Well for the next round of mods to the bike, decided to go with -1/+2 sprockets. Once again called up Mike at MJSPerformance, as always, Mike answered every question I had, and gave me plenty of advice. Ended up ordering 15 tooth Vortex front sprocket, 47 tooth Vortex rear sprocket (aluminum), EK chain, and SpeedoTuner.
Rear sprocket seemed easy enough, but it turned out to be a disaster. FSM said to torque the sprocket nuts to 72 ft-lbs. Not thinking anything about it being only a 10mm stud, I start to torque them to 72 ft-lbs, and promptly strip to nuts, the other 4 actually did torque. Ended up having to remove the studs (with nuts still freely spinning on them) from the hub, and find a local source for 10mm hardened studs, and nuts. I found some, just slightly shorted, replaced all the studs, and torqued to 45 ft-lbs. (10mm bolt, class 10.9 is supposed to have a maximum torque of 47 ft-lbs.) Not sure if this was an error in the FSM or what?
15 tooth, and 16 tooth front sprockets next to each other.
On my bike, I've tried real hard not to have anything real flashy, no logos, etc, trying to keep a clean look. I originally was leaning towards just a silver sprocket, and silver chain. Mike kept saying the black looks really good with all the rest of the black stuff on the rear. Now I'm really glad he talked me into the black, it looks good.
As for the install, well for some reason everything fought me. Now I can say first thing you do on a chain install:
clean off every LAST bit of grease they put on the chain from the factory first. It was a metric crap load of grease on the chain, I wiped most of it off before even riding it, and you still couldn't tell it was black. The grease that was on there, got flung all over my paint, tires, and everything else back there. And when I say tires, I mean in the tread and all, it was extremely dangerous. I went through an entire bottle of degreaser getting all that crap off. Plus half a bottle of some paint prep stuff to remove the grease from the painted surfaces. (The pictures above are after I cleaned all the grease off the chain, and re-lubed it correctly)
The chain ended up the same length as the factory chain, honestly if I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't have even changed the chain. I tried one extra link in the chain, and it had the adjustment on 4th mark so the rear wheel was pretty far back, and I was worried about having enough adjustment, so I cut one more link out, which resulted in the adjusters being all the way forward.
As for riveting the chain, ended up using the harbor freight chain breaker, with a ball bearing in the end, and metal plate on the back side, worked great.
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