How to Adjust Motorcycle Shocks

"Hello! This is Jerry Fishel from Vicious Cycles in Santa Clara, Utah for Expert Village. One of the things that we can adjust while we have our saddle bag off is the amount of air pressure in your air shocks. The amount of air pressure is determined by a few things. One, is quite simply rider comfort. One of the things that determine the amount of air pressure you want is making sure that your fender does not bottom out your rear wheel or that you never bottom out. You will have less air in the bike riding as solo rider. I suggest anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds for solo rider. When you go to a two up riding; when you are going to bring the girlfriend, wife in the back and she wants to put all her goodies and shoes and extra make up, and the dual Margarita blender, and everything into the saddle bag, you are going to need more air to keep her butt from the top from being on top of the rear tire. So what you do is buy one of these pumps. This is a Harley specific pump. You can get them at Harley Davidson or after market shops. It is just a small air pump. It has a gage on it, air tight, you pump it up by hand. One of the things you never want to do is go to a gas station and put a gas station pump to this, because if you hit that with a hard burst of air, you will blow the lines out and the seals out of the shocks. So let me demonstrate, tighten this on here. Right now I am sitting at just a little under 10 pounds. Let’s say I want to take my wife and go for a ride. I want to put a little more air into it. The maximum air pressure you can have in one of these into the shocks is 35 pounds. You never want to go over 35 pounds. I am going to bring it up because I am not going to let her bring all that crap this time. I am only going to let her bring a little bit of crap. I am only going to bring it up to about 20 pounds. One of the ways to test your system to make sure you are not losing air is to just set this to the side and hold it for a while, and make sure that the line isn’t leaking and your arrow is not coming back toward zero. If your pressure is dropping, your arrow will move back. You can leave it set like a lot of people will do. They will let it sit like this for maybe a half hour or something, and make sure that they don't have a really slow leak. If you decide that you got too much air, say you pumped it up to 25 and you really only want 20 in it, there is a small release valve right here, and you just press it and then let off till you get to where you want to be. You want to be right back at 20."