well if you’re like me and you own a Honda NT 700p eventually you’re going to want to remove the rear wheel whether it’s to just replace a worn tire fix on the road hazard but whatever the case unless you’re the privileged type that has doodles of cash and drops it off the deal with then worry about the whole mess you’re probably going to purchase the Honda service manual attempt to do it yourself you’ll notice that when you open these uh manuals of today unlike the old days they’re not as explicit as they used to be boy they used to give you lots of illustrations and step-by-step procedures you really couldn’t miss now they kind of sum it all up and give r6 fairings you one sentence to sentence procedures that kind of leave a lot of things open-ended the Honda’s manual to remove the rear tire will tell you to remove the rear fender remove the exhaust pipe I like that one myself and then remove the rear wheel removing the fender they basically just give you a handful of steps and they leave a lot of things on set and I’m going to kind of show you these procedures now it’ll tell you to remove a couple bolts from inside the saddlebags to get the fender loosen off but it really doesn’t show you clearly which ones they are and I’ll show point them out to you there’s one right at the top right by the cord that holds the saddle bag from falling open there’s one mid-drift and there’s one at the bottom these bolts will look like this they’re just your five millimeter shoulder bolt hex bolt there’s two right up above that you don’t want a mistake for those these hold
the tail light in place you do want to loosen these and Honda manual also tell you to loosen all the rest of them so you have a little wiggle room with the saddle bag carcass and you’re going to want all the wiggle room you could possibly beg borrow and steal on the right hand side saddlebag you want to do the same exact thing however there’s one little hidden treasure to this side right at the pass-through between the left and right bag there’s also a little Phillips screw that goes unmentioned you might want to loosen that guy too just to give you a little more access to movement of your saddle bag carcasses okay now it’s time to remove the rear fender the factory manual will tell you that there’s a plastic peg up in the left and right corners up here that go into a rubber grommet you got to make mental note of that because when time is do you want to grab and kind of wiggle those away without snapping off the pegs but what they won’t tell you is along the left and right side this is not a flush mount the rear fender actually has a lip that channels underneath the saddlebag plastic the fender plastic is far more pliable than the saddlebag even with the saddlebag bolts entirely loose it doesn’t give you a much movement there I found that flexing the fender to get this out from underneath here is a little bit of a safer and easier bet what I did is they just kind of hold this saddlebag tightly and push in on the fender start getting that edge away and then you can kind of get it out from underneath the edge there once one side is out the other side will follow far easier now the lower half of your fender is completely loose and then you can grab the top pegs and pull them out of there rubber grommets there’s going to be a cord on the back your like a license plate light will need to be removed and I’ll show you the backside of the spender in a second just to familiarize yourself with the backside of this fender as we spoke here’s those little pegs in the left and right corner that hold the upper section of the fender to the motorcycle you might want to just take extra note of that be careful of those yamaha r1 fairings they don’t snap them off that does happen quite often especially with age when the plastic it’s a little bit more brittle and here’s the mounting surfaces for those bolts that you’ve removed on the inside here saddlebags on the left and right side now here’s the thing that I want you to take a little peek at before we put this back on there’s a little lip that runs up and down the right-hand side now this lip that we spoke of goes in between these little tongues right here if you can see those clearly on this video you don’t want to go to
the inside of the tongue because then your saddle your fender plastic will be recessed too much and the seam won’t stay true and so you got to kind of slip it in there without snow pin it off and without going to the inside all the way around and that makes the return trip a little tricky in preparation for returning the fender to the motorcycle I usually use a little bit of nappa silicone spray you could probably use wd-40 as well the silicone spray evaporates really quickly and if you saturate those pegs with the silicone split spray and the grommets you’ll find that the they slip together with ease and then once the silicone evaporates out it holds nice and firm okay we’re going to take you on the return trip of the fender going back on to the motorcycle first thing you want to do is put your license plate light back into its holder it’s literally just a push and turn you’re going to have to kind of do it by field didn’t give you a heck of a lot of wire on there just give it a little pull make sure it’s in there well eyeball off your pegs up in the upper corners and push those in place now the fenders hanging and you’ll notice I’m just going to go a nice and smooth because that silicone lubricant now the fenders in place it’s time to line up those seams and get those in properly and that’s kind of where the fun begins okay I’m going to do one side at a time and once again flexing the fender is probably the best way to go that’s it the right side is in I went very very carefully to get that edge between those tongues without pushing in too hard and this is the easy side because well you can do motorcycle fairings it either left or right but the first side is the easiest because obviously there’s not a lot of tension on it you can bend the fender around to get everything lined up properly here comes the tricky side okay this side is not fun at all the object of the game is to get this lip in underneath the edge of the saddlebag plastic and between those tongues of doing any damage and it’s not going to be as easy as the other side what I usually do is grab the saddlebag plastic here firmly and push in on the fender to time to get it in and around that edge the hardest part to get is this mid-drift point the bottom will go in nice the top are usually go in nice this outer edge right here is difficult the easiest way to do it is to keep either pressure on your license plate area or here while you’re really kind of pull this edge out like I said I’ve loosened up all the bolts a Honda manual tells you to do and I still didn’t get too much movement out of this bag I’m going to look into that a little bit deeper if anybody on the web has a suggestion for that I am all ears but other than that fenders back in place you put your bolts in and the project is a defender remove and replace is done you