It's the 7th of February and winter just Will. Not. Let. Go!! I got all excited last week because they were calling for 'warmer temperatures next week...". What they failed to tell me was that this weekend the temperatures were going to drop to hell again, with wind chills hanging around ZERO, with wind chills on the mountain, believe it or not, of -10 to -40 degrees! WTF?? I mean, Really...!? Whatever happened to 'global warming'??

Anyway - I wanted to get this blog entry in here for anyone who might be having a problem with an annoying 'buzz' coming from their CB550K engine; I found out what mine was, your problem may be different - but as many times as I've taken this bike's engine apart (FOUR now!), I'm 'pretty certain' that I found all it's problems.  

This is going to be a long entry, so grab a drink or a smoke or 'whatever' and sing along with Johnny...but I do have a selection of videos that will accompany each problem; I'll try to summarize them so we can get to the fix.

This past summer, I rebuilt my 1974 Honda CB550K...

Yes, she's very pretty. But when I went to start her for the first time, I got this:

Yeahhh, That's not supposed to sound like that....so I tore the engine down, discovered that the starter clutch had a bad spring in it, fixed it (without taking the engine apart, I might add - which you CAN do!), rebuilt the engine, and got this...

So I adjusted the cam chain - and got this

Hear that buzz going on...? It seemed to be coming from the area of the kick starter...and since there's only one way to get to the kick starter (well, actually you can do this job without taking the engine apart, but I didn't know that until after I had completed this), I took the engine apart AGAIN!  

The problem was this - see how those gears in the yellow oval are meshed...? Yeahhh, they shouldn't be doing that. They should be separated. See the big barrel-looking gear on the right? That's the sliding gear, and the other one is the driven gear...

When the kick starter is not being used, or 'at rest,' those gears should be separated, because all the sliding gear does is slide down to the driven gear, lock in (like that) and rotate the driven gear, which in turn turns the transmission and the bike starts. Let the kick starter back UP, and that sliding gear should slide to the right, away from the driven gear. Mine wasn't doing that...but it took me forever to find out why! 

It drove me crazy! For, like, two weeks I couldn't find out why my sliding gear wasn't retracting. Even the guys on a website dedicated to these bikes couldn't tell me why, so I dug deep into researching the topic online and discovered the problem was with this piece of the kick starter: 

You see that long part on the left, there...? The one that's sticking straight up? (It's upside down in this picture) That's a little ramp that a little nub on the sliding gear needs to slide up after the kick starter comes back to it's 'rest' position and pushes the sliding gear away from the driven gear...mine wasn't doing that, allowing the driven gear to ratchet against the sliding gear teeth, creating that buzz. This video tells it better.

Here's the part and what I did to it - see how that part with the circles is leaning up and an angle a bit? I first took a BFH (Big Fuckin' Hammer, or in this case a 5lb sledge) and tapped the yellow part down so it was level, then tapped the red part IN so it was more perpendicular to the yellow part...and it worked!! Drinks all around!! 

Here, this might be a better view of how I did it...those are the normal bends/angles of the piece, I'm just enhancing them here. (Light taps, btw...)