The OBSERVED Valve Clearance thread

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Hi Tod, i supported the chain with a piece of wire to prevent it from disappearing into the cavity, if this happens you can still fish it out with a magnet or so but better to prevent it.

The chain just hangs there with slack but positions itself once you pull it back into place, i have not had it come off the bottom sprocket but i guess that could happen, don't know.

Here is the chain support white wire, it is hanging from the ignition coil mounting support which is in the center of the engine, the sprockets are lined up but the ex shaft is not yet connected to the sprocket, i rotate the sprockets counter clockwise to position the sprocket to line up with the two bolt holes in the ex shaft and put the bolts back in, the intake sprocket stays on the shaft, no need to take it off since there is plenty of slack once the front shaft is removed;



I have a tool that winds the tensioner back into itself and it is very small, you take out the screw and aluminium washer, use the tool to decompress the tensioner by winding it in, locate the slots and push the tool into two of the four slots which now prevents the tensioner from extending itself and now it does not fight you when unbolting the tensioner and it is straightforward to undo the two bolts and take the tensioner out.

In this video ( at 5 minutes in ) you can see what these four slots look like, their function is to hold the tool by itself and keep the tensioner spring wound up whilst mounting/unmounting the tensioner;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSr6zD4iT2s



As you can see on the picture there is not an abundance of room to have a larger tool do the same job, this little piece of copper works just fine.



Take the top bolt out first and then remove the bottom one so there is no chance one of them could end up inside the hole for the tensioner



When you are rotating the shafts the tensioner needs to be applying tension to prevent the chain from skipping teeth which is easy to do.

When i put the shafts back in for the first time i forgot to put the chain over the ex shaft and found out when i bolted the bearing caps back on, so i had to undo them, pull the shaft out and route the chain as it should have been

When installing the camshafts the relationship between the marks has to be correct so that they line up when the chain is tensioned, when the shafts are put back in at the correct angle they land slightly out of alignment but this is fine as long as the relationship between the marks on the sprockets is correct you can always rotate them to line up with the marks and rotate the ex sprocket with the shaft counter clockwise to locate the two bolt holes and put the bolts back in with blue loctite.

And for Dave; i made a mistake the first time and reported what i had done, the best way to remove/install parts is on the right hand side of the bike, you live and learn and you are correct

Here is the work space.



Any more questions; feel free