8000 miles, did your valves REALLY need adjusting?

[Ulvetanna_imp]

No, valves are checked at each "major" service. That is every 8000 miles or approximately 13000kms.

To cut to the chase; the OP asked whether valves REALLY need adjusting. There are two ways of finding out:

1. Check the valves as per the Honda recommendation

2. Don't check them and see what happens

Cheers

The owner's manual has all that info and good stuff. So I don't need to look at my valves again until the bike comes up on 16,000 miles which will probably be a couple of years as it's not my main ride. That's not so bad. But I think for a guy doing serious touring or racking up the commute miles it might be a little intrusive. I know there was a time in my life where I would have needed to do three or four per year if it was my only bike. But once again, since I could do it myself, it's an afternoon well spent.

I am still doing just as many services myself; in the past year I had to do two other semi-major services to two other bikes and even though they didn't need a valve clearance check, the liquid cooling and bodywork removal demanded more time than the CB1100.

I know with my first real streetbike, I tried to do the valves myself and could not figure out how to get the valve cover out from between the frame rails. This was in the eighties. I gave up and took it to a dealer, and the guy took the thing out instantly like he had been doing it every day in the week. I never forgot that. But next time it needed valves adjusted (screw and locknut back then) I persisted until I duplicated his feat and after that it wasn't so bad.

If you think about it if you ride 16,000 miles a year (that is about my average) you are going to spend $1,000 per year to maintain this bike taking it to the dealer for major services. That is ridiculous. That was my motivation to learn all this stuff back in the day.

If you tack on two sets of tires per year as well, there is another $800 if the dealer does the R&R plus mounting and balancing. Roughly in all, over $2000/year counting oil changes. Now factor in $1400/per year for gasoline at around 36 mpg and current prices.

It ain't cheap to own a bike if you pay the dealer for all the required maintenance. For the same mileage with the average sedan, it's about 200 bucks a year. It's easy to see that by doing one's own maintenance, one could afford a more expensive bike or afford to keep the one he has.

So, after the "first" valve adjustment is done, I understand the interval for the "second" needed adjustment is much, much longer. True?

Just a thought, that used to be very true. The first valve adjustment for that bike I mentioned back in the 1980s was at 600 miles. Then the next one was something like four or five thousand miles. Every bike was like that back then, they had screw/locknut adjusters and they needed to be checked and set at the first oil/filter change.

Now we've gone almost exclusively to shims, especially shim under bucket, the intervals are much much longer. Also materials are much better now, metals are harder, surfaces are hardened and coated, and so on. But the drawback is that the cams need to be removed to change the shims, even for a single shim.

I sort of miss the days of screw and locknut but those don't like high RPMs.