we are some ATV enthusiasts from Germany. We always enjoy watching your ATV scene. Unfortunately we are not able to speak, read or write e.g. in Belgian language. Therefore, this little write-up is in English. Searching your forum, especially your photos, we discovered that the Suzuki LTR450 is also a popular ATV Benelux. And that´s it why we decided to share our recent negativ experience with this LTR´s and how we solved the problem. We think this could be very interesting to you. During a ride at the motocross track one of our buddies had the problem, that his cluth was shifting for it´s own - forth and back as wild. We tore out the engine and disassembeld it in order to find out what has happend. The following pictures show the dissassembly:
We discovered that all 3 shift forks, the gear shift cam and nearly all gears were extremly worn out. The spare parts all in one are very expensive. We have to pay between 700 up to 900 Euros for the whole spare parts. No one of us wanted this issue happen to his LTR. So we did some research in various US-forums. We found out that the problem is the shift shaft stud. You can find this stud marked with a red circle in the next picture. By the way: our stud was loose!
Many people in the US-forums wrote that they had trouble with this stud getting loose of its own. In some cases this led to a complete destruction of the transmission. The reason why this stud gets loose seems to be hard shifting during motocross action. Moreover they wrote that the crankcase of the LTR is built very weak. So the area around the shift shaft stud can break easily. All 2006 and 2007 models can be affected. We don´t know if Suzuki solved this issue with the 2008 modell.
We wrote this story in various German forums and asked other LTR riders. We were not alone with this problem! One guy in a US-forum had a special designed plate that holdes the shift shaft stud and and prevents it from getting loose. Now we designed our own plate that can be easily bold in the crankcase. You will find this plate in the next pictures:
In the meanwhile many German LTR riders asked us, if they also can get one of this plates from us.
So if you are also interested in this plate and want to prevent your transmission from being destroyed – simply call us back.
Marco
(als het goed is hebben ze die plaat er bij suzuki nu ingezet)
