You Can't Save Them All

I'd been having all sorts of problems with this bike, from the crappy wiring system to the smashed gauges and the wrong parts found on it, but the straw that made me throw in the towel was the fucking bent valve(s)...I put that in apostrophes because I KNOW  the Intake valve on cylinder #1 was bad (and #2 was looking kind of shady as well), but when I got this thing all put back together and tried to turn it over, the engine would bind up when I tried to set the timing on it - I could rotate it through almost 360 degrees, but when it approached the #1 position after coming around, it would feel like it 'stopped' - - and I could turn it through that position, but not without a great deal of effort. The culprit was here - - 

See that valve with the circle around it? That's the (new) #1 intake valve I put in - well, inside that little crater there it sits in, there's a guide that the shaft of the valve rests in to keep it straight. The old valve did not want to come out without a good 'pull', which it shouldn't do; the valves should just slide right out. The rest of them were fine, but that one and Number 2 (right there to the right of the circled valve) were problematic in that #1 did not want to come out, and #2 had some slight resistance, but I got it out too - 

Anyway, Long Story Short the #1 valve was definitely bent, and the only fix for that is to pull the valve AND the guide(s) and replace them. Not necessarily a hard job to do, but you need a special too which I don't have (yet), and I also had to get back to the 1974 CB550K that I have on the slab in the lab (on my lift table). So, I put a work order tag on it with what needs to be done, and relegated it to the project shed where I'm sure it will lie until I get the inclination to work on it again. A man's got to know his limitations...

In the meantime, though, I went back to work on this beauty - my 1974 Honda CB550K...

Ain't She Sweet!

Yes, she's very pretty - but like all pretty things, they too have their foibles. This pic was taken right after I had rebuilt her - here's the 'Before'...

"I like my bikes like I like my women - over 30 with lots of problems!"

("Cough-cough...!) That's a joke, btw...I have enough problems already; and I'm married...but if it has two wheels and a motor, I'm a sucker for it!  

"Why, John," I can hear you saying..."what problems could that beautiful bike have??"

Lemme preach onit!  I got it rebuilt, tried to start it and the engine made some very ugly noises; I had misplaced the cam chain tensioner, which is located near the rear of the cylinder head and runs vertically through the head and down into the lower case, meaning I had to tear down the engine again and get it into its little groove in the lower engine case...

See that funny-looking little tab there...? This shot is looking up through the bottom of the engine... Yah - it needed to go into the little slot behind it - like this - you can see the whitish wear marks where it was jumping against the case...no harm done, though. Made a very ugly noise.

In truth, it's a very easy thing to overlook if you don't know what you're doing - but I got the engine back together and discovered another Scary Noise - the starter clutch had a bad spring in it! So I had to tear the engine down AGAIN to fix that! The starter clutch is located directly above the yellow circle in the previous photo - believe it or not, I was able to get the clutch out through the bottom of the engine, rather than taking it all apart again - that operation wasn't too bad, but did take some time - about three hours, I think it was, from start to finish.

But WAIT, There's MORE!!

So I got all that crap done, and then - THEN!!  - I found out the kick starter was bad! GAAAAH!

In this pic the kickstarter is 'at rest', meaning those teeth on those gears there should be separated - but they're not. SO I had to tear down the engine AGAIN! And people wonder why I drink...

Again, Long Story Short I got it fixed (took me forever to find out the kick starter stay had been bent), put the engine back together and then got distracted with that 1972 JDM CB500 I relegated to the Project Shed.

So you might be asking yourself why I just didn't fix all these problems the first time...good question.

Because when you rebuild an engine and fire it up the first time, if you did something wrong, or it makes noises that you know it shouldn't be making, you have to go back in and fix the noise; then, thinking you fixed the noise it was making,  you rebuild the engine and it makes another noise! And sometimes (as in my case), all of these noises occur at the same time and hide behind each other, which makes you want to drag the bike out into the driveway and pour gasoline all over it and burn it down to the axles...which I thought about doing. 

But luckily, patience prevailed and after I relegated the CB500 to the project shed, I dialed in the electronic ignition on this CB550 and it started right up! I wish I had a video of it; I need to start adding more dynamic stuff to this blog...