I think you missed my point entirely: the manufacturer HAS to specify some quantifiable amount of torque for virtually everything that uses torque on the product. That does not make it correct, practical or necessary but again, no mfg. can say things like 'tighten sufficiently'. Further, they have to come up with some spec. for their own internal (easy boys!) assembly procedures. Any other method would be chaos.
I am not opposed to torquing an oil filter with a torque wrench, nor do I say it is a bad idea. I simply pointed out that the exact torque specified was at best a 'best windage guess' and a number slurped out of thin air at worst.
The only thing I would be opposed to would be excessive worry about something like this. After all, we all have KiPass to keep our terror levels high enough so we do not need to worry about oil filter torque IMO.
I have spent all of my adult life in manufacturing and have had the pleasure of designing many things, both consumer and industrial. I have also had the pleasure of working with and supervising many different people, some truly talented, a very few gifted and virtually everyone who did what needed doing that day, be the level of engineering available sufficient to the task or not. So my belief is that it is more likely that Gunther Wang, the new guy fresh out of school and now working under Jinko Bingdang, who is not paying any attention to Gunther as long as Gunther has not set the building on fire (and maybe not even then), got the job of spec'ing parts of and designing parts of the new fangled C-14 they had to introduce next year. Gunther played a game of pong, looked out the window for a while, smiled foolishly while looking around not quite believing they were actually paying him to do this, and then carefully wrote the specification for tightening the oil filter by copying what Judhow Pingtang had written down for the ZZR 1200 five years before, rather than actually checking on the durometer of the seal, calculating the crush area, noting the pitch of the threads, applying a thread friction factor, and then calculating a 'correct' torque to apply to said filter to generate the 'correct' seal pressure. A similar thing went on in Germany although the Germans took it much more seriously, worried about it, and then used the same number as Mercedes does for their oil filters.
If you doubt any of this, and some of it might be made up, find the tolerance for the torque on the oil filter <chuckle>. What is the torque range? Have you calibrated your torque wrench, and even if you did how would you know it met Kawasaki's stringent but undefined specifications for tolerance? <chuckle twice> So by all means, torque your oil filters to the factory specified number. I am not claiming it is wrong, only 'over the top' regarding effort for absolutely no return. Unless you are a gorilla or Mary Jane Tinklepants, winding that bad boy on there as tight as you can without crushing the filter can will be close enough, save wear and tear on your torque wrench and allow you time to drink one more beer for the day. Now that is a win- win situation IMO.
And if you save enough time, read up on why Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic: I can give you the short version- the three pilots flying the aircraft 1) did not realize what was happening (!) and 2) apparently could not fly the plane. All those years of collective training, skillfully executed by intelligent, cognizant people and they could not keep a perfectly good plane in the sky due to ineptitude. I remain unimpressed and wary of anything Kawasaki (or anyone else) puts in a service manual and absolutely do not defer to 'them' as being more able to correctly install an oil filter than I am.
Brian (carefully checking each lettter in this post for accccuracy because I have beeeen trained in Englisio and it is unlikiliy I wood make any misteaks)
I guess I am the Lone Ranger here but since you love your bike ( Happy Anniversary) and most of us do too, these same engineers and designers must be doing something right. "Whatever works for you" is the best conclusion to reach with this thread I believe. But it seems unusual that designers from at least 3 different countries, Japan, Italy, and Germany all have recommendations about torquing the OF. What we all share here in this forum is basically "anecdotal evidence" for recommendations many times based on our own experience which of course can be quite practical and entertaining at the same time.
Tim I use an inch/lb. torque wrench and convert 14ft/lbs. to 168 inch/lbs.
