Sing it with me now, “Chain, chain, chain ….. chain of fools” No, seriously, it’s not foolish to put a decent chain and new sprockets on your bike. Especially when it’s hit 12,000 miles, as mine did over the weekend. My original factory chain and sprockets aren’t looking too bad, but I’ve got some big trips this summer and 12,000 miles is a good change interval for original equipment.

I bought a DID 525 ‘gold’ chain from Adventure Motostuff in Nevada and will have my local Suzuki dealer install it. It’s a highly recommended brand/model and if I take good care of it I can expect to get up to 25,000 miles out of it. I’ll get OEM sprockets, front and rear, from my dealer and have them swapped out at the same time. My bike’s also due to have the throttle bodies synced. The engine has been running fine and my fuel mileage is still between 50-53 mpg, but I hear the TBS usually needs to be done every 10,000 miles anyway.

My tires still look good. I’m running Metzler Tourance and have been very happy with them. I’ve got a small degree of flattening going on in the center of my rear tire, but the amount of actual tread remaining is still at least 80-90% of original, plenty to last the season.

So far the bike has been flawless with no mechanical or other problems whatsoever. From all that I gather, as long as I take care of it my V-Strom will be trouble-free for a very long time.