bike ruud
Was contracted to fix a problem with my one of my favorite vintage Hondas, and one that I have considerable experience with, a CBX1000. The poor engine had zero cylinder compression immediately after just being "rebuilt" and afterward stored, and then being test ridden for just a few miles. Telltale under the valve cover, two paired valve buckets at different heights. Not good. Head off, yup. Bent valves. All the exhaust valves, in fact.
All the exhaust valves. "Kiss" marks on the pistons. And very rusty valves.
More of the same. More. Heavy corrosion in the exhaust ports.
The cylinders were very rusty also, and of course this affected the pistons and rings. Close up of the rings. But rust was just the beginning. Note the nicks on this valve. Signs of poor disassembly/reassembly techniques.
And this engine was just rebuilt? Why then are the valves badly receded? And, although using pattern valves is alright, mixing them with the stock ones, not so good. All those bent valves did a number on some of the valve buckets. Note the signs of overheating.
More. But it gets worse. This cam chain was installed by the rebuilder. So what? Well, it is a part from a dirt bike. The link pins are just 2.5mm as compared with the factory chain's 3.0mm.
Here is the right cam chain. Another shot. So the cylinder head became the main focus.
Amazingly, the valve guides are all good. No cracks. A wonder. I was able to get the rust out of the guides using this special tool. Found more issues still. Many more. Here is a clutch basket (or outer) that is heavily banged up. Again, remember this is a "rebuilt" engine.
Sigh. And "porting". Fortunately, the individual who did this didn't go overboard. But it is still something you never want to do to a CBX1000. More problems. This is the Oldham coupler. This part joins the two halves of each cam to each other. This special aftermarket part is supposed to be hand-fitted. It has to be sanded and fit, sanded and fit. You can't simply hammer the parts together. Not good for the cams, and makes the engine extrememly difficult to assemble and subsequently disassemble. Took me hours to get the cams out, in fact. Here the engine builder demonstrably lacked knowledge of this engine. More on this later.
Cylinder head shows signs of fin repair. No biggie. Just an observation. More. Unnecessary but fairly popular high tensile cam holder bolts.
Removing the pistons using a specially-made tool. These are Wiseco 1147cc pistons. The piston-to-cylinder clearance was found to be excessive. Almost three times what it should be. And more trouble. This is one of the six "oil pool plates" found in the camshaft area of the engine. Look like they were hammered, literally, into place. I'm sorry, but now this builder has fallen further from grace. It's one thing to not be familiar with a particular model. But this is something no mechanic would do.
Another plate. Deck on the pistons and cylinders incorrect. This will be corrected. Oh boy. See the sanding marks on the head gasket surface? I know where they came from, a roloc disc, a tool made for removing paint. Hideous. And contrary to everything having to do with basic mechanics.
More. More. More.
Cylinder head gasket has absolutely no sealer on it. No Honda mechanic would ever do this. Note the oily surface also. And the bad news continues. Pry marks. Lot of them. More.
More. More. More. These will all be corrected.
Strange. More. Hmm. I always drop the oil pan when I have opportunity. Here you can see why. Very thick, dirty oil.
Sludgy. Debris, too. More debris.
Lumps of crankcase sealer. On my finger. Happily, the oil pump screen was free of junk.
Speaking of oiling, a common mistake on the CBX1000 is improper routing of the oil cooler hose. The hose here is sticking out from the engine mainly because of the battery ground cable being misinstalled. The hose sticking out like this makes the countershaft cover not fit correctly and the cover will consequently squash the hose, which is what happened in this case. Close up. Now more on the clutch. The clutch lever was loose/floppy. On removal, behold, no pivot bushing! Again, two things. First, how could someone install this and leave it like this? And two, it again shows a lack of experience with Hondas of this vintage, that indeed have lever bushing issues. But to leave the bushing out?!
Made a bushing to fit, because a replacement lever, like everything on the CBX1000. is quite dear cost-wise. Nice fit. Note also the filing on the lever.
I had to file the lever and do some filing on the lever perch, to make the two fit together properly. The perch seems to be distorted from a tipover. All well now. The clutch basket again. Bad shape.
Now onto the front brakes. On the first test ride after the top end rebuild I noticed the brakes were bound up. Lifted the front end and the wheel would barely turn. Reason: the master cylinder was malfunctioning. Sticking on. It turned out to have the incorrect rebuild kit inside it, so eventually it was made right. But even then the brakes were not quite right. Found the calipers to have some pitting and peeling nickel plating. They were replaced.
Note the oil soaked pads. That's fork oil. Close up. More on the fork seals later. This collet type caliper slides back and forth on these pins. The pins were not assembled correctly, making the caliper bind even more.
Oh boy. Almost no two brake sealing washers were the same, and most were the cheapest, thinnest I have ever seen. Bad stuff. New factory Honda washers. Wet forks, from bad seals.
Even the safety reflectors were filled with oil! Check out the seals. Very oily. Also, one of the two forks was asssembled incorrectly. The thin protective washer shown here was under the seal on one fork instead of under the snap ring.
Rust. Protecting the delicate fork tube with tape before using snap ring pliers to remove the snap ring. Same procedure for reassembly. This is best practice. The bolts were rounded off to boot. Fun!
Then I found the damper rod bolts stuck, probably due to thread locker. Another bad practice. Had to be drilled out. There we go. Two hours of work to just get the forks apart.
Bad sealing washers. Finally got the sliders off. Gladly, the tubes were not scratched or dinged previously. Good!
More. Close up. The previous mechanic (who I heard is a car mechanic) must of really liked nyloc nuts. Puzzling why the high quality factory hardware should be discarded in favor of these, smaller and less permanent items.
Worse, the axle clamps had aluminum washers on them. Now we go onto general chassis stuff. The countershaft cover was missing its rubber seal. This made the cover unusable as it wouldn't tighten up onto the engine. More problem is the seal is not available separately, never was. I got a small engine valve cover gasket and custom trimmed and fitted it. Glued it onto the cover. That's a bunch of weight for the gluing process.
The rehabilitated cover. :-) The shift lever was extrememely loose. Part of the problem was this nut was loose. Not even finger tight. But even after the nut was tightened, the lever was still pretty loose due to very worn heim joints. Distorted oil cooler hose guides.
Rounded over drive chain adjuster hardware. This is the drive chain guard. Not sure how it got like this. Pretty crazy. Took some time in an oven and then hand shaping while still hot to fix.
Crappy Motion Pro throttle cable shown here. All the cables appear to be Motion Pro. The handlebar switch cables were misrouted and thus hitting the fuel tank. I properly routed them. The choke cable clamp was loose.
The handlebar wiring also fouled the choke mechanism. Fixed. The bolts that go into these two holes were missing. They help support the airbox. I replaced them.
Chisel marks on wheel bearing retainers. Not a good thing to see. Automotive spark plug wires. You know, graphite instead of wire. These were replaced. Not only graphite, but crimped as well. Lousy stuff.
The copper core replacement plug wires were soldered together. Now they are lifetime ignition cables. More. I replaced the steel battery cable screws with the proper, safer lead-coated brass ones. These better screws are getting hard to find now.
Ugh! Silicone sealer! The bane of concientious engine builders. Worse, the Dyna ignition plate was improperly installed, resulting in a hyper advance in the ignition timing of over 12 degrees! Corrected the plate to install it properly. Common problem on the CBX1000 and another sign the engine builder did not know this bike well.
Strobe timed the ignition, something that is done rather creatively on the CBX1000. Exchanged the silicone sealer for a proper grommet. Battery cable bolts holding the horn onto the chassis.
Now onto the engine. Overbored cylinder had to be discarded and a new cylinder acquired. Then it was carefully bored to accept the Wiseco big-bore pistons. Difference in stock vs. 3mm over big-bore. Takes a lot of machining, as you can imagine.
A big bore leaves very little chamfer and this chamfer is important to engine assembly. A special tool was used to re-chamfer each cylinder, then a piece of emery paper followed that to smooth later cylinder assembly even more. And the cylinder is milled to correct the negative deck of the Wiseco pistons. Cylinder is all ready. Pistons on, ready for cylinder.
Another angle. Next the cylinder is installed. Note the nice gasket surfaces. Now on to the cylinder head.
Happened to be doing a few heads at the time. Closeup of careful diamond stone seat work. More.
Good, Kibblewhite Viton seals. Custom-made Manley stainless steel valves. Mandatory really, on early Hondas if you want long valve life. Valves treated with moly grease. If this had been done by the previous builder the bent valves might have been avoided.
Factory Honda moly. All of the gasket surfaces treated, corrected. More.
More. The cylinder head is done. Even valve pre-shimming. Closeup.
On to the cams. First the Oldham couplers are hand-fitted. Shown sanding. The two couplers are marked differently as they are fitted to their respective cams. Note the red and the blue couplers, plus the orientation to particular sides of each cam.
Valve cover is prepped, the gasket properly glued on. Closeup. The drain plug gets a new sealing washer. The plug came to me with some kind of non-factory washer. I didn't like the looks of it. Besides, this washer needs to be replaced regularly.
The oil pan cleaned up and ready to be installed. Engine almost completely assembled. Closer.
More. Finished bike. More than 80 miles of shakedown time and ready to go home again!