Is the Kawasaki KLR 650 Doohickey ACTUALLY a Big Deal? I Asked a Veteran Kawasaki Mechanic.

If you buy a Kawasaki KLR 650, the first thing you'll hear from a lot of other owners is "make sure you fix the KLR 650 doohickey right away!" It's a common believe among KLR 650 owners that the KLR doohickey (another name for the counterbalancer chain tensioner) will eventually wear out and fail, causing your KLR to die. The belief in the Kawasaki KLR 650 doohickey problem is so widespread that many people actually replace their KLR doohickey immediately after buying a brand new bike.

I've gotten a ton of KLR doohickey questions since I bought my 2022 KLR 650 Adventure last year, and I wanted to cut through the rumor and hearsay and go right to an expert on the subject. Mike at Power Motorsports, a veteran Kawasaki mechanic with 25 years experience, was kind enough to come on camera and talk about his experiences over the years fixing KLR doohickeys.

His answer might surprise you. Mike has never seen a doohickey fail, nor has he ever opened up a KLR and found a doohickey on the verge of failure. He's installed a ton of KLR doohickey kits at customer request over the years, but he's never had to do one as a result of a failure.

Properly maintained, KLRs will run forever, at least according to Mike.

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[DorkintheRoad]

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[LibertyEver]

It must be nice to have an dual sport / ADV bike that's so reliable that people make up problems to fix. Race Ready KTM should be so lucky.

[tugdrivinj]

Yeah but, I heard from a guy whose brother knew a guy whose sister dated a guy who said he saw one break on a brand new bike and the engine failed so bad he flew over the bars like superman... or something.

[drewiliffe]

My KLR had 33000Km and I got my local Kawasaki dealer to install an Eagle Mike kit. The mechanic said that the spring had lost its tension and it was not working correctly as a result. Nobody would purchase a replacement OEM part so that explains why Kawasaki never have to sell them.

[damagedbyus]

Have had 5 different KLR 650s. I had a 2003 that I bought it in 2003. I pulled it apart to do the Doohickey upgrade and my tensioner spring and tensioner had failed with 5500 original miles on the bike and I had been religiously maintained. So yes it did happen to me and it is a cheap simple insurance to upgrade.

[adamjordan]

The “mod” does not make the “tightening” of the cam chain any “easier.” The process is exactly the same. Loosen the bolt on the side of the case, let the spring take up slack, tighten the bolt back down. The difference is Eagle Mike’s torsion spring works where I’ve seen more than one spring on a Gen 2 be out of tension before 10, 000 miles. If you’ve taken both bikes apart (Gen 1 and Gen 2, or 3 at this point), it is clear that the lever itself is better in Gen 2/3 and unlikely to fail. But if you’ve taken more than a few apart, you also know the stock spring can run out of adjustment way too soon.

[cindyeva]

At 8000 miles I pulled the cover and checked mine on my 2014, spring had no tensioning ability and was loose………eagle mike is the man of truth here

[LarryMusgrave]

I'm a member of a local Pittsburgh Pa area dual sport club and I've installed 6 Doo-hicky upgrades. Of the 6, not one OEM spring was actively providing tension. Each of them was was found with the coils at rest and the tensioner lever laying limp. That was 4 Gen 2 and 2 Gen 1 KLR650 engines.

I'll be doing the doo on my 2022 because I'm my first hand experience, 0 for 6 survived in working condition because the spring is too long and stops working early in life.

[HaRLeYDvDsN]

Weird because my 18 with 3000 miles the spring was eating the case. I have pictures and all. They DO go bad and they DO fail. This is misinformation man. I live in PA. The spring had ZERO tension and maintenance has always been done.

[patrkbukly]

People can think what they want but I can’t fault this guy for just telling us what he has personally experienced. Thats his experience and deserves respect for just that. Good interview Dork, thanks for that.

[SteveD]

Sounds like a stock answer from a Kawasaki dealership mechanic. I was at a local dealership looking at the new KLRs when they brought them back out and asked if Kawasaki had done anything about the doohickey. The salesman pretended to not know what the doohickey was until i asked the sales manager the same question, and he acknowledged that the doohickey was a problem, then all of the sudden, the original salesman knew all about the doohickey issue. Now, my experience with the doohickey. I’m 65 years old and have been riding and working on motorcycles since i was 10, even worked as a mechanic at a local Yamaha dealership starting when i was 14. I have owned motorcycles continuously since i was 12, and always do all of my own wrenching on them. I have a 2006 KLR 650 that I bought new. When it had 11, 000 miles on it, I decided to do a doohickey upgrade with the Eagle Mike kit and opted for the torsion spring fix. As I began the upgrade, I pulled the left side cover from the engine, and found that I was not doing an upgrade, but instead, I was doing a doohickey repair as the spring had long since broken and the adjuster was already set at full travel, from the factory. The spring had broken so far in the past that the nub end of it had worn a groove in the bottom of the case, I was very lucky that the tag end that had broken off had apparently came out with an earlier oil change and somehow didn’t do any damage. I finished my repair/upgrade, and all of the sudden the engine was much quieter, possibly even quieter than when it was new. I still have this bike today and still enjoy going both on and off road with it. The stock KLR doohickey is beyond question a problem and to say otherwise is just laughable.

[johncarruth]

I have done four "Doohickey" upgrades, with new levers and torsion springs. Two 2011s, one 2012 and one 2022. All less than 5K miles. All three Gen II bikes had no tension in the stock coil spring. the Gen III bike still had some tension, not much. All of the levers were intact, no issues, but not as robust as the EM unit. The biggest issues I have found on KLRs is lack of grease in the suspension linkage, swingarm bearings, Unitrac axle and steering head.

[GreaseAndGravel]

My 2007 KLR's Doo spring was missing after less than 5000 miles when we opened it for the Doo. If I had done the routine maintenance procedure prescribed by Kawasaki, I would have destroyed my engine. The guy who did the Doo for me showed me a bowl of more than 30-40 broken doohickeys. The original Gen1 had bad welds and the Eagle Mike Doo has more adjustment in it (for when the rubbers on the sprockets wear). The Kawasaki dealer where I bought mine (with 3000 miles on the clock) also denied that the Doo is an issue. The bigger issue is the rubbers on the balancer chain sprockets that wear out.

[miraclo]

I JUST did my doohickey yesterday on my 2002 KLR. i had a 31 year retired Kawasaki and big block race mechanic come over and do the work with me. he has done dozens and dozens of doohickeys and he has personally showed me the bag of 20+ broken doohickeys and springs that he had. when we cracked my bike open after we noticed that the adjuster wasn't doing anything. what did we find? A BROKEN DOOHICKEY SPRING. just sitting there doing nothing. the welded style doohickey oem was perfectly but the spring giving it tension was snapped off. we did the torsion spring and Emike doohickey and I'm very happy i did or it could have been very bad. my doohickey spring 100% failed.

[jimallison]

Sure. I had about twenty thousand miles on my 06 and I asked my Kawasaki Mechanic about the doohickey. He backed up what your mechanic said. At 22, 000 + miles cruising a state away at 70 MPH, the engine made a funny sound and locked up. I have a broken doo hickey sample, a broken spring' two bent intake valves and a cracked piston. Needless to say, my local kawasaki Dealer wasn't my choice for a solution. A 685 kit and aftermarket doohickey made me very happy again. At 31, 000 miles now.

[WWADV]

I've owned 6 KLRs over the years. I did the doohickey mod on 4 of them. Of those 4, three of them had slack springs with no tension left. None of those three had cracked or broken doohicky's, but they did have grooved cases from where the spring was digging into them. They also had chaffing marks on every one of the springs from the chain. The one klr of the 4 that I did the mod on, had no spring when I opened the case and a piece of the doohicky was missing. I fished almost all of those parts out of the sump hole with a flexible magnet. You can call it a myth all day long, but every one of those bikes would have eventually succumbed to engine failure in the future. My last KLR a '22 model, I sold before it was time for a second oil change, so I didn't open the case on that one.

[car_junkie]

So I used to work at a car dealership and let me tell you if you want the honest truth about the reliability of a vehicle you have to make sure the tech is anonymous. The manufacturer of the vehicle will come at the dealership if they said anything bad about the vehicles. Notice he said nothing about parts failing it was all due to poor maintenance. Every vehicle has some sort of defect that wasn't made or engineered well because human error is impossible to avoid. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Kawasaki in particular, I'm just saying if there was and the tech talked about it he'd probably loose his job.

[shooter-vxxy]

It's a dealership talking about a long term problem though. They mostly get warranty work.

Most people are gonna fix it themselves or take it to a local shop by the time the doohickey does go bad.

[Roadmaster]

When I bought my brand new, zero kilometres, 2018 KLR650 from the dealership in the spring of 2019 I asked the service manager about the doohickey.
He said the exact same thing as this mechanic with the caveat that most KLR owners do their own maintenance and repairs and he had never personally worked on one.

At my first oil change at 935 kms (580 miles) I bought the Eagle Mike kit and decided to look into this controversy. BEFORE adjusting the doohickey the linear spring had almost no tension. There was less than 0.005" of gap between each coil. And when I loosened the bolt to the doohickey there was zero tension on the spring and it basically slid off the boss on the engine casting. So there is that.
Totally anecdotal, but I feel happier I did mine.
Doo what you want to doo.

[paullepper]

Well I have an 09 I bought with 13K miles, when I checked it the spring was intact but completly slack and there was no way it was able to adjust the chain. I'm not disputing the mechanic's comments but I've seen enough pictures of broken / slack springs to justify doing the DooHickey. I will say I am a freak about maintenance on all my toys, but in 40+ yrs of riding and racing motorcycles I can't remember ever having a breakdown due to a maintenance problem.