After messing about with the brakes on the big VF recently, it got me thinking about the mods in general.
My bike was fairly heavily, and entirely competently, modified before I got it, but I still felt the need to do more, with the 17" wheel conversion and the brake upgrade centre stage, among others like fan switch, alternator, reg/rec, and starter solenoid lurking in the background.
I use the bike as my main transport and it has now proved as reliable as any bike I’ve had and will shortly go north of 100,000km (coming into my possession at 83,000km).
So, in all your years of VF, or variants, ownership, what’s been your best mod? For performance, usability or just because you can, what’s your absolute favourite?
I can’t decide between the 17" wheels and the radial master cylinder.
Less the Ontario slip-ons, my bike is stock with only 26K miles… The number one mod that I would like to do is the one to feed more oil to the cams. Is documentation on how to do that online somewhere?
EVRYWHERE.The whole oil mod thing has been talked to death,here and on other V4 forums.
I read an article posted on a VF1000R facebook page which detailed the reasons for premature cam wear,the amount and pressure of oil supplied made no difference.
None of the bikes Teambif run have an oil mod,most have 40k+ on the clock and all are running original cams.
Keep your clearances set to prevent excess hammer on the followers,these are the hard parts.The cams are tough but not hard and had inclusions(a bit like slag when stick welding…badly)which can surface as the cam wears.Wear is purely down to load and if the follower picks up,it turns into a very hard grater which chews the cam.
Quality oil,good maintainance and gentle warm ups and these old girls will last a lifetime
Regards Bif
The addition of a Wilbers shock made such a huge difference to mine especially the fact i got one for a bol and put it on an RE this along with the ride height adjuster gave me and extra 4 inches height at the tail piece and 3 inches seat height, makes a huge difference when you’re 6 feet 6 inches tall! The old shock was awful wallowed around in corners, new one is fantastic the bike feels so steady now mid corner just need to get the front end to match!
Very Interesting subject i have toiled with since the mid 1980’s when i got my VF the first thing i did was get decent Tyre’s at the time and i learned to love the 16" front wheel as this was a joy around fast bends at speed it worked once you got used to it, well Freddie Spencer used to race them almost out the box back then.
The next was brakes, quality brake pads and Goodridge hoses and changed the air filter to a K&N and got some Neta Silencers and the beast was then tamed ?? or let loose i still wonder which way it was.
Honda VF’s always had a Muscle Bike Tag and a few design issues but over all even with that anti dive & Air forks and rear shock, put on top settings and it was stable not perfect but OK.
If i had to make more radical changes say a rebuild after an accident then i would have taken that road back then to really modify it, but as it survived to this day ime quite happy it is close to Mr Honda’s vision it has a feel of the 1980’s era and like its factory brothers on the IOM had a reputation of being beasts, you play ball with it and it will play ball with you and they dominated the TT.
It was never hailed as a super bike, but on a good day on the right roads you could play with a “Fireblade” ok it would always win !! but it did not have its own way most of the time LOL, that V4 power plant was its main asset.
The only Mod i never made but thought off was to fit a damper for the 16" front wheel but never got round to it.
If there was so much wrong with them why are they still so much fun today ? they will always be this way whatever mods they may have had
They gain respect these days when lost in a sea of modern machinery and one of the last range of motorcycles Soichiro Honda wanted to be produced in his vision.
To this day i can get out the Hand book set it to as it came out the show room with standard settings and take it for a run and its fine as it ever was, even after sitting in a garage for 14 years
For my 85 FF, the best thing I ever did was to rebuild the steering head, new fork springs, and get emulators fitted to the forks. I`d been riding it for years with shaky headraces, amazing what properly installed bearings, and now progressive fork action. My old springs were stuffed, I had spaced them up about 40mm to take up the slack, but if the antidive cut in it it just about froze the front end.
Now no horrible thumping chatter during hard braking-despite antidive and air fork being hooked up still.
Fitting the 4 brush starter from vf750 has transformed the starting and electrical system also. Starts reliably when hot now. Used to suffer a sort of hot lock after fuelling up before.
