Wednesday I scored one of those Harbor Freight auto clamping wheel chocks and made myself a wooden base for it from a couple of 2x6's. Got the idea from FJReady who shamed me into doing my suspension arm maintenance on the '14 for the first time at 24k miles.
Put the bike in the chock and tied the front down with a couple of cam-lock tie down straps and my Canyon Dancer bar strap. Then set up my Black Iron Pipe stand and lifted the rear end only. Kind of nice that the T-Rex luggage guards are the same width as my pipe stand, so with the bike lifted I wrapped some rags around the guards and Ty-wrapped them to the pipes. Helps keep the bike from swaying around when lifted up in the air.
I used some nice hefty 1 1/4" ratchet straps to lift the rear. Looped the bottom end around the base of the the passenger footpeg brackets, which seems to be pretty sturdy. I did not trust the cast aluminum cross braces under the seat, though that is how Russ did his.
With the front wheel in the chock, and the luggage guards ty-wrapped its a very stable setup. Good thing I've got this all worked out 'cause I have a couple more FJRs to do this service on in the coming weeks.
Relay arm removal went pretty much as usual. The only real ***** of the job is getting that one lower right side center-stand bolt out without removing the exhaust header. On my '05 I was able to just barely squeeze that bolt out by flexing the exhaust a little bit. No way it was coming out that way on the '14. It would have to be cut.
After holding various tools up to it, neither my 4 1/2" angle grinder, nor little Dremel rotary tool could get up there to cut it. I was going to take a whack at it with a sawzall, but didn't like how close the blade would come to other stuff I didn't particularly want to cut. That's when I found I already owned the perfect tool to cut that damn bolt: A Dremel MultiMax 30 with the little metal cutting blade. That was a bit slow cutting, but got the job done neatly without butchering anything else up.
That long pivot bolt doesn't need to be removed all the way on these new 3rd Gens. Just slide it all the way right and leave it in the frame, there's plenty of room to get the relay pivot free.
And now I look out the window and see more snow flakes drifting down... When does that "out like a lamb" stuff happen again?
