[
2. The OEM Boge shocks are little more than undamped pogo sticks. Folks say that the Boge boingers were fitted simply to keep the rear fender off the back tire while the bike traveled in its shipping crate. Basically worthless.
I see that Motobins are flogging Spanish Betor shock absorbers. I remember the beggars well as they came fitted to the Bultaco Metralla I raced in production races a very, very long time ago and was stuck with under the class rules.
The saying went that Betors are better than nothing, but not by much. It is a very long time ago but my memory tells me that Boges were better than Betors.
BUT, joy OH joy, Betors are rebuildable and they use (or at least they used to use) catalog seals. So once you pulled them apart, played with the valving, fiddled with fluid quantity and weight, you could actually turn them into decent shocks.
To conclude this trip down memory lane, I created a huge bunfight when I presented my bike with the Betors fitted internally with freon bags (Yes Jennifer, once upon a time you could actually buy small plastic bags of freon gas, nasty Ozone depleting stuff that it is for the purpose of reducing "dead air space" in shocks) and mounted upside down to reduce un-sprung weight (which for some reason I thought was important in those days).
Well there were protests and I was temporarily pulled off the grid on the grounds that they were not "stock".
I then lodged a protest against all the bikes in the field not running the disc pads/brake shoes supplied by the manufacturer as OEM, and while I was at it, added handlebar grips, break/clutch levers and fork damper rods into the bargain. This created a major problem for the organizers in that two or three of the competitors had protested me and I had lodged a protest pretty much against the balance of the field.
Sensibly the race went ahead and the protests were sorted out later, my protests where dismissed and the rules quickly changed to allow aftermarket brake and clutch levers, handlebar grips and brake material.
The protest against me presented a few more problems because my shocks were undeniably the ones fitted to the bike at the factory, the problem was that I had altered them in ways that had not been thought of (at the time the ranks of OEM shocks that were actually rebuildable (or for that matter could be taken apart non-destructively) probably began and ended with Ducati, MotoGuzzi, Laverda and Bultaco. Worse there were no untouched Betor shocks around to compare mine to to see if I had broken any rules (arguably I had not because there was nothign int he rules about altering shock absorber or fork internals and nearly all the Yamaha runner would have had Fox "trickit" double action conversion damper rods anyway.
Eventually the rules were changed so that you had to run OEM shock absorber bodies and stock fork bodies but internally forms and shocks were free - and shocks had to be mounted the same way up as OEM.
The joke of it was that even then I was a "big" bloke, about 6' 1" and weighing around 10~11 stone. Just how much chance did I really have in resisting the onslaught of small children on Yamaha RD250s and Suzuki Hustlers? The answer is not a prayer!
but it was fun trying.
