No engineer here, What you say makes perfect sense Helmut, I don't think it's enough to make much of a difference tho, I believe these mounts fail when someone really bottoms out the suspension. that's when that area would take a wack..I ride solo so it doesn't happen often, but I have hit a pot hole on occasion hard enough to knock my teeth loose, I can see where it could do some damage...

Flashback, thank you and the others for the info on this. I'm getting under my bike tonight.
Papa Bear

Hey Papa Bear is that oil under your R* in your sig pic??

I try to check my shock every oil change put it up on the jack and look at everything underneath with a flashlight really well.

Steven

you guys got me wondering, Im lifting mine tomorrow & inspecting. Hey RC, when yours failed, did it give any warnings, or did you just happen to notice?

Good point. If I'd know about this earlier I'd have welded it up last year when I changed out the rear tire. It only takes a couple of bolts to pull the rear arm after the rear wheel is removed. Then there's plenty of space to run that bead.

Probably should be done weather you plan on going with a heaver spring or not. After all mine tore out with the OEM shock assembly installed.

~Craig

It went pretty quick Ironman. I thought my rear shock had lost pressure. It had the classic symptoms; instability in the curves, bottoming out especially going around corners. I was convinced enough to order up the 420 before tearing into it.

I was hoping to hold out until the end of August but within two weeks it got to the point where the drive belt was making some pretty wild noises and the ride degraded to the point it felt like I was riding a hard tail. (I commute on the thing and put almost 100 miles a day on it) That weekend I started taking it apart and this post tells the rest of the story.

It's possible that it all started with a pothole on the freeway. I remember hitting one pretty hard a couple of weeks before I noticed anything. But I can't say for sure. Also I noticed that the pretention bolts had backed off all the way. So maybe it was a combination of a large pothole and not pretention. At this point I think if you already suspect there might be a problem, there probably is.

~Craig

PS in hind sight I feel kind of dumb. Obviously I was not paying nearly enough attention to my rear suspension during my maintenance.

DONT BEAT YOURSELF UP. im like you, asuming a design flaw/failure like this could actually happen, who'd ever think? how many guys are NOW checking for this if you had'nt spoken up?

shock area is this year conected