How to eliminate motorcycle belt squeal

Motorcycle riders with belt drives on their bikes may face the irritating and annoying issue of squeal, squeak or chirp originating from the belt drive. I tried many things and after reading many articles and trying many permutations I have been able to eliminate the sound from my belt drive. The bike here is a Kawasaki Vulcan VN2000F, but the concept will remain the same for all motorcycles. Hope this helps eliminate your issue.

I discuss the various issues that may be haunting the belt.

Please do not use any sort of belt lubricant to remove the sound. While it may remove the issue for a short period, it will eventually arise again, as the real problem is not yet solved. Moreover your belt will become prone to getting a lot of dust, grit and gravel sticking to the drive train.

[VadimNYC]

Wow, thanks Kawasaki for not making the notches true. Thank Rahul for bring this to everyone's attention!!! My belt is also on the left most side of the rear pulley and making noise, i made sure both side are on the same notches. Now need to measure both side to make sure the distance is same size. Again, Thank you!!!

[midmooutdoors]

Nice video man very helpful. I'm gonna get my belt straight while I'm waiting for parts

[Tom-jxte]

You’re assuming the swing arm is perfectly symmetrical, and that may not be how Kawasaki calibrated the notches just saying

The other thing I’ve heard, and I believe it’s true is that the belt on the V2K should actually ride a little bit to the outboard side of the pulleys not directly in the middle, I don’t know if you read or heard about that

[Jodyrides]

so the rear wheel was not tracking straight. Sometimes the marks on the swing arm don’t line up correctly on the axle marks. Here is the shore way to do it. I did this on my factory Road racers back in the day. I never trusted the swing arm marks, because at very high speed, you can put you into a high-speed tank slapper..
get a piece of white string about 20 feet long. By the way, I have a video on YouTube showing how to do this on my Kawasaki Z 400 ..
you get to the middle of the string and wrap it around the front wheel about 6 inches off the ground at the front of the tire. You bring the two equal lengths of string down both sides of the bike, and pull them one on each side of the rear tire. Do you have someone sit on the bike and try to hold the front wheel straight..
you can tell it straight if the string is making contact with the tire and four places.. sometimes it helps to put a spacer on each side under the string in the front wheel, so that the front tire is as wide as the back tire with the spacers, holding the string out to make the front as wide as the rear tire
now lay on the ground and eyeball the string, holding it about six or eight or 10 inches off the ground just so that it clears the discs, sprockets, whatever
you will be able to see very easily, if the rear wheel is pointed in exactly the same direction as the front wheel, using the tight string on both sides. If it is not perfectly straight, tracking behind the front wheel, loosen the axle and adjust it, then make a note of where your indicators on your axle slides are in reference to the swingarm marks. You can check your marks, or you can see how close they are or how far off they are that way..
I saw that being done in the pits of the factory Road race teams. They were checking to see if the frame was still straight after a crash. I was talking to one of the mechanics, and he said, string don’t lie.

[corneilcorneil]

Correct, also on the 900, the marks are not in line.

[ksgjlg]

This is the correct way to fix this. Thanks

[DemoNiq]

Hi, do you have a video showing us what the sound was before the adjustment? mine makes a sound - but it's more of a sound every time the belt does a complete turn. I'm thinking of using one of those spray solutions for belts and try and eliminate the sound. Hopefully that will do the trick.