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I have attached the shim map, the bike now has 37,300 miles on it.
What do You guys think? Is it possible that after 37,300 miles there is no adjustment needed???
Later,
c14-Pilot
I dont know if I buy into the idea of noisy valves needing adjustment. On the dirt bikes, which are very similar, the valves tighten up and get quiet. Noise is a better thing to have than no noise.
Other than the interval being WAY sooner for the dirt bikes, I woudl expect the c14 to be the same.
+1 A noisy valve is a happy valve- a tight valve can burn due to incomplete closing .
OK, I am going to chime in. First of all, all U.S. C-14's (yes, even California models) are specified by Kawasaki to perform the valve clearance inspection at 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers). Every where else in the world, that valve inspect interval is at 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers). That your dealers didn't recognize this would be a warning alarm for me.
Secondly, I am worthless and weak and easily swayed by nice riding weather, and I rationalized putting off my check because of others reported findings and the above interval discrepancy, until 23,500 miles. I am in the middle of it right now. Every single one of valves was on the tight side of the specification, or .001" out of spec to the tight side. Every one will be adjusted toward nominal. Most others here have found very little to worry about during their checks, but most have also noted the valves tend to the tight side.
If yours are all near mid-spec nominal, as shown in your map, that is very cool and not unprecedented. In my case, waiting until 37,000 miles wouldn't have resulted in any real valve noise, but it very well could of led to burned valves.
I propose two things...- the first is that the movement occurred very early in the bike's use and then stabilized...Again, I do not believe it is a linear thing.
Nothing wrong with checking the valves at the specified time, I am merely saying that we really do now know what has happened when we examine an engine with XX,XXX miles on it and find the clearances are out of tolerance. And I don't think it is anything to get overly worried about at any rate.
This is a perfect example of what I was mentioning earlier: it is natural to assume that since you were 0.001" below tolerance at 23.5K miles that the clearance tightened linearly (or evenly) during those miles. I propose two things about that- the first is that the movement occurred very early in the bike's use and then stabilized. Because no one ever checks the clearance at 1,000 mile intervals from new, we simply do not know when or [when how much] of the clearance changed. If the clearance was set to the low side initially (during the engine assembly) and then as the valve train seated the clearance tightened in the first 500 miles, it is entirely likely that the clearance had not tightened in thousands of miles. The second thing is that merely being 0.001" under tolerance is no where near -0- clearance and the possibility of burning a valve because it could not close. Again, I do not believe it is a linear thing.
The object of this lesson was a1984 Ninja 900 engine, the first ancestor of our C14 engines. However it did have thread valve tappet adjusters.
I strongly agree...but how tight do the cold clearances have to be before a burned valve can become a reality? How much of a safety margin is built into the low tolerance spec?
There is a long running thread at the fjrforum.com about what FJR owners are finding when they check their valve clearances and one rider just reported that he did his first valve check at 89K and everything was fine except for one exhaust valve that only had a .002 clearance (spec is .007-.010). When he checked the valves again at 156K, he had one intake valve at .005 and several others that barely were within the spec of .006-.009. It appears that the .002 exhaust clearance he found at 89k did not result in any damage to the engine since that was the same bike that turned 150K miles when he rode (and won) the 2011 Iron Butt last June.
On the flip side, last fall another FJR rider did actually burn valves at 50K, the first water cooled engine that I had heard of, but he had never done a valve check. His FJR was probably the 1 in a thousand that really needed a valve adjustment at 26K.