I hardly come here since BEC is of littie interest to me but I have a question from someone else about a cbr600 linkage.

a) firstly any examples of a gear lever linkage - how to make one up etc: (I guess the linkage is not specific to this particular engine).

b) any info about paddle arrangement?

c) is there a way to change the shift pattern (usaully is dwon for 1st/up for rest) so that the smae direction is used to move up and down the gears?) (I reckon there ain't a simple way.)

any info. links etc: much appreciated.

ta.

With regard to changing the gear order, why do you need to?

Imagine the gears as wooden blocks stacked on your desk - 1 at the bottom and 6 at the top. You have neutral between 1st and 2nd. Once you're moving, you never need to worry about neutral - everything's stacked in order and you press down to go down a gear, and pull up to go up a gear. Far, far simpler than a car when you first learn to drive/ride.

If the neutral was at the very bottom or top of the stack, though, you'd more than certainly hit it when going down or up the box, which would be a bad thing!

The neutral on a bike needs a fairly light touch to get right, so you'll never accidentally hit it when driving as long as you shift gears positively.

[Edited on 11/10/06 by StevieB]

I don't know about that specific engine, however I think they are all much the same. There is a little arm on a shaft. a rod with a rod end connects to it. Push to change gear one way, pull to go the other.

You want to go the same way to go up and down. How would the box know which way to go?

If you want to go from sixth to third then back up to sixth you would have to go to the bottom to work your way back up wouldn't you? I ride a bike and can't actually see why you would want to do what you are doing. There are some with a gearlever with a pivot in the middle so you press down on the front to go down and down on the back to go up (Honda 90)
Rescued attachment gearlink.jpg

As has been mentioned, with the standard layout you're still ALWAYS using the same direction to change up, and always using the other direction to change down, you just have to have the mindset that changing from neutral to 1st is a change down, not a change up (in reality its neither).

There's a VERY good reason why you don't want to change it, imagine braking for a sharp corner and needing to go down into 1st gear for the corner. With the alternative layout if you dont know which gear you're in you dont know how many times to change down, so you're very likely go past 1st gear and select neutral, which is not very helpful and potentially very dangerous if you're pressing on quickly as you'll have to coast round the corner witout drive which could easily cause you to spin.

With the standard layout you can't go past 1st because there's nothing the other side of it so you just change down until you can't go any further, and you won't hit neutral unless you intentionally do a little "half shift" to find it between 1st and second.

Chris

[Edited on 11/10/06 by ChrisGamlin]