I am surprised your Intruder has 2 holes in the tunnel for the front cross shaft. My '79 Invader definitely only has 1 hole drilled in the tunnel.
Others on here can verify if the newer ones had 2 holes, but I sure don't remember that they did. I wonder if a previous owner drilled another hole to experiment.
This really slayed me....I looked at a couple shop manual descriptions of the rear suspension adjustments, specifically the 2 holes that you can mount the bottom of the front swing arm to the rails:
79 Invader manual (and 79 Intruder)--the front swing arm comes from the factory mounted to the top hole. This gives the best overall ride. Moving to the bottom hole gives slightly more ski lift.
82 Intruder manual--the front swing arm comes from the factory mounted to the BOTTOM hole. This gives the best overall ride.
Moving to the TOP hole gives slightly less ski lift.
Apparently, Kawasaki changed their mind as to which mounting location gave the best overall ride.
I have experimented with both locations, and slightly prefer the bottom hole. It does give a little more ski lift, but the difference is not huge.
You can gain a little ski lift out of a corner, but still rock back forward when entering a corner.
I have the front springs jacked up to the firmest slot, mainly to reduce ski pressure. It seems my Invader has always had plenty of ski pressure, to the point of hard steering in certain conditions. The front limiter strap is at its longest position.
I think the steering is very dependent on the ski wear bars. It seems there are only about 3 choices that I know of....standard steel, Bergstrom hard weld, or "Kimpex" (I think) carbides.
My Invader always steered beautifully with the Bergstom bars. But, I have usually bought carbide bars from Dennis Kirk....whatever brand they are, they have a carbide wear pad at each end of the bar....in addition to the center 4" of carbide. They seemed to increase steering effort a bunch.
I finally realized that when sitting on a concrete garage floor, the Bergstom bars just touched under the center of the ski, below the spindle.
I think my skis are still straight, but it seemed that the carbide bars would touch the floor first at the end carbide pads, not the center section under the spindle....that sucked.....I used washers to shim the carbide bars so that they had a slight curvature, so that the center section would contact the floor first. Not the greatest solution in the world, but it dramatically lessened the steering effort, and probably improved the "bite" of the carbides in a corner.
Let's see who else posts on here about the 2 mounting holes at the front of the tunnel. Certainly, raising the front of the skid to the upper hole in the tunnel would increase ski weight and steering effort.
Topic: Update!! 1980 Intruder rear suspension set up.... (Read 6395 times)