I've been riding for 30 years, bikes varying from 50cc dual sports up to 140hp literbikes. Currently have a Versys 650 (running) a gl1000 (not running) and a Dnepr MT16 (in pieces.) A while back son bought himself a cm400t which was the victim of a café racer conversion. Fortunately we caught it before the inevitable sawzall action. PO put clubman bars on, pulled the airbox, installed pod filters, the usual for café. Here's some of the good bits though. He never changed the oil, he realized that the pod filters flowed more air than the bike could possibly use which caused it to run lean, and a teeny bit of knowledge fell from his brain to his hands and he fixed the problem. Rejet? No. Take off the pods? No. He put electrical tape over most of the filter surface to cut down the amount of air. Wow. Just wow. Now that he had taken a nominally good running motorcycle and screwed it up, he sold it to my son. We immediately put the airbox back in and all stock parts we could find and Lo! it ran much better that way. Pulled the valve cover off and found the expected chewed up cam, followers, gloopy oil. Pulled the head, installed new rings and a cylinder (cheaper to buy a new stock cylinder than to find/install/machine overbore pistons) Sourced a replacement cam and followers from ebay, lapped the valves in (local shop wanted a hundred bucks to do a valve job; after lapping them in they held water for 10 minutes before there was a teeny amount of moisture visible around the edge of the valve. Good enough for now. Put it all back together and fired it up, worked just fine. Pulled the top end again since the bolts weren't holding torque, helicoiled all the holes and reassembled. Yes the timeserts are probably better than helicoils; in my mind they weren't over twice as good, which is what they cost. Put the top end back together with new head and base gasket. Ran it up and down the driveway enough times to get the engine nice and hot, drained and refilled with fresh oil. Lathed a flat spot on the end of the oil drain bolt and epoxied on a magnet. Man, this bike is hard on oil. Came out like water. Anyway, pulled carbs again since the idle mixture screw wasn't doing anything on one carb, adjusted the non-adjustable floats and ordered a new accelerator pump since the old one was shedding rubber into the bowl. And we begin the waiting game again.
Forgot to mention the stock overlong clutch cable, the stock overlong throttle cable (only one, no return cable) and the car front brake line that was inflicted on this poor bike.
Or the fact that one of the main nozzles (emulsion tube for primary main jet) was buggered up with a cross-shaped opening making it look like at some point in the bike's past someone thought it was pressed in and tried to push it out with a Phillips tip screwdriver.
Forgot to mention the stock overlong clutch cable, the stock overlong throttle cable (only one, no return cable) and the car front brake line that was inflicted on this poor bike.
Or the fact that one of the main nozzles (emulsion tube for primary main jet) was buggered up with a cross-shaped opening making it look like at some point in the bike's past someone thought it was pressed in and tried to push it out with a Phillips tip screwdriver.
