Wrench Tip Wednesday: Dirt Bike Diary

Do you write a diary about your dirt bike? If not, you should and not just write about how much you love your bike. You need to track stuff, regarding hours, conditions of what you are riding, work done to the bike, etc..? Some riders tend to wait until something fails on their bike before fixing it. Wouldn’t it suck to pull up to the start and all of sudden your clutch does not work… Something to ponder on

How many legitimate hours are on your bike? The only accurate way to know is to use a hour meter vs mentally keeping track. The problem with mentally keeping track is, did you really ride for 2 hours or was it really 30 minutes ride time and talk for the rest. Hour meters do not lie.

There are two types of hour meters:

-Wireless, which runs off engine vibration. When transporting a bike, sometimes a meter can vibrate and add hours to it. Now, PC Racing makes a meter that can be locked when not riding.

-Wired, the wire attaches to the coil or spark plug

Most of our bikes have wireless ones on but we do still have a few wired ones on and no complaints on either.

Now that you are properly tracking your hours, it is time to talk about the diary. EVERYTHING needs to be wrote down! Dates, current hours, what kind of oil used, what has been changed and why, maintenance, literally every little detail regarding the bike. It is the most accurate way to keep track of work done.

All manufactures come with a maintenance manual, it shows at “X” number of hours certain things should be checked or even replaced. An example is, Beta recommends on 2 strokes around 65 hours it might be time for a top end.

Writing everything down sounds like tedious work but in the end, it takes less time doing that than the time and money wasted from a mechanical DNF.