skip valve clearance inspetion???

I got an extra two years due to a late season purchase. Promo deal. Considering how much we get jammed up here, it's the least they could do. Remind me of this topic when we meet for beers one day. :rant:

 

first..u wont tell by how its running till its usually damaged..so i guess if its happy , it is...and it also depends heavily on how the guy putting it together felt that day..i have had some bikes need adjusting, some never ..but all of my honda's over the years usually needed one shimming early in life, then never again after that..

what he told u tho was definitely the norm for most guys. Depends how long u plan to keep the bike..do it now and forget it for years, or just ride and worry down the road...

I picked up a 05 and didnt believe the fellow had done it(he said he did) and I could tell they had the rear cover off(the easy one. ), not the front, so i did em and 4 were out at 50,000km..all the intake side.....I believe they had never been done.


call this guy in carman..Blaine Skelton, (in the book)..he's a long time Honda master mech who works outa his house on the side..he will have some advice for u anytime...

good luck!!

 

nice to know ...my 96 has 25000 and runs perfectly....never had a valve adjustment.....ill save the $

 

No wonder you complain so much about your bike. If you (or Honda) have got that much money into it, it obviously has reliability issues (which most of us do not experience). You got a lemon. So I have to ask, why do you keep it? Why would you not send it on it's way?

 

I checked my '98 with 51,000 on it. Was within spec. Won't bother doing it again.

 

jason, will have to ride first then beer, dont get me going about how much we get ripped up in canuck land , especially after a few.
..............great deal you got on warranty!!

 

As a former Honda shop mechanic let me explain about valve adjustment.

First I will say that the valves that use shims/buckets almost never need adjustment.
I would check those at around 1500 miles. Then not unless indicated by a compression check,or other indicators like a vacuum check.

Valves that have rocker arms and tappets need adjustment more often. Many times a bike will get a valve adjustment and idle much better. The exhaust valves are of the greatest concern. If they are tight at all it will effect the idle. Exhaust valves tend to get tight because they are subjected to great heat. The Honda exhaust valves are sodium filled to deal with the heat. If the exhaust valve cannot come up far enough because it is too tight then the edges of the valve cannot touch the cylinder head and dissipate heat into the cylinder head.

On these type bikes the first 600 mile service is very important and the 1500 mile service as well. Intakes just get a little loose. No harm done but they may make a little clicking noise.
When the engine is new all of the metal ,gaskets and bolts are expanding and contracting and settling in. This is when the valve clearances on these type engines need to be checked.
When you look in your workshop manual you will notice that as the bike gets more milage that the valve adjustment schedule is less and less as the bike ages because the engine metals have stabilized.

Important! When you get a valve adjustment, make sure the cam chain tension is checked and adjusted FIRST or you will be wasting your time. Makes a big difference.

 

Sorry. Older people know lots of things and now the internet allows me to help younger people because They cannot see how old I am. Out on the street a 20 year old guy would'nt even give me the time of day. I have been working on motorcycles since I was 16 . I have worked on supersonic fighter plane engines, welded chromoly tubular aircraft engine mounts, I am a certified welder and certified welding inspector. I have been a Motorcycle mechanic at several shops. I have built three sailboats from scratch. Two steel sailboats and one wood sailboat. I have built many model boats and industrial models and I have a masters degree in Sculpture and a BFA in graphic design.
I don't have space to list everything. But any body that is my age has usually done many things.
I am happy to answer any questions. If I do not know the answer, I can point you in the right direction.

BTW I also play blues guitar. That is how I met my wonderful wife.

One more thing. Good story.

I was at the bus station in San Francisco one day and started talking to a guy in a wheel chair and found out that the guy at one time in his life had been the commander of a US aircraft carrier! For real.

 

Yes....I talked to the guy for about an hour and he was the real deal.
I worked on F-106 Delta Darts. The space shuttle uses the same basic wing design.

 

Just thought I'd add my two cents as well... My '98 CBR900RR has 36K on it when I checked that valaves... 2 were out of speck, but just barely... I also check my race bike every other season (2005 CBR600RR) because it get's more abuse than it should have to and all valves have always been in spec.

 

For what it's worth, I took my bike to an experienced mechanic that was a Honda garage manager at the time these bikes came out, mine is a 95 with 45k km, approximately because the odometer was stuck.
The mechanic told me that it was pretty safe to skip the valve clearances because they have big tolerances and tend to tighten, and that it was unlikely that they would need adjustment.

 

I was advised that it is cheaper to replace the head with a second hand one than get the valves checked.

 

If you are reasonably agile, checking clearances and then swapping shims if needed is pretty easy on a gear-drive VFR. It is even easier on a Honda ST1100 (with belt drive to an idler sprocket then gear drive to the cams) as the heads stick out sideways! I checked my recently acquired 5th gen with 80,000km and it needed 3 or 4 inlet valves opened up a bit but the exhausts were all in spec. I already had a Hotcams shim kit so the cost to me was $0. I may not bother doing these again for a long time however.



May be a different proposition on a VTEC bike as not only are the valve checks much more complex, changing clearances on the VTEC valves requires replacing quite expensive buckets not cheap shims. Another reason the 5th gen is the best VFR.

Personally I would rather check and find nothing amiss, than wait for the valve clearances to close up enough to burn a valve or lose compression. But that is just me.

 

So true -- hardest part is removing the valve covers on the gear driven models.

Regarding the 6th gen, for the vast majority of folks I would agree that it's unnecessary to do the valve check/service. Most bikes don't ever log more than 50K miles. People usually crash them or move on for whatever other reason before ever reaching higher mileages. Anecdotally, my friend has an '04 with 110K miles that's still running perfectly fine, and the valves have never been touched.

Totally agree that if you're not doing the work yourself, it makes little fiscal sense to check/service the valves. When I did the service on my '06 at 67K miles (107K km), only the intake valves were within spec., but I adjusted #3 intake to bring it back toward the middle of the range. All my VTEC valves were way out of adjustment.

My bike was running flawlessly when I performed the service: Engine was smooth and quiet, but I was curious and wanted to log the clearance data. The bump in power after adjustment surprised me: I can feel the torque peak at 8K rpm, and I hit 150 mph on a long highway straight on my way up to the mountains. Before the adjustment, the bike would struggle to make it to 140 mph on this stretch of road.

 

I checked mine when I bought it with 31k miles. 14 of 16 were within specs. 2 were just slightly out and I re-shimmed them. I will probably never check them again in the years I left to ride since I am already 64.