Hyperpro rear shock fitted.
Mileage 21743
I wanted ( apart from just having better suspension than provided by the very ordinary stock unit ) to be able to throw some weight over the front of the bike to sharpen up the steering, but without having to drop the forks through the triple-clamps, hence retaining overall ride-height. So I bought the Hyperpro type 460 – ’3D Emulsion’ – without the remote preload, but with a ‘height adjust’ option. It’s a lovely bit of kit – feels very well engineered – up there with the Ohlins I had on a previous machine.
I went with an optional black spring
It was a bit of a bastard getting the bottom mount of the stock shock off. There is an ‘interference fit’ ( stuck ) hardened steel sleeve which passes through two lugs on the underside of the swing arm either side of the actual bottom shock mount eye, with a fixing/retaining bolt passing through the whole thing *. The sleeve was clearly fitted dry at the factory and was stuck in place. It broke one puller before I got tough with it. I made up a good drift with a locating pin at one end, and tapped it out with a sledge-hammer head attached to a normal hammer handle! Extract it by tapping from chain-side, sleeve exiting exhaust-side. You will also need a large Torx socket – T55 IIRC. Everything else went smoothly.
The new Hyperpro shock is great. Firstly and importantly for me – it’s about +/- 8mm longer in it’s default ( height-adjusted ) state than the stock shock is at full preload – so the bike is now much better balanced for and aft, steering is sharper/quicker all without having to set the ‘wrong’ amount of preload to achieve said rear ride-height. You can tell instantly on sitting on the bike that things beneath your arse are better. The Hyperpro is sprung softer than the stock Kayaba, and the static sag out-of-the-box is spot on ( Hyperpro take the rider weight, riding style etc and build the shock specifically for you ). On the road the difference is vast. Because I had to wind the preload up on the stock shock to try to get some weight over the front, the rear – even if it had been a quality item – would never have behaved properly, having ( obviously ) too much preload. It’s great now to have both compression and extension in the rear! Damping is a million times better than the stocker, and again came set exactly right out-of-the-box. On the road, poise is much improved, going around corners, especially bumpy ones is much smoother, controlled, and composed. You can really feel that the rear wheel is spending more of it’s time in contact with the tarmac. High speed stability is improved too – I reckon I can cruise at about 10mph more than I used to on the yawnaway before things start getting sprightly. Plus it’s generally more plush and comfortable. Very happy with this set-up – combined with the Racetech front-end – I reckon the handling up now up there or there abouts with the big GS’s which I always thought handled great.
* The Hyperpro system does away with this sleeve, and instead provides two shorter aluminium sleeves which pass through just the lugs themselves, allowing the shock to mount directly onto the fixing bolt itself. I do wonder slightly if the fixing bolt is strong enough. I’m sure Hyperpro know what they are doing – time will tell.