Just finished lubricating all four relay arm bearings. Actually, I had already done all but the front one and was going to ignore it until guilt got me. As you know, the front one is what causes the major disassembly to take place. The actual lubrication of the bearings takes less than 10 minutes. The disassembly/reassembly goes on for hours. For a device that needs to be lubricated on a regular basis, some remarkably poor engineering went into this portion of the bike. Some thoughts on avoiding pain follow.
1. Before you do anything else, put the bike on its sidestand. Lie down on the floor on throttle side of the and, using a flashlight, locate the wire loop behind the left front center stand mounting bolt. It is there only to serve as an unrequired retainer for the tank vent hose. Found it? Good, now get a pair of pliers and snap that mother off. You cannot get a wrench on that nut with the wire in place.
2. You do not need to cut the centerstand bolts off. It is amazing how much you can move the exhaust system (once the four mounting bolts are removed). You can pull all four CS bolts past the exhaust pipe. I never would have moved the exhaust that far if I hadn't gotten pissed and decided I didn't care if I broke something. My method was to lie on my side and use my leg to pull down on the muffler.
3. Getting the centerstand back on the bike is the hardest part of the job. Do it with the stand in the extended position. Before you start putting it back on, use the tool of your choice and pry apart the two sides of the mounts to make it easier to refit the stand on the bosses. Not a whole lot, just enough to give yourself a little extra leeway.
4. If you want to use your handy torque wrench to snug up the stand mounting nuts to spec, go find a friend, because it's a two person job. You need a long extension to reach behind the exhaust pipes (which you're holding down with your leg) and that means torqueing is a two handed job - leaving no hand for the wrench needed to keep the bolt from turning.
5. If you are going to reverse the centerstand mounting bolts (nuts to the outside), you need to use a 10mm washer behind the bolt head on the two front mounts. Otherwise, the bolt touches the exhaust pipe.
I hope this helps someone avoid some of th pain I just went through. It took about one hour to do all but the very front bearing. It took about five hours to do the last one. Now that I've done it once, I could probably cut that in half. It's still a stupid amount of time to spend on a five minute job because the engineers gave no consideration to maintenance engineering.
Good luck with the task. BTW, all my bearings were in great shape and didn't really need to have anything done to them.
Dan
