Last week-end I was running between Norway's two western cities Bergen and Stavanger on my 2007 TDM 900 (RN114), when halfway on the southbound leg my shifter started to operate erratically. The pedal appeared simply "to have died" unceremoniously; after a while I discerned that it simply did'nt return to normal position after up-or downshifting. It felt stuck solid. Having had similar trouble on an old XJ I assumed that either something was blocking the fork in the shifter drum or some other major disaster was happening right between my legs.
I made it soutth and back, and then after some philosophizing figured that maybe the shifter linkage had gone dry and needed lubrication. By then I had found out that I needed to raise the pedal after downshifting and ease it down atfer up-shifting, to make it work next time a gear change was in order.
I found the culprit as soon as I removed the side cover that hides the inner plastic cover outside of the front sprocket. One of the inner cover allen-head bolts had unscrewed itself and jammed against the shifter linkage adjustment nuts. I was dreading a two-hour surgical procedure with picks, screwdrivers and tweezers but lucked out big-time.
All in all a seven-minute fix out of which two minutes were spent cursing the local Yamaha dealership for not tightening the bolt properly just 2 000 km's ago when they replaced the chain/sprocket set. Makes me wonder whatever else they forgot.
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