Hello everyone.. after sitting back and reading on here for quite a while i thought i would ask a question hoping for advice , after spending quite some time cleaning my pride and joy i decided to fire her up and let her run for a bit, whilst she was running i was looking over the engine and noticed bubbles coming from what i believe is the intake duct rubber , obviously this shouldn't happen , is it quite a straight forward job to replace this part? and is it quite common problem? any advice is much appreciated..

I assume you mean the short hose between the throttle body and inlet? Is it leaking in the middle or at either end where the hose clamps are? Have you tried nipping up the clamps?

The part itself is cheap (about �20). Fitting isn't difficult as such, just fiddly and time consuming as you have to remove the battery, airbox and loosen the undertray to gain some space to pull the throttle body back far enough to get the hose off.

As for it being a common problem, I've owned older bikes with perished intake hoses, but never heard of an XT with this issue.

Modern fuels containing 5-10% bioethanol are not good for rubber and older bike's/car's fuel system hoses were not compatible with it, which is why older bikes tend to be the ones that suffer. The XTs hoses are all ethanol safe.

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Thanks for reply , it appears to be coming from just in front of the rear clamp on the clutch side from what appears to be small cracks in the surface of the rubber , just like the small cracks you get in the surface of an older tire , would this effect the engines running performance?..

Cracking/perishing is quite common on older bikes as I mentioned before, but I've never seen it before on as new a bike as an XT660Z!?

Leaks here will affect the performance of the engine as un-metered air will be drawn in to the inlet. How badly performance is affected depends on how bad the perishing is and the size of the leak.

As a stop-gap you can seal them up with silicone mastic, which works for a while until it start s to peel away. Essentially you are going to have to fix it/get it fixed. It is only going to get worse in the long run.

BTW, how old is your Tenere?

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Hi Pleiades , that is the confusing thing its a 2010 model , think i shall go ahead and order the part..

Just been online to look for the replacement part and getting such different prices , any ideas for the best place to order from?..