Friend has one of the early 750’s, it’s been stood for years. He said to me a few months back “I need someone to pull the carbs, clean them out, reinstall them & get it running”

Ha! good luck with that! I worked on one of them once… NEVER again..

Got to say that I never owned a Honda & never wanted to either, saw a lot of cam chain & tensioner trouble back in the 80’s.

They still have problems with that.. they STILL use the same design CCT in newer engines…

Too true Andy, the original Honda VF750 for instance, made Bike Of The Year when if first came out (’83/84? something like that), that was before the engines started falling to bits, it got so bad that Honda even honoured warranty work to the secondhand market out of the warranty period as the problems were well known & extreme.

I know all this because because a mate bought one, once he got it back (after a long time at the dealers) he couldn’t wait to unload it quick enough, I rode it a dealers in Brighton for him to PX it for a GPZ900R (far more like it) by the time I got it there, it was showing signs of problems & couldn’t ditch it fast enough!

The problem with those engines is that H*nda didn’t line-bore the cam housing in the heads so they ended up with oval holes which allowed the cams to float about a bit. They came out with a tool to prevent the cam float while you adjusted the valves.
To this day you can make VF owners twitch by mentioning “chocolate camshafts” 🙂

I put one that belonged to a friend in a ditch…. & amazed the same guy when I had to give him a ride someplace by pulling away on my Z900 at about 1200rpm (facing up hill), he was used to having to revs the knackers off the VF to get it to move.

Getting back on topic with ZRX61’s youtube clip. Cannot see the problem, by his own admission [he was there we were not] he had to catch up with the lead rider. There was a few bikes behind some of which would have stopped to help.It looked to me like a split second desiscion .It’s all too easy to pontificate on what we would do in any given situation,we were not there don’t know the road or the ‘muppet’ in question.

BTW ZRX61
nice video of a scenic ride

The 4 guys behind me stopped, but by the time I was 20ft past the guy who fell over he was already on his feet & had the bike up. In the time it would have taken me to pull over & park my bike, he already had his bike off to the side of the road.

Careful assembly, good quality gaskets & Wellseal sorted the ones that I fixed up. 😉

3Bond 🙂 Altho if someone else has to go into the engine at a later date you may get some grief about how long it took them to remove the gaskets….

brit bikes pissed oil like drunks

Getting Brit bikes to stop pissing oil is a piece of cake, I’ve even managed to make P&W R2800’s oil tight so doing the same for a bike is a doddle..:cool:

Chad Veich – there is a possibility that the rocks were covered in sand when the aircraft landed and the sand has since been blown away.

To quote my grandfather who spent some time out there subduing the natives* pre-WWII. “You’d pitch your tent between 2 sand dunes & by the time you got up in the morning, the sand had moved so much you’d be on top of a sand dune”

* not the word he used…