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