GT300LC

No problems for the next few days over the trip back, I even gave up checking the gearbox oil after a couple of days. It was loosing enough to cover the rear tyre with oil but not so much that I would need to top up often. Luckily we didn’t get much rain on the way back so the oil on the tyre wasn’t too much of an issue, the odd few times I did find myself on a wet road it was frightening but using a little common sense, slowing down and not leaning far to the right, made it manageable.

When we arrived at Spa a few days later I decided to take the side case off while at the hotel and have a look to see how things were in there, the reason i decided to have a look was because during that day the drive had become snatchy when pulling away and it felt like the cush was riding over when accelerating hard. I found that the chain tensioner had moved making the chain very slack and more than that, the cush spring had broke in two, this meant that the cush wasn’t doing its job at all. it must have been like it for quite a few miles as the ramps on both the cush and sprocket were both very worn. As i didn’t have a spare cush spring all I could do was put it back together and take it easy. We did put an SOS out on facebook asking if anyone in the area could supply a spring but that night we had only offers that were either the wrong direction or too far away. Next morning some good news came, a guy about 40 miles away had one, strangely I don’t know his real name but he goes by the name of Far Far on Facebook. We went to his house and him and his family were fantastic, lovely coffee, shelter from the rain while doing the fix and a good laugh. It was very much appreciated.

The chain and cush problems were all due to the chain tensioner moving resulting in a very slack chain. Since then a new chain tensioner design has been added to the LC.