Frankly my dear, there are no problems with this design. When we speak common, it goes back to the early years. Connecting rod failure, frame cracks, early gen tensioners, subthrottle lag. Years later, no engine failures, no frame breakage, no tensioner noise, throttle delivery improved. All factory fixes. That my dear should show you how out in the field they held point as one of the best if not the best performing bikes for the last 14 years.
If this is last year, this like all the rest were in a constant refinement exercise. Subtle as they are, they are found with different part numbers for the same item. I remember Kruz had ragged on the first gen air cleaner cover being plastic. The next year or one after had the stamped out steel one. Thus the hidden refinement.
Tensioner too has been revised and you don't hear about chain noise on the later style tensioners. In fact, none here at all, i.e., the updated tensioner.
Probably a touch quicker than last year or drop down another year. Could be another team of up and comers improving the map. I've had 4 of them and all were bulletproof, one faster or say torqueified more than the other.
Gotta remember this is a 14 year run at it, and very few have blown no matter how the bike was broken in. Book break in is the way to go.
Engineering has been setting cam chains for decades, and I'm speaking about all brands. You'll go backwards using a static tensioner. It's high maintenance, meaning, you'll have to pop the crank cover and keep checking for perfect tension, or let the engineering do its job for you. Racing it is a different story.
Chain wise, no wait, rub both hands together real fast; which hand stayed cold? You'll have to come up with a better theory that two part rubbing on each other do not equally wear each others surface areas out, right? Now, make a fist with one hand. Take the other hand and follow your fingers down and around the fisted fingers. Kind of looking at your open hand as the inside of a roller, and your fisted hand is a pin. So that rubbing you felt was heat. And a chemical kind of reaction is moving molecules off that pin. As the rubbing down continues, the chain grows in length. Think about it. As you would cut a circle in half, that's what is happening to one side of the pin. The tightest curve is around the crank. The cam sprocket, not so much. And when they say 'the weakest link,' that shaving down of the pin is who is about to crack with enough ground away at the half circled looking pin.
Now that's a stretch justifying a static tensioner to extend life.
Tormenting the motorcycling community one post at a time