Head stem bearings

[Aj1300]

Had a wobble in the front end at about 50-70 kph while backing off on my black bitck. While talking to that bloke over the fence Dickie, about this problem. I was certain it was my tyre, with 9000ks from new I thought that the 021 was the culprit , but I was proven wrong. I only have slight cupping on the front tyre and Dickie said it will be your head stem bearing.
So he came over and we had a play. If you move the. Handle bars off center, they would clunk back to the middle. It wouldn't do it on full lock either side, Dickie thought my 010 had a tapered bearing, but it has the ball race type.
It turns out that the top race bearing had broken ( that holds the balls) so now I think I will have to get the tapered bearing set. Not what I wanted after only 9000 k's  :||||Cheers Aj

[Greencan]

Arvo Aj et al...

Well...I wasn't expecting that

As I made mention of on a previous thread, some years back, 2000 in fact I recall being told by someone who was working at Honda MPE at the time that during the delay of releasing the 1300's in Oz (questions in Europe / UK with handling), he'd changed steering head bearings with tapered rollers, so I presumed that Honda had continued with that. I was obviously wrong

Interestingly, this was the top race on the top (non-load) bearing. So I'll go out on a bit of a limb here and suggest that the probable cause was excessive play perhaps caused it to 'hammer' and fail!?!? If so what condition of the 3 remaining ball races?

Does begs the question doesn't it...what time duration / distance traveled do Honda recommend for periodical steering head stem checks for the 13's???  For the 11's it's at 1,000km and every 12,000km thereafter.

And have others had there steering head stem re-tensioned?

If others have their machine is routinely OEM Serviced you'd immediately know as you would have been charged for a new tab washer, as it's replacement is called for each and every time the head stem tension is checked / re-tensioned.

Cheers, Dick :)

[saaz]

I know from my experience with taper bearings in my GS1000 that keeping them tensioned and greased is crucial (34 years and still the originals).  Every few front tyres put some grease on the bearings.  It is easy to check for the right amount of tension each tyre change - bars should fall freely side to side, but no play when you grab the forks.  My 96 ST11 had taper bearings in it (may have been replaced sometime?) but still had a notch, so I put new ones in. Most likely the bearings had not been tensioned, got hammered as Dick says, then went bad.

Watch out for those old buggers over the fence...'back in the day you know...'