Aprilia Moto 6.5 - new rearshock

Now the Moto 6.5 is a bit of an acquired taste, without a doubt. It was designed by Philippe stark and even twenty years later it polarises the onlookers. There's pretty much only two opinions: love or hate and not much in between. For apparent reasons my dad falls into the first category. The styling being rather avantgarde, under the hood it was more common hardware taken from the Aprilia Pegaso, with the well known 650cc Rotax single.

Now the technical side of this Moto 6.5 was well taken care of, but still, the rear shock was as dead as one can be. Unfortunately even though a lot of the components were taken from the Pegaso, the standard rear shock wasn't. Luckily after doing a lot of research the stock rear shocks from both a Bandit 600 (Mk. II) or a SV650 should both work, the latter being slightly (15mm) longer with an overall length of 335mm.

Getting to the shock is pretty straight forward, but requires removal of a lot of parts.

As mentioned before, the SV650 shock is 15mm longer than a Bandit 600 shock. Unfortunately that's exactly those 15mm too long.

 

The other measurements were off, but in a pretty good way: The upper end was five millimetres narrower and the clevis on the lower end five millimetres more wide. Nothing a few washers couldn't sort out.

So how does it feel? Stiff, stiffer than stock even on the second lowest pre-load setting.

The last part of the suspension upgrade is going to be a new rear tyre as the current one might still be the original OEM fitment...