[photocodo]

I have noticed that a lot of people are doing a mono shock conversion. I have a 78 cx500 that I want to do a Cafe Racer conversion on, I love the mono shock look and would love to get a little more information on it. Can someone point me to a post where someone goes through the step by step process for doing this. I know it will be different for each shock that you would chose but I am just trying to figure out if it is something that I can do or not. On huge perk for me is that I dont really like where the top eye of the rear shocks mount. It makes a "step-up" from the front seat to the passengers seat because of where the shock mounts, which makes it difficult to fit a generic cafe style seat. So I think that this mono shock conversion is right up my alley, as long as its not too difficult to accomplish. Thanks for the tips and advice.



-cody

 

[50gary]

I wrote one of my long replies and accidentially deleted it so the short answer is "Yes" I think you could do a direct mount mono-shock i.e. no linkage. It would have to be a short shock to fit and mount on the cross brace of the CX500 swingarm and weld an upper mount in place. I measured my CX '78 and my Yamaha R1 shock (12" C/C with piggyback resevoir) It will fit but the spring rate would have to be high due to short leverage.

Cheers, 50gary

 

[photocodo]

Thank you. Do you know if the position of the shock would affect anything on the bike. What I mean is, since the shocks are normally toward the rear of the bike (near the middle of the rear wheel) and the mono shock would be in front of the wheel, would that change how the bike rides or cause any undue stress on the rear swing arm or anything like that.



Cody

 

[50gary]

I would guess that the CX swingarm would be strong enough and you could always reinforce it from underneath. The spring rate would have to go way up because of the leverage change. The wheel rate is what's important, that's the spring rate at the rear axle. Mono-shock springs are easy to come by though.

Cheers, 50gary