Tappet Mapet—♪ Rain, rain, pour down ♪
With this much rain, nobody comes by, so work really moves along! Awesome!
Yesterday I threw out some seriously gross stuff—best day ever! This afternoon I’m heading out in my raincoat to pick up some odds and ends!
That’s what work this morning is for!
It’s a GSF1200! It’s a bike that’s been thrashed pretty hard on the track! Before we installed the engine, I had already done the tappet
work on it. It’s probably run about seven hours or so? The engine’s starting to break in and settle, but
lately it’s been making a lot of noise. It’s bugging me, so let’s do a tappet adjustment and cam chain adjustment!
Okay, let’s take the cover off! Hmm, nothing obviously wrong, but the tappet clearances are all over the place—
Oh boy, oh boy… They really do drift that much, huh?
On the track, you definitely need to check at this interval. Then we visually inspect the valve, retainer, and stem area
to make sure there’s no metal debris, no cracks, and so on. Once we’ve confirmed everything looks good, we adjust the tappets and
check the cam chain for play, and we’re done! The cam chain turned out to be in pretty good shape…
But automatic adjusters can be risky, you know?
Putt! Putt!
