6 Speed Manual Smoothness?

Maybe I am still adjusting to short shifting, but this gearbox dose not seem as smooth as other Honda's I have ridden. Is it just me, or do you guys/gals feel the same. I have put 800 hundred miles on it in 12 days. My reference is a new cbr250r, 2007 cbr600, 2011 cbr1000. Don't get me wrong, it still is a great gearbox!

Well, if your references are other Honda's, maybe that could be true. But I can tell you the NC gearbox is WAY smoother than the Kawi Versys I just came from!

Way better than the car crash like shifts on my Victory too.

After 4000 miles it still isn't as smooth as other Hondas I have owned. The shift action is kind of heavy in the first three gears especially the 1st to 2nd. It's not bad just not as smooth as some. Shift almost any BMW and the NC will seem smooth as warm butter.

My NC700X with 1600 miles shifts as smoothly as any bike I've owned, with one exception. The shift from neutral to first has a much more pronounced clunk than other bikes I've owned, even when the engine is warm. Since I pretty much never use neutral that's not much of a problem, though.

Give it time and I bet it will smooth out to be as good as any gearbox.

Greg

Its looks like I am not alone then. Once I get to third it usually feels as smooth as any Honda I've ridden. And compared to my last bike (klr 650) it feels 10x's better! I love the car crash analogy for explaining a shift. I will be using that to explain the klr.

670cc said:

My NC700X with 1600 miles shifts as smoothly as any bike I've owned, with one exception. The shift from neutral to first has a much more pronounced clunk than other bikes I've owned, even when the engine is warm. Since I pretty much never use neutral that's not much of a problem, though.

Give it time and I bet it will smooth out to be as good as any gearbox.

Greg

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+1 Mine is very smooth.

In my experience, our NC700X is very sensible to the correct clutch lever free play. I found it works better adjusting it to have around 15 mm of free play at the handle lever. This is some point to check if you (like me) have short fingers and you fitted an adjustable lever. Please, check it and let us know how it goes

HTH

Will do next week. Taking the family to the grand canyon for vaca! I have the adjustable levers on order.

Moto we want pics ! Grand canyon pics

While waiting for motocommuter's pics, here you go one from when I was there, March 2002 if my memory serves my well

I'll surely get some pics up. I'll have the lap top with us. I will either post in the album section or another thread as this is the tech section. Funny, I make fun of my wife for having a facebook. Yet, here I am about to post my vacation pics!

Not the worst shift I have ever felt on a bike but sometimes it feels a little funny to me. I noticed tonight that with the bike in neutral and the clutch pulled in the engine is silent, when you let the clutch out and the trans. starts turning there is a lot of noise. More than other bikes I have had and rode. I don't think anything is wrong, it must just be the way the gears are cut or something. I have a lot of miles on a bike and I think that a sequential motorcycle transmission, by nature, can feel a little weird sometimes. I still second guess my shifts sometimes, if I went far enough with the shifter lever, because sometimes it just doesn't click. I had a GSXR750 that shifted like crap, got on my friends R1 and the first thing I noticed was how positive the shift feeling was. On a side note when I worked for Honda I rode pretty much every brand of bike under the sun and every model too. I noticed the same harmonic sound we hear, while riding some of the four wheelers around. Not sure what it is maybe an output gear harmonic. I don't want to get off topic, just FYI.

Mine is very smooth compared to my high-mileage Ninja 250 and VFR. That was actually one of the first things I noticed about it, is how smoothly it shifts.

-Payne

Well, mine has been a disappointment, very noisy especially from neutral to first (and i don't mean when cold, right after starting, it's always that way). I put in a tube of Militec and i hope it gets better (didn't try it yet after this). Maybe also it'll get better after it's run in.

Maybe it could also be the thin 10W30 oil, good for the engine but not so much for the crankcase. Wonder if a 10W40 oil wouldn't work better for the gears.

But i noticed something funny - i always put the bike in first and with the clutch pulled move it around a little to free the disks before turning the engine on- this prevents that awful clunk . I've done this on all my bikes and have always felt the bump from the disks 'ungluing'. The NC is the first bike where i didn't feel anything, looks like the disks were quite free from each other.

I guess it depends on what you transition from, but my trusty BMW shifts like a box of rocks compared to the NC and the clutch pull is much lighter on the NC.

I like smoothness.

Beemerphile said:

I guess it depends on what you transition from, but my trusty BMW shifts like a box of rocks compared to the NC and the clutch pull is much lighter on the NC.

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The bikes i can remember were two Yamahas XT, one the old 600 and recently the 660 Tén. Those i don't have anymore, but my Honda 250 XR shifts like butter, so i was expecting a smooth box from the NC. The Tén clunked from 2nd to 3rd, probably also higher, but then it made so much noise i couldn't hear it anymore . The 600 also had a bad clunk when i bought it used, so i changed the disks (not the plates, those were ok) and there was a huge difference.

The question is : can a noisy gearbox be considered normal ? I mean, if there's noise that's because when one gear is being moved onto another, there is motion between them when ideally there shouldn't be any, so what you hear is mechanical shock when they mesh, and that can't be good. Maybe they're strong enough to take it, so the problem will be only for the user's ear, maybe not. Perhaps it's the wet clutch that has inherent drag, anyway why can't we have smooth shifting like cars do ?

My NC (as of about 510 accumulated total kilometres so far) is one of the most notchy and "wow, this thing's shifting is pretty crunchy!" motorcycles I can remember owning. (this is my 21st bike in 40 years)

It's mostly the first to second, second to third change, up or down.

Still, it doesn't particularly alarm me, or make me dislike the bike, my BMW had a smoother gearbox as far as shifting went "notchy"-wise, but overall, the shift feeling was hated by me. It was forever going into false neutrals in any gear, and it never really felt positive or trustworthy that it wasn't going to pop right back out of the gear I just selected.

It did have a viscious crunch in the first-neutral selection.

My CBR125R has a beautiful, smooth as silk shifting box, except for 5th-6th gear when new, where it really liked to produce an incredibly bizarre and scary lurching/surging feel, accompanied by a hideously unhealthy noise and then pop back out of 6th and into 5th.

This was noted by many fellow CBR owners, and some were terrified and or bothered enough to sell their bikes. It was eye widening to me, but I didn't get put off about it, and tried to either make it explode during warranty or see if it went away or diminished over time.

It pretty much went away eventually, and I noticed a huge betterment in overall feel when I switched to Motul 300V synthetic (10W-40) If I am really lazy and sloppy I can provoke it to pop back into 5th from 6th, but it's extremely rare, and I have to work at it to make it happen. It's been over 5 years and 30K with no hint of nastiness or trouble now.

Many owners have tens of thousands of K's more than me, and I've never heard of one single gearbox failure reported, ever. I doubt there are many more abused motorcycles in the world, than the CBR125R lol. And this is Honda's "bargain basement" bike, that has gotta be one of the cheapest cost MC's available anywhere.

So with the NCX, I think it's more psychologically worrisome than actually a real, tangible concern, but I guess only time will tell. Add the strange 3,000 rpm 6th gear pulse/noise thing that some have, (I do) and I'm a little more curious, but I can live with it as long as it doesn't turn out to be a physical part defect after all.

Mine is a little bit crunchy as well, specially since the 1,000 km service. I believe it is the oil. No idea what oil the dealer has put, the invoice says Castrol 10w40, but that's all I know. The oil is clean and it has not wasted a single drop so far (8,000 km), but I will be asking for a different oil at the next service.

Maybe it would be a good idea to setup a poll to know what oil we are using and which one is working better? Admin?