What did you do to your Yamaha today?

More from Yesterdays riding. On the road in the dark this morning with 100 km in before breakfast. Very glad for the extra driving lights. And hand covers. Electric grips on the to do list.

 

I love those rims, wish I had those on my XJ650

 

Those are all done. Now on to the fork seals and rotors. Oh, and I need to pull the carbs and change some jets. And fix the fairing. And mount a tire.

 

The handling is amazing when these run on the 17s. Tire availability really helps

 

Nothing but admire its performance
1800 km in two days without a single hiccup.
Well except for coming up 10 km short in fuel range and having to get rescued. On the plus side I now know the exact distance I can go on a tank and that I can trust my fuel gauge

 

All the way up to Thunder Bay

 

And onward another 400 kms to Fort Frances

 

and another 200km south to my front door for a cold one.

 

Head on up and enjoy some Canadian hospitality.

 

Put another 175 miles on the bike today but it might be the last for the year, need to pull the carbs off and address a runaway idle issue that creeped up. Overall the bike was feeling somewhat lean so I think it's time to go thru them, two years without any major carb problems is nothing to complain about.

Time to get Zestfully clean

 

Ever since I put the 8 inch headlight on my 650 maxim I've suffered from poor lights - combination of low idle speed, long routed wiring dropping volts, and worst of all a continental left hand (right side of the road) drive headlight, so that on dip it flicks up on the wrong side. I sort of decided to go led headlight, but you can only go to 7 inch, which would need a curved stainless bezel to take up the annular space, a right faff.
So I had a look around the workshop, and found two units dipping on the other side, albeit they were poor - one was dirty the other looked like the reflector was rough. Well I decided to open up the dirty one, to see if I could swap the lense into my existing light. Well, after some heat was applied, it came apart lovely, it then cleaned up nice as well. So well I decided to use it. So it was fitted in place of the old one, and crikey, massive improvement. So this leaves me wondering if I need to bother with a relayed feed, but I think I will add a pair of LED lights to give some background light close in. Anyone else tried this?

 

I started the week off with a couple 100-mile rides. No particular destination, just out for some fun, giving the bike some exercise after canceling my plans to ride it to the Slimey Crud run and then around the Driftless, in order to exorcise the demons of last fall's misadventure by riding the Himalayan to Arkansas. In the process I pushed the odometer past 14,000 miles, which is not much for a 46-year-old bike, but keep in mind it slept in my friend's garage for over 20--maybe 30--of those years.

And I noticed it was time for a cam chain adjustment and valve check. Today was rainy and chilly, so a perfect day to do such a thing. My, this bike is easy to work on... gas tank comes off with one bolt and one easy-to-reach hose; yeah there are 22 bolts holding the cam cover on, but they are all pretty easy to reach; there's plenty of room to get feelers in to measure valve clearances; if it does need re-shimming they're conveniently on top of the buckets (and, unlike the one Kawasaki sold for my Z-1, the shim-removal tool actually works). It was a pleasant hour or so checking things.

The good news: seven of the valves were dead-on, unchanged from 8300 miles. The eighth (#3 exhaust) is just a tiny bit loose, most likely because of a decision I made when I re-shimmed at 8300 miles. The valve was very tight then, and according to the chart in the manual going down one shim size (#255 to #250) would leave it barely at minimum clearance, while going down two sizes (to #245) should leave it right at the upper limit. So I went with the thinner shim, thinking I'd never have to adjust this valve again, and now it appears to have settled in just slightly above the upper limit. I wish I had bought both sizes of shim last time, and tried them both. Sigh... this is what happens when the width of the in-spec range and the increment between shim sizes are both 0.05mm...

I also noticed something on five of the cam lobes:



Is this considered normal wear at 14K miles? Is the hardened surface coming off the cam? This is #1 exhaust, but the other four lobes look the same. And three of the lobes are shiny and like new.

Edit: a search turned up similar photos on somebody's XJ550 from earlier this year. Dragging a fingernail across the cams confirms that I am looking at pits, not ridges. I suspect it's corrosion pitting, the result of the bike sitting for twenty years without being turned over. I pulled one of the shims and saw no signs of scuffing or wear on it. This would be consistent with the lobes being pitted and the shims sliding on the hardened surface between the pits. I am kinda surprised I did not notice the pitting when I checked the valves at 8300 miles, but I do miss things (and in my defense, I had better lighting today, and I still didn't really notice the pitting until I wiped the oil off the cam lobes). I think that for the time being I am just going to run the bike, maybe inspect the cams again after a couple thousand more miles, and compare photos to see if the pitting has spread (indicating that the hard surface on the cams is failing).

 

Yea I agree with your approach
Check it again in a few miles next year and see if it gets worse. A replacement cam shaft is pretty easy to find, if it does get worse

 

Personally I'd replace it anyway and stick with high zinc oils or the STP oil treatment in the little blue jug, I mix that 1/3 to a crankcase each oil change. This is the type of damage caused by the modern oils be it synthetic or blends. Zinc was cut way down to appease the new emissions regs and prevent cat converter damage.

 

Finally finished up most of the overdue maintenance on the 750 Seca.

Oil change
Air filter
New fork seals
New fork bushings
New front tire
New front rotors
Fatter pilot jets
Install rebuilt calipers with new pads
Install rebuilt master cylinder
Spent 3+ hours bleeding the !#@! brakes
Crappy job of fixing the fairing
Fix broken clip on side cover

Brakes seem to work much better but still takes a lot of lever movement compared to the 900. They have plenty of stopping power, so I think it's just a side effect of the goofy hybrid cable/hydraulic setup as I am pretty sure I finally got them bled fully.

Still need to resync the carbs, and I should probably check valve clearance, but those will have to wait.

Pretty sure I spent more on parts than I originally did on the bike. Should be good for a while now though. Hopefully I'll get a chance for one last ride this week before the weather turns.

 

What was the deal with the fairing? How did you fix it? When I had one like your avatar I did not like the way the fairing attached to the mounting bracket between the headlight and the instruments, it seemed less robust that I liked. I fitted a flat piece of aluminum sheet in there and glued it to the fiberglass for the bolts to go through. No, I didn't take any pictures of what I did but the fairing was solid to the frame after that.

 

The mounting points where the lower section bolts to the engine bracket was broken. I tried the super glue and baking soda trick, but the glue I had was the thicker stuff and didn't mix well so it looks awful. Fortunately, you can't see it from the outside.

 

Oh yeah, rebuilt the anti-dives too.

 

@co.dirtbiker, ahhhh. I agree that the gel works with the baking soda but not well. The plastex (sp?) kits come with "low viscosity" super glue and work really well. I have had excellent results with the cheap, runny super glue from the dollar store and baking soda. I have also read that very finely ground charcoal is even stronger but haven't tried that yet. I did a bunch of plastic repairs on the XJ750 Seca and Turbo that I had for awhile. Again, not pretty but really solid.

 

I may have a line on replacement cams. Maybe.

I also keep thinking that if these are corrosion pits, they had to be there when I re-shimmed at 8300 miles. I don't have any notes about cam lobe pits, but I think my full attention was on the shims and the light wasn't so great. But assuming they were there at 8300 and they haven't changed since then, the pits are probably not an immediate issue.

I have been thinking about what to do with this bike. In another discussion with a bunch of Road King owners, about what we're going to do when we're too old and feeble to muscle around an 800-pound Harley (I will be 73 in a couple months, so this has become more than just something to talk about over beers), I said that if I had an empty garage and full bank account I might be looking for a modern "standard" bike like the Royal Enfield Shotgun, something I could equip with some luggage, belt drive and a small fairing, and pretty much use for anything from long solo tours to day trips with the wife. Then I noted I already might have such a bike in the garage, in the form of the XJ... which leads to another thought: this bike plopped into my garage for "free." I have put a fair amount of work and money into it and have it running reasonably well, but it retains the fundamental problems of a Maxim: it's a cruiser, which means low seat, small tank, ridiculous handlebars (the last of which I replaced early on). Plus, of course, the brakes--after fitting Galfer lines, EBC semi-metallic pads and an aftermarket drilled/floating rotor, the front brake rises to mediocrity by today's standards. So I have a bike that's got a good underlying platform but would require a lot of work to seat, tank, brakes, etc., to really fit the way I ride. Perhaps, having inherited this thing and been bitten by the XJ bug, it would make the most sense to put it back to "stock Maxim" with the preposterous handlebars, stash the fairing in the garage, sell it for less than I've put into it, and go shopping for the 650 or 750 Seca that would probably fit my use profile a whole lot better. There seem to be plenty of them on CL and FB Marketplace. The question is whether I could find one in decent enough condition to actually use as a daily rider, and at what cost...