Ive never been in there, but if I was doin it w/o someone there who KNEW for sure, thats how Id do it. Now, Id put a rag on the teeth & grab it with vise grips & shift it. Or, Id look at the manual, surely you didnt walk off in there without one,, did ya?

Placed in same position as mine - And I have all 5 gears

 
Thanks all.  I did read up thoroughly via the clymers manual about the transmission and gear selector and the removal of the cover before diving in.....it showed the abilty to remove the cover while the gear shifter stayed in place.  So fyi, at least in my case we can add this to the list of inaccuracies.  

It seems like someone tried this prior.  My cover is really gouged in and around the seal area.  The seal ripped badly after attempting to get it out.  Cant get it out of the perimeter area..... This not sure if it is salvagable.  

This hasnt gone well.  If i come up with a fantastic solution to the issue i will certainly post for anyone that would find themselves in the same perdicament.  

I got the seal replaced, I ended up taking down the blade width of  a standard screw driver and squaring the front off to make sure it was blunt and used it to carefully drive the broken seal out.  Took a while and was tedious but worked well and the cover doesn't have any scarring from it.  A 19/32 socket was a good size to drive the new seal in.  Put everything back together and the last bolt to tighten down was the bottom front (with the locating dowel).....and low and behold I feel it come loose     (I looked through Clymer's and wasn't seeing a torque spec for this cover so I went with 7ft/lb.)  

So after a bit of investigation and thoughts of where the get the appropriate heli-coil I see something that I wanted to share.  The engine case is threaded pretty deeply, much more than needed.  I don't know if this goes for other parts of the engine but the threads for this cover seem to extend back farther than needed so I am going to grab a longer bolt and that should solve this problem.  I see the lost threads were at the front so I cleaned it out and threaded the bolt into the hole with no cover and it catches fine.  

Knowing that the aluminium was so soft did Suzuki throw their technicians a bone and build a safety of sorts into the case.  Maybe this is a secret the Suzuki technicians know but isn't advertised?  Thought it was interesting.  

verslagen1 wrote on 06/24/12 at 16:55:56:


Bout time somebody taught verslagen something about this bike that he didn't know!     scuba gets a thumbs up!

Since these members must return to center in any gear, it seems optimized because there is a tooth/cog both above and below the current position shown.   Lift the back tire (frame jack), and place the shift lever on the shaft to see if you can go thru all gears while jiggling the rear tire.