8000 miles, did your valves REALLY need adjusting?

[Ulvetanna_imp]

One of the things that I've enjoyed about owning my KLR650 is the "tech days" we have where between 10 and up to 35 of us get together on a Saturday morning and do minor to major fixes on the bikes with several "tech gurus" watching you do your own work and guiding you through steps if you're in doubt. Oil, tire, fork oil changes, modifications, air filter, spark plugs, running rough, carb isses...and valve checks and adjustments with shims. Now I don't think I would have attempted valve checks / adjustments on my own, but with this group of KLR owners, it wasn't that bad, maybe 2-3 hours total time. What about the CB1100 makes the check / adjustment "daunting"? More valves? Or are there a number of difficult steps? Maybe someone will put together a nice "how to" video?

I owned four KLRs starting with the KLR600, two 650s and also a bitchen little 250 that I could not break.

That bike is an awesome platform for learning about the basic systems of a motorcycle. Still carbureted.

Well, the CB1100 is a whole lot more work and time to get at the valves to begin with, and obviously, a $12K motorcycle is not something most guys want to learn on. It's a real puzzle to get it all apart and some previous experience with at least some kind of motorcycle is helpful.

Daunting? I could see how someone would say that, even those who could do it themselves. Who wants to disrupt his riding or personal schedule to tear apart a motorcycle and find out nothing was wrong with it, lol? But the truth is, unless you want to just skip the valve clearance check, it takes a lot more time to drop the bike at a dealer since it has to cool overnight before the work can be done. So you are looking at three days all told and about 5 hours labor. And it is a LOT of work, it requires a good deal of due diligence. There is only one mechanic I would trust my bikes to, if I couldn't do the work myself. There are more than a few shops that will just listen to it, and tell you it's fine, and charge you anyway.

I have seen what happens to valves when they get too tight from lack of attention; two bikes I owned needed the top end rebuilt because the previous owners did not maintain them. Many of the valves had to be replaced along with a complete valve job (refacing the seats, and so on).

I like motorcycles and wanted to learn everything I could, so I learned to do all this stuff. Only thing I really have not done is to rebuild the bottom end, transmission and whatnot. Not really something that falls under "routine" so in the one or two cases (pun intended) where I needed tranny work, I paid someone else. In one case I pulled the engine out of the frame and took the cylinders off and dropped just the cases off at the dealer which saved a lot of money. I didn't have the money anyway at the time so that was my only option, do it myself.

The CB1100 is a bike that very much lends itself to the role of "education" and while I have said I don't think it's a very appropriate first bike, it's a fantastic bike on which to learn about motorcycle systems. Everything is easy to see, pretty easy to get to, and not too hard to maintain or repair if you take your time.

I thrive on self-reliance and being self-taught, having been on my own since the age of 16 with no one to lean on but me. It has worked out fairly well. Necessity is the mother of invention, but perhaps these days invention is now a test-tube baby lol