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Old April 16th, 2021, 05:16 PM   #2
NinjaBraap
NinjaBraap
 
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Name: Tom
Location: Long Beach, California
Join Date: Dec 2016

Motorcycle(s): 06 Ninja 636, 2016 Yamaha R3 (Street/Track), 2019 Ninja 400 Project Racebike

Posts: 175
Blog Entries: 2
Wait, you're trying to raise the front end, but lower the rear? That's going to be terrible and potentially dangerous.

Some quick helpful tips:

• If you lower the rear/front then the rear/front likely needs lowered as well (vice versa)
•*It's already a low bike to begin with, 2 inches of lowering is pretty extreme. Try replacing the padding on the seat first to get the sitting height lower, ergo more likely to have feet comfortably on the ground.
•*Reduce pre-load to the lowest setting on the rear first. It's not much but it can help.
•*If you do end up lowering the bike, get links that give the option of multiple heights, such as 1" or 2". You'd be surprised how low 1" of lowering is.
•*Again, if you do end up lowering the bike, don't drop the front end lower on the forks, remove the inside spacers and cut shorter spacers from PVC pipe to properly lower the front end. Leave the fork height above the triple clamps at stock height, as changing this changes your geometry, and can be dangerous.
• In addition, if you cut new spacer lengths for lowering, don't cut much, at most 1" to match the amount lowered in the rear. Again, 1" of lowering is quite a bit, especially on these already tiny bikes.

Personally, I'm a short dude so every bike is taller than me, and almost nothing 300 or larger do I put both feet flat on the ground. The stock geometry is pretty well measured, and setting the preload correctly vastly improves confidence for riding. If you're really serious about lowering the bike, I highly recommend using racetech.com and their suspension calculator to calculate and find the correct front and rear springs to lower the bike properly. They even have the option to input how much lowering you want. It'll run you a few hundred dollars, but the difference between properly sprung and lowered and quick and dirty lowering is night and day, and can mean the difference between crashing, or at least not learning bad habits associated with a vastly incorrectly setup bike.
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