something, thought he sounded a but vacant.

I'm still waiting on my bearings and spacer that I ordered at the beginning of the month.

FFS do they hate me or what.

PS. Just took my rear hugger off and all four ******* bolts sheared off.

This bike is doomed.