[Candyman]

Ok, in the interest of sharing info I'll copy a thread I posted on another board regarding a swingarm swap it did using an 05 636 swingarm into my 05 ZZR 600. Most of this will be copy and paste, but I'll try to get it all in there.

Its not real tricky as far as swingarm swaps go, but it my my first attempt, so I was leary at first, so my best advice is to jump right in - after reading as much as you possibly can about it of course.

Disclaimer: I wrote this for non-fighter folk who are scared to death to do anything to their bike, so if its overkill, don't complain.
Here goes.

First a link to a site I found helpful, but not detailed enough. Scroll to the end of the page to see his swingarm swap.
http://web.mit.edu/jaman/www/zx-6r.html

 

[Candyman]

How-to swap a 05-06 636 swingarm onto a 98-02 ZX6R / 05-07 ZZR:


Before I get started I will just clear up some terms. If I refer to anything as a “stock” piece you can assume that it is off of the bike being modified, namely my 05 ZZR600. Anything referred to as a “donor” part is off another bike.
If I refer to a right side or left side, consider that as if you were sitting on the bike and it would be your right or left. i.e. the chain is on the left side of the bike.

Parts list:
Base bike used is a 05 ZZR 600 (though it might not look it)
05 ZZR pivot bolt and pivot spacer/bushing
05 ZZR rear wheel, axle, spacers, and rear brake caliper
05 ZZR suspension linkages
Donor parts:
05-06 636 swingarm
05 ZX10R shock (636 shock also works)
05 636 rear brake bracket
Custom rear brake bracket
Longer rear brake line (custom SS or whatever you have that is long enough)

05 ZZR parts that cannot be used:
Rear shock – reservoir is positioned in a way that will interfere with swingarm and suspension travel
Rear brake bracket – it just doesn’t fit


Reasons why you can’t just plug and play the 636 swingarm:

The 636 swingarm bolts into the pivot fairly easily, but there are several issues that do not allow a simple swap. First is a minor issue where the exhaust cover plate on the 636 swingarm does not clear the footpeg bracket. A flat plate must be used in its place, preferable ~ 1/8” steel plate for structural support. This is fairly simple to remedy.

Second is another minor issue, the stock ZZR brake line is too short to reach to the caliper mounting position on the 636 swingarm. It’s only barely too short, another inch or two would reach.

Third is the ZZR shock. As I mentioned before, its reservoir is positioned pointing back and upwards. This would cause it too hit the braced area of the 636 swingarm. So you need a shock with a reservoir that is mounted right-to-left, such as the 636 or ZX10R shocks. I used a ZX10R in mine because word on the street is that it is better suited for lighter riders, the 636 is more suited to 180-215lb riders.

The larger issue is with the wheel. The ZZR wheel is wider than the 636 wheel, therefore there is not enough room between the arms of the swingarm to allow for the ZZR wheel with its stock bushings and brake bracket. Some may think it’s just easier to get the 636 wheel and spacers and save the hassle. It would definitely save time, but not money.

In all, parts cost me about $100, but I sold some old ones, and it would have cost $20 less if I didn't have to buy a stinkin 05 636 brake bracket to use as a pattern for fabricating a new one.

 

[Candyman]

Fitting the donor swingarm into the pivot:

First dissemble your wheel, swingarm and suspension. You will need a 23mm socket for the pivot bolt on one side, I’m not sure the size of the nut, but a 23mm socket got the pivot loose for me.
I recommend taking your chain off as it will be easier to work in there without it in the way. You can take your chain off without breaking it by removing the front sprocket cover. Once you get your chain off the front sprocket you’ll notice there is a very annoying “post” that will not allow you to pull your chain out the back. Look closely, that post can be removed with an allen key allowing you to pull the chain out the back.

Before you put the 636 swingarm in place you’ll need to remove the exhaust cover plate on the right side of the swingarm and replace it with a sheet of metal cut to fit. 1/8” steel plate should work well seeing as how it looks like that plate was made to carry some of the linear stress of the swingarm.

Now take the spacer/bushing from the right side of your stock swingarm and place it in the right side of your 636 swingarm. You can now bolt the 636 swingarm in place at the pivot using your stock pivot bolt. There will be a tiny bit of play in the swingarm on the pivot, but it is very small, and it will be addressed in the next step.

Now slip in your rear shock and bolt up the linkages. When you do this I find it easiest to first put in the top shock bolt, then the lower shock bolt, then finally bolt the dogbone links to the swingarm.
You will notice when you do this that the stock dogbones don’t line up completely with the mount on the 636 swingarm. Some have said that using 636 linkages fixes this issue. Myself, I just didn’t bother. You only have to push the left dogbone to the left a few millimeters for it to fit, and I feel confidant that the support and strength of the linkages isn’t compromised in the least. For yourself, do whatever makes you feel comfortable, it is fairly easy to find rear shocks already with their linkages on ebay though, so it might be worth going that route from the start.

Once the suspension is bolted up, try to move your swingarm from side to side on the pivot. You’ll notice that because of the linkages being in place now there is no 1mm movement of the swingarm on the pivot. If you are really anal you could try to find a thin washer to take up that space on the left side of the pivot, but its really not going anywhere.

 

[Candyman]

On to the wheel:


One note to begin. When you first bolt up your wheel to stand back and admire what your bike will look like you’ll notice that your axle is too long! Your options are to add some washers, or to buy a 636 axle which is the proper length. Right now I’m going the former route, but I’ll likely go the later route when I get a few extra bucks.

As mentioned before, the ZZR wheel and its spacers and brackets are too wide for the 636 swingarm. You will first need to center the chain line by removing 2mm off the outside of the left (sprocket) side spacer. The stock measurement for the sprocket side spacer is 23mm. You will want to remove 2mm taking it down to 21mm.
This is most easily done by machining on a lathe, but since I had no access to a lathe, I used a bench grinder. Crude yes, but if you are careful it can come out just the same as a machine job. The trick is to measure and measure often to make sure you are taking an equal amount off and that you don’t take too much off.

This will give you a centered chain between your rear and front sprockets.


Next you will need to modify the right (rotor) side spacer to give enough room on the axle for your brake bracket. You will want to take about 3mm off the inside of this spacer, just enough so that the larger outer ring part of the spacer is almost flush up against the dust seal. The stock measurement for the rotor side spacer is 16mm. From my measurements I ground it down to 13mm. Only take more off if your brake bracket requires more room.
Again, I used a bench grinder for this and measured and test fitted very often. Machining is much better.

Keep a container of water nearby to dunk the piece in often if you use a grinder. Dunk and dunk often or you'll heat up the piece and make it brittle.

A note: if you use a bench grinder make sure you take the part to a wire wheel before you put it on your bike, you don’t want metal shavings getting into your wheel bearings.
Also with a grinder it is very easy to get an uneven grind, i.e. one side of your spacer ends up 12mm and the other side is 13mm. This is not good. Be very careful to grind evenly and when you measure, take measurements all the way around the spacer to make sure you have a flat surface.

 

[Candyman]

Brake Bracket:

First note: The ZZR brake caliper is a direct bolt on to the 636 brake bracket. You do not need a 636 caliper for this project.

Once your spacers are the appropriate size and installed, measure the space left on the right side of the axle. This is how much room you’ll have for your custom brake bracket. From my measurements it is ~9mm or ~3/8”

As you can see in the pics, the 636 bracket is much too wide to fit into this space. There are two possible solutions to this, both of which involve making a new bracket.

The first has been done by a member of this board, but –no offence meant to him- I wasn’t comfortable with his method giving enough strength for this particular piece. I may be wrong though, so I’ll tell his method and mine and let you choose for yourself.
The first method is to take your 636 donor brake bracket, and grind it down to 9mm at the axle point, and to an appropriate thickness at the caliper mounting point. This would involve A LOT of grinding, and you would have to be uber-careful you got the measurements right and didn’t take too much off. Because trust me, those stinking brackets are way more expensive than they are worth.

Method number two is my alternative to the above option. Since 9mm is ~3/8” and 3/8” is a very easy size to get steel plate metal in, I opted to make a bracket out of that. I made an outline using my donor 636 bracket and had one cut in a metal shop I had access to, as well as the holes drilled.
There a lot of ways you can make one of these, using anything from an angle grinder to a torch to an automated torch (which is what I fortunately had access too). The biggest difficulty is that the hole for the axle is roughly 1” in diameter, and trust me, you can’t just pick up a 1” metal drill bit at your local hardware store. Its best if you have a machinest do it for you. It’s a fairly simple project for them.

NOTE: 1” is actually slightly too big of a hole. You will want to use calipers to get an exact measurement. Or you could use the ghetto caliper method: tighten a crescent wrench around your axle, remove the wrench, measure the gap between the sides of the wrench, which will give you your axle diameter.

Back to the bracket I made:

After cutting out the bracket and drilling the required holes, the bracket was not completely satisfactory because when mounted on the axle, the other end would hit the swingarm and not allow the bracket (and it turn the caliper) to be mounted perfectly parallel to the rotor. This would cause bad things to happen, such as crappy braking and uneven brake pad wear. So out with the grinder again.

To make the bracket line up perfectly parallel to the rotor it required some metal to be removed from the right side of the plate, on the end that has the “bracket slide guide”. Once this is done, it will allow you to put the bracket on the axle, and have it line up parallel to the rotor, providing even contact between the brake pads and rotor.

 

[Candyman]

Final thoughts:

The final fitting of the bracket was a PAIN. Lots of grinding both the bracket and the “bracket-slide” plate on the swingarm. It does fit, but it just took a lot of little adjustments to get it perfect. It was painstaking and difficult because it was a trial and error process for me. Now that I have documented it I would hope that it’ll make things easier for others.
I’m confident that anyone with access to a grinder and a way to get the bracket cut would be able to do this mod without a huge deal of investment.

My final opinion on the matter though is that the BEST way to do this mod would be to get a machinest to design an off-set bracket and have that made. (see the link to jmarts swingarm swap) It would give you all you need, but you’d have to pay for it.

I hope the pics help, look very closely at them, some have writing you may or may-not be able to read.

 

[Candyman]

Another good bit of info to add, I measured the stock ZZR axle and its diameter is 25mm. Just good info if you are making your own brake bracket. I had a 1" hole drilled and it was slightly too big - which isn't a bid deal.

I found out a couple bits of info that need to be shared with anyone else attempting this mod. First, the STOCK ZZR CHAIN WILL FIT WITH THE 636 SWINGARM! I know there was a question about that on another thread. It fits fine, but it does position the axle fairly far forward in the adjustment slots. I found it to be easier to put the chain on the sprocket before I put the wheel on.

The trouble I ran into was that in my test fittings it all went fine, but I wasn't clamping the axle bolt down tight. When I did that in my final instalation it clamped the swingarm arms together, which ended up pinching the new bracket/caliper against the rotor so that it was too tight. I had to get the grinder out again and grind down a couple points (see pics) to offset the caliper to line it all up again. I also put a 1mm washer on the inside of the bracket to help with the offset. If you take less than 4mm off the right side axle spacer you most likely won't need to do this.

My best advice to avoid this is when you are doing your test fittings, make sure and tighten down the axle nut just like you would when riding.

 

[Candyman]

Now pics
Axle layout before mods
ZZR wheel
05 636 swingarm
636 brake bracket

 

[Candyman]

Exhaust cover plate sticking out
Swingarm mocked up showing where the exhaust cover plate would interfere
Small space on left side of pivot (can be filled if you like)
Spacers

 

[Candyman]

More of the spacers before modification

 

[Candyman]

Spacer after modification and fitted

 

[Candyman]

Right side spacer after modification and fitted

 

[Candyman]

Woops, this pic should replace the second pic in the previous post

 

[Candyman]

Dogbones
Bracket slide on the inside of the swingarm that needs to be shaved down
Bracket slide shaved down
2 pics showing the 636 bracket is too big and you need a new one

 

[Candyman]

3/8" is the size for the bracket
ZZR caliper is a direct fit on 636 bracket
Outline for the new bracket
Old and new brackets together
New bracket on swingarm

 

[Candyman]

Several pics of the caliper mocked up on the new bracket

A couple showing chain allignment

 

[Candyman]

Now some misc (but very important) pics of the last minute adjustments I had to make to get it all working smooth.

I had to do a little more filing/grinding on the bracket and caliper mount to get the "offset" that I needed to have the caliper/rotors mesh perfectly. First pic is of some filing on the caliper, second is some facing I had to do to the bracket, also I added a 1mm washer to the inside of the bracket because I took 4mm off the right side spacer when I should have only taken 3mm (as I statedin the instructions)
And also a pic of the longer brakeline I used. This line was WAY too long, you only need a line about 2" longer than a stock one. I'm not sure if a 636 line will be long enough either because it would depend on where the footpegs mount.
And also a pic of the new exhaust cover plate I fabricated out of steel.

 

[Candyman]

And last but not least pics of it all on the bike ready to roll.

 

[Candyman]

There it is. As easy as that. If I can help anybody with it PM me (please read it all through first though) with questions, or you can email me at [email protected]

Cheers,
Micah

 

[ZZR808]

Micah when you first described this mod I thought it was kind of non-sensical. But after looking at your pics Im now jealous. I like how that 636 swing arm looks. Btw did you cut down the stock pipe? If so how does she sound and run?