Thursday 14 April 2011

Greasing the Speedometer Cable Housing

Hello!
First off, if you've been following this blog, thank you, and please leave some comments because I'd love to hear from you. Also, if you have tips to share on how a particular job could be done better, please share it with me.

In my last post, I had the forks apart to change the oil seals. When I did that, it gave me the chance to clean out the speedometer housing.

I'm not sure if it's ever been cleaned, but it was really dirty. Filthy would be a better word. So I dismantled the housing and cleaned everything up with paint thinner.

The housing is a simple assembly. There's the outer aluminum casing and a plastic geared centre. This geared plastic piece is splined to the front axle, and it spins when the wheel spins. This plastic piece in turn spins the speedometer cable, which tells the meter how fast you're going.

There are two very thin washers that sit between the plastic centre and the aluminum casing. I guess this is to prevent wear and to prevent the plastic piece from spinning directly on the casing itself.

Today, I had some help from my lovely assistant. She starts by lubricating the inside of the speedometer cable housing. This is where the washers are going to sit, so it's important to get some grease in there. She does it by squeezing the grease in with a stick.

Another shot.

Next she lubricates the washers with waterproof grease before assembly. I used brake caliper grease for this. Apologies for the poor picture quality.
Now the other washer.
Next the centre plastic piece is lubricated. You can see the gear teeth cut into it.
Here's what it looks like fully lubricated with brake caliper grease.
And here everything is fitted into the housing, and a final dollop of grease gets squeezed into whatever space is left.
And that concludes this short post on how to lube the components in the speedometer cable housing.

If you haven't already, please follow this blog.
If you have ideas or methods to do this better, please comment on the blog!

Thanks for reading, use your tools, and happy wrenching!

4 comments:

  1. I, for one appreciate your photo-jounralism. It gives me the (eventual) confidence to perform some/many of these tasks myself. Even though I consider myself somewhat mechanically-inclined, having someone else share their experience (do's and don'ts), and with pictures and references really helps me along.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the encouraging words, glad it had been useful. Believe me, I'm not very mechanically inclined myself, I just learn a little from breaking many things along the way...:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pepper Crab,
    I too wan to throw out a thanks for the documented repairs done on the Nighthawk. I'm a recent purchaser of a 91 Nighthawk, and have a few repairs to do to it to bring it up to par. Any experience with working on the ignition or replacing it? That's fist and foremost on the list so that I can move on to other projects (Key broke in the ignition). Take care

    Rob

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Rob,
      Unfortunately I have no experience working on the ignition. Sorry.

      Delete