Modern Buddy

I couldn't find anything on this forum about it, but plenty on motorcycle forums. People say the throttle cables snap after a few years. When though seems to be a mystery. Some peopl say six months, one year, three years, five years....never unless these is damage. My cable is 8 years old with 27,000 miles on it. Terrified, went to check mine. The metal nuts on the engine side are rusted, but the cable looks fine at both ends and it still has the black teflon coating on it so I assume the wire underneath is fine. There isn't any damage nor cracks nor fraying on either ends where the head is. And the plastic rubber housing is all intact.

Am I supposed to swap these out at regular intervals or only if I see damage? Removing all these panels and unrouting the cable is a pain. I don't want to do all this work for something that's not broken but I also don't want any surprises on the road. What do you all do?

I have a pretty strict policy about not fixing what isn't broken and isn't recommended in the manual. So far, no broken throttle cables (knock on wood).

My throttle cable is ~12 years old and has over 100,000 miles on it and it hasn't broken yet.

It pretty rare for it to break.

Even on modern motorcycles.

Thanks for the input. I don't know why so many motorcyclists seem to have broken throttle cables. I guess if you ride a sports bike and are constantly hard revving and trying to do 0 to 60 in two seconds.

Then again, my Buddy is fuel-injected so you can't ride it like that. Since it looks okay at both heads, I guess I'll leave it. I give up trying to get these panels off. The cable goes down the front and I can't get the inner leg shield off - probably need to remove the floor board. It's more work than the cable change.

I did need to adjust the cable. Service manual says to replace it when the cable can't be adjusted anymore so maybe I'll do that.

I thought about lubing the cable to get more life out of it but then I read never to lube a teflon cable because when the teflon comes off, the lube will cause it to gum up the housing and then the cable will stick.

You know, in 50 years of riding motorcycles, I don't think I can remember ever breaking a throttle cable. I think I broke a brake cable once though. I think that was on a dirt bike that got quite a bit of abuse. I wouldn't worry about it.