Motorcycle Pre Ride SetUp General BS
Jodyrides
14,648 views
Not So Commom Motorcycle Knowledge
20 Comments
@wallycleaver1046 4 months ago
I have been teaching and preaching for decades to NOT use the kill switch!
@colinm1325 4 years ago
Hey Jody,
Some great advice buddy. Thanks for sharing some tips we all may have forgotten or didn't know. 👍
Some great advice buddy. Thanks for sharing some tips we all may have forgotten or didn't know. 👍
@jojoba35 4 months ago
Years later this video is phenomenal still, these bikes are out running strong , almost brand new 20 years later...tapedeck still rocking
@giovannihenry2343 1 year ago
I just brought one 88 perfect condition ik ppl gone be confused seeing a 24 year old hop off 😂
@ronfriedman8740 4 years ago
Wow, cool Venture! I remember years back when I was deciding between a Roadstar or a Tour Deluxe ...bought my '06 Roadstar 1700 for $10k out the door ...that was like $7k less then a H-D Fatboy and certainly a no brainer. Man, I wish I kept her...it was low to the ground and I'd scrape floorboards ...carving twisties. And with V&H Longshots it was so obnoxiously loud. Nowadays I'm riding a '14 Goldwing and couldn't be happier.
Have fun and ride safe ...gonna be sunny and in the low 80s here this weekend 😀
Have fun and ride safe ...gonna be sunny and in the low 80s here this weekend 😀
@wmh327 2 years ago
Sir, Not only was this a great pre-trip/season video, but I have saved this for anything that life may throw my way. You literally covered all bases with this one!
@youngblood2 4 years ago
I just bought a 2001 Venture today, in almost new condition, with 20k miles on it.
@camronmcgovern1907 4 years ago
Thanks for the video found it quite useful. Picked up a 2002 adventure with about 90k miles and doing some maintenance on the bike to get it road worthy, need to replace the battery. Thanks for your service and ride safely.
thanks everybody. To respond to some of the comments and questions I got about my video here, my Venture is a 2008 Yamaha Royal star Venture. They have a V4 water cooled engine with four valves per cylinder, five speed gearbox with shaft drive. They have four carburetors which is just fine with me, because carburetors will always get you home. And if your battery is going flat on a fuel injected motorcycle, you can push that thing till you wear the tires out and it’s not gonna start with a flat battery. That fuel pump has to pressurize the fuel rail. The ECU unit needs a lot of power to operate and so does the ignition system. But on a machine with carburetors, you can generally don’t start them just push them to get the move-in. Click them up in the second gear and slam your butt on the seat as you release the clutch to start them, usually. But that ain’t happening with a fuel injected motorcycle. That’s why I make jumper cables out of heavy electric cords when you see someone throwing away a refrigerator or an electric dryer or washing machine, cut the cord off, put alligator clips on the ends, and just join the white and green wires together for the positive terminal and the black wire for the negative terminal on both ends with alligator clips, you can buy on eBay, though slightly larger ones. You don’t need to have heavy, thick jumper cables to start a motorcycle, actually you can actually start a car, converting a power cord from an old washing machine into a set of jumper cables a lot of times, because cars start instantly pretty much these days, and you won’t be sitting there, cranking and cranking, making the wire get hotter and hotter like a toaster. But I make jumper cables for all my motorcycles and they’re easy to pack away somewhere in the saddle bag or under the seat somewhere just in case..
My Venture when I bought it in 2021 had 30 K miles on it, it now has almost 36K on it. The reason for the not very high mileage over five years of ownership is because I always have multiple motorcycles. You can’t ride them all at the same time, plus in April 2025 we had what I think were tornadoes that went through the Pittsburgh area because I had about 12 trees come down smashing my pool damaging my pool deck smashing the gutter on my backside of my house damaging my roof on my house landed on my truck slightly damaging the hood and knocking my power out for 10 days. But now I have a new generator and since I am a retired electrician, I put a back feed with transfer switch in my panel board and I’m gonna run my generator on natural gas, it can also run on propane, or gasoline, which I never want to make it run on gasoline because I don’t wanna put gasoline in the carburetor and let it sit for who knows how long. When that storm came through my old generator, which I had since the 70s with a carburetor on it would not start, because I loaned it to someone, and when I finally got it back, I never checked to see if there was gasoline in the tank and in the carburetor. So there I was outside, taking the carburetor apart with a flashlight during a storm, I never did get it to fully light up…
So that’s why my riding season in 2025 I only rode my Venture I think about 200 miles or maybe 400 miles in all of 2025 because I was just too busy cutting trees up with a chainsaw, my wife and I couldn’t get anyone to come and remove the trees because there was such widespread tree damage around Pittsburgh that the electric company that I’m retired from had over 250,000 customers, not people, individual buildings with a meter on. It is a customer, a customer building could have 100 people living in it. So that storm affected a hell of a lot more than just 250,000 people. Anyway, that’s why I don’t have more than 6000 miles on the machine in five years of usage, that and I had sold one motorcycle and picked up two other ones..
I am going to be doing a video about replacing the fork oil and upgrading the fork springs on my Venture..
I have a new set of Progressive brand Fork springs for my Venture ready to put in the forks
Someone asked what pressures I run my forks and shock at since they are air assisted
I run seven psi in the forks, I run 20 psi to 30 psi in the shock
I have videos on my YouTube channel, showing how to put air in the forks in literally one second. You have to do it the way I show because using a screw onto the valve pump, lets the air back out of the forks when you unscrew the fitting off of the straighter valve. You have to use a Press on air chuck that you can just press on for one second. I have two videos on YouTube showing how I do it by pressurizing my air hose and then shutting my valve off at the compressor. I have a air pressure gauge mounted after my air valve showing the pressure in my air Hose. So I pressure pressurize the hose with about 7 pounds of air, and then I press on the air chuck on the end of the air hose. That way I can’t put too much air by accident in the forks. I can only equalize the air pressure between the hose and the forks that way, that’s the only way to do it because those forks hold so little air, that if you put a air hose on there and your compressor has 100 psi in it, only bad things can happen. I suppose you could do it with your compressor by bleeding the whole compressor down to about 10 psi, then balance it back out with a low pressure gauge to seven psi, which is the maximum you can put in the forks.
. I’m going to change the fork oil at the same time, but Yamaha says in the owners manual, the exact words they use is “not necessary “when it comes to changing fork oil. And although Yamaha is never wrong, I think in this case, they are a little short on being right. The reason is, every time you put air in your forks or in your shock, you’re putting air with humidity in it, you’re putting water in your forks and water in your shock, so you need to change that fork oil, and the oil in your shock because it’s contaminated with air that has water in it. They put your fork oil out of grade, and it could cause rust/corrosion inside your fork tubes because your springs have a lot of iron in them. They will rust, and that rust is gonna work its way off of the forks, and that’s scratchy stuff to have inside a smooth piece of equipment like a fork tube sliding through the fork leg, doesn’t do your fork seals. Any good either..
So I’m going to change my fork oil and I’m going to use 20 weight fork oil and I’m going to put a little less fork oil in each fork because I want to have a smoother feel to the forks when they get near the bottom of the stroke. They’re gonna feel like brand new with new springs and new oil. I have already changed the oil in my shock which is very easy to do because it’s just an air hose and two bolts holding the shock in, remove the air hose drain the oil overnight and put 125 cc back in the shock. The two times I changed the shock absorber oil, both times it came out as black as ink. So that oil was cooked, overheated, used up…
I have other videos on the mileage. I’m getting out of the KENDA tires that I put on my Venture in 2021, they have now been on there for five years, and they are showing about one and a half millimeters of tread loss after almost 6000 miles. They give a very plush ride also but they are noisy. as I get the bike over on its side going into corners… I just installed a new mighty max battery. I bought on eBay for $45 free shipping. They have a nice little spacer under the terminals to hold the nuts for the terminal screws up next to the terminal top so that the screws are long enough if you have several ring connectors on the screw as you install it on the battery. Nice simple invention it’s simplifies trying to get the screws in the battery when you have a lot of wires, going to the terminals for things like heated grips, accessory outlet for your Garmin or your phone charger or if you want to add a horn relay to put on horns that can actually be heard over the stock Venture horns, which sound more like musical instruments than horns. By the way, the second horn on a Venture is in front of your left foot inside the fairing panel hidden inside the fairing. No wonder they are quiet horns…
My Venture when I bought it in 2021 had 30 K miles on it, it now has almost 36K on it. The reason for the not very high mileage over five years of ownership is because I always have multiple motorcycles. You can’t ride them all at the same time, plus in April 2025 we had what I think were tornadoes that went through the Pittsburgh area because I had about 12 trees come down smashing my pool damaging my pool deck smashing the gutter on my backside of my house damaging my roof on my house landed on my truck slightly damaging the hood and knocking my power out for 10 days. But now I have a new generator and since I am a retired electrician, I put a back feed with transfer switch in my panel board and I’m gonna run my generator on natural gas, it can also run on propane, or gasoline, which I never want to make it run on gasoline because I don’t wanna put gasoline in the carburetor and let it sit for who knows how long. When that storm came through my old generator, which I had since the 70s with a carburetor on it would not start, because I loaned it to someone, and when I finally got it back, I never checked to see if there was gasoline in the tank and in the carburetor. So there I was outside, taking the carburetor apart with a flashlight during a storm, I never did get it to fully light up…
So that’s why my riding season in 2025 I only rode my Venture I think about 200 miles or maybe 400 miles in all of 2025 because I was just too busy cutting trees up with a chainsaw, my wife and I couldn’t get anyone to come and remove the trees because there was such widespread tree damage around Pittsburgh that the electric company that I’m retired from had over 250,000 customers, not people, individual buildings with a meter on. It is a customer, a customer building could have 100 people living in it. So that storm affected a hell of a lot more than just 250,000 people. Anyway, that’s why I don’t have more than 6000 miles on the machine in five years of usage, that and I had sold one motorcycle and picked up two other ones..
I am going to be doing a video about replacing the fork oil and upgrading the fork springs on my Venture..
I have a new set of Progressive brand Fork springs for my Venture ready to put in the forks
Someone asked what pressures I run my forks and shock at since they are air assisted
I run seven psi in the forks, I run 20 psi to 30 psi in the shock
I have videos on my YouTube channel, showing how to put air in the forks in literally one second. You have to do it the way I show because using a screw onto the valve pump, lets the air back out of the forks when you unscrew the fitting off of the straighter valve. You have to use a Press on air chuck that you can just press on for one second. I have two videos on YouTube showing how I do it by pressurizing my air hose and then shutting my valve off at the compressor. I have a air pressure gauge mounted after my air valve showing the pressure in my air Hose. So I pressure pressurize the hose with about 7 pounds of air, and then I press on the air chuck on the end of the air hose. That way I can’t put too much air by accident in the forks. I can only equalize the air pressure between the hose and the forks that way, that’s the only way to do it because those forks hold so little air, that if you put a air hose on there and your compressor has 100 psi in it, only bad things can happen. I suppose you could do it with your compressor by bleeding the whole compressor down to about 10 psi, then balance it back out with a low pressure gauge to seven psi, which is the maximum you can put in the forks.
. I’m going to change the fork oil at the same time, but Yamaha says in the owners manual, the exact words they use is “not necessary “when it comes to changing fork oil. And although Yamaha is never wrong, I think in this case, they are a little short on being right. The reason is, every time you put air in your forks or in your shock, you’re putting air with humidity in it, you’re putting water in your forks and water in your shock, so you need to change that fork oil, and the oil in your shock because it’s contaminated with air that has water in it. They put your fork oil out of grade, and it could cause rust/corrosion inside your fork tubes because your springs have a lot of iron in them. They will rust, and that rust is gonna work its way off of the forks, and that’s scratchy stuff to have inside a smooth piece of equipment like a fork tube sliding through the fork leg, doesn’t do your fork seals. Any good either..
So I’m going to change my fork oil and I’m going to use 20 weight fork oil and I’m going to put a little less fork oil in each fork because I want to have a smoother feel to the forks when they get near the bottom of the stroke. They’re gonna feel like brand new with new springs and new oil. I have already changed the oil in my shock which is very easy to do because it’s just an air hose and two bolts holding the shock in, remove the air hose drain the oil overnight and put 125 cc back in the shock. The two times I changed the shock absorber oil, both times it came out as black as ink. So that oil was cooked, overheated, used up…
I have other videos on the mileage. I’m getting out of the KENDA tires that I put on my Venture in 2021, they have now been on there for five years, and they are showing about one and a half millimeters of tread loss after almost 6000 miles. They give a very plush ride also but they are noisy. as I get the bike over on its side going into corners… I just installed a new mighty max battery. I bought on eBay for $45 free shipping. They have a nice little spacer under the terminals to hold the nuts for the terminal screws up next to the terminal top so that the screws are long enough if you have several ring connectors on the screw as you install it on the battery. Nice simple invention it’s simplifies trying to get the screws in the battery when you have a lot of wires, going to the terminals for things like heated grips, accessory outlet for your Garmin or your phone charger or if you want to add a horn relay to put on horns that can actually be heard over the stock Venture horns, which sound more like musical instruments than horns. By the way, the second horn on a Venture is in front of your left foot inside the fairing panel hidden inside the fairing. No wonder they are quiet horns…
Motorcycle Pre Ride SetUp General BS
Jodyrides
14,648 views
Not So Commom Motorcycle Knowledge