Motorcycle Cooling Hoses
Depending on your motorcycle, the hoses of your cooling system can be easy to get at or not. Most aren’t that easy. The original clamps are not likely to be reusable so get some worm drive clamps to suit the hose diameter and rule one here, do not over tighten the clamp. If the hose looks squeezed, then you have failed. Flat and not leaking is the key here. Destroying original clamps is usually as easy as fitting a small flat screwdriver under the clamp and pressing it away. Or not. Good luck. Side cutters can work here.
Put simply, you can always tighten it a bit if it’s leaking under pressure but you can never undo a crimp in the rubber.
Some motorcycles have an easy to get at filler under the pressure cap. That might not be the case for you, although for me that’s easy, but the overflow bottle isn’t and that’s another trick. Why put a cap under a frame stanchion?
All modern liquid cooled motorcycles use a pressurized system, meaning that the traditional radiator cap is not the end of the filling method. You must prime the catch bottle and you can accept some spillage here as the system primes, but the trick is to fill the radiator, run the engine until the fluid gets swallowed and stop, top up and continue until the top of the radiator is full. Put the radiator cap back on, run the engine with the catch bottle lid off and watch the bubble come out.
When that stops you top that up to the hot level, run the engine to warm and watch the overflow under the motorcycle and then fill the catch bottle up if needed. That should do it. If in doubt, don’t.
