Master Your Motorcycle’s Springs With These Essential Tools

When it comes to motorcycle maintenance and tuning, we reckon most riders, even newbies, know about oil and filters, tires, chain lubrication and adjustment, brake pads, and air filters. And quite reasonably, typical toolboxes contain tools that facilitate working on these. But peel another layer off the onion, and budding mechanics will begin discovering something else, springs. Fun fact: There are springs all over your motorcycle, small and large. Such as inside the wheels’ Schrader valves, behind the start and horn buttons, inside kill switches on dirt bikes, above the carburetor slide, attached to the side- and centerstands, encircling the kickstarter shaft, inside the fork tubes, and wrapped around the shock or shocks. The list goes on. Here are three essential spring tools that make maintaining, repairing, and tuning your motorcycle easier.

If your bike uses springs to secure the exhaust pipe to the cylinder or head, prepare for a fight if you ever must remove them. They’re often awkwardly positioned, leaving little working room for makeshift tools such as pliers. What to do? You’re time and money ahead with this KiWav Spring Hook Removal Tool. Place the steel hook over the spring end and pull the T-handle. Presto! The spring is off with no barked knuckles. To reattach the spring, just reverse the steps. The tool also works on side- and centerstand springs.

If you have an old-school dual-shock or a budget-priced single-shock bike, there’ll be a time and a place for removing suspension springs. This may be to upgrade springs for better performance, to rebuild a leaky shock, or to restore the bike. This pair of tools uses two sets of fingers, connected by a threaded rod, to incrementally compress the spring until you can remove the collets securing it to the shock. One tool goes on each side of the spring to allow even compression by ratchet or socket (not included), turning a sketchy operation into a controlled procedure.

In a seniors’ home, sag is a sad reality. But for a modern motocross bike, rear-suspension sag is beautiful for best handling. Typically, it’s assessed by gauging the distance from the axle center to the seat bottom with the motorcycle on a stand and the rear wheel hanging free, and then again with the bike on the ground and the rider seated. The difference is the sag, which, after measuring with this Race Tech tool, can be tuned by adjusting shock spring preload.