You have the timeline correct, it does not vary as i am riding.
When it was easy to pull it was only run like that for less than a mile so im not sure if it would have went back hard on its own or if its an error on my part.

trini tuner wrote on 11/02/12 at 18:46:14:


Good luck....keep us posted!

The parts came in today! The bike's up and running alright, my brother was able to get out the pushrod that was stuck in the wrong place with a flathead and speaker magnet?, so no chop sticks for me  
Turns out i was using the correct size pushrod like i thought, its the middle sized one by the way.
I installed everything together and adjusted the clutch lever again this time i installed the spring with the rocker arm differently so that when you have the clutch cover in your hand and you move the arm there's some resistance.
So i basically didnt do anything different except for how i installed the spring therefore im not totally convinced the problem is solved
The clutch does not slip anymore i switched to Rotella from what i read here and i guess it was the same stuff the previous guy was using however even after i fiddled with the clutch lever adjustment, some times it is hard to go into first gear it goes in but not as smoothly as it should it makes a noise and sometimes you even feel "it" i think ideally it should shift like "butter" into all gears like it does just sometimes, i would place my foot down from neutral and it just goes in so nicely with no effort really but it only goes in like butter sometimes and i know its not supposed to be making a noise when you shift into gears. Im sure this has to do with the problem, the clutch arm is in the correct range by the way.

That makes me feel alot better.  
After some more time on the bike and what you said ive realized that its probably shifting fine but i did have to get it into gear real fast to avoid an angry mother coming after me with a broomstick and i almost got clobbered because it wouldnt go in, until i stepped on it like my well being depended on it lol and also the clutch still slips but not nearly as much as when i was using the valvoline motorcycle oil but i didnt expect the oil to cure it completely anyway.

trini tuner wrote on 11/05/12 at 20:55:10:


I think that story may be more interesting than the clutch issue!

No way I could push it home... I was on the superslab.
think I push started it in gear from a dead stop.  
jammed into 2nd from there it was a piece of cake.
10 miles to home.

the busted piece was still hanging on the shaft.

Upon looking closer at the broken pieces of the clutch cam/rocker it is pretty obvious why the part breaks often. it isn't a piece of powder metal or the likes, it is in fact matrix pulled bar stock steel that gets chopped of piece by piece in the factory and then the oval shaped hole in the middle gets reamed/stamped out showing I tool identations on both sides. The pieces then get hardened, which should be case hardenend in that matter. The reason is because the stressed areas of the part are exposed to shear and torsional forces which require the steel core of the part to remaoin somewhat "flexible".
And here is where the problem comes in. The piece is REALLY hard, evident through the barely visible rub marks in the identation where the clutch rod touches. The HRC on this part is really good, considered that the bike has 18k mile on it. the way the part fractured indicates that after the hardening the part did not get annealed properly and that is why so many break.
I'm considering annealing the new poece before putting it in. Not sure yet, because the part lasted for that long, which is kind of a surprise. The only reason it didn't break sooner is the fact that the stressed corners have sufficient radius to spread the loads.

case hardening is still used where labor is cheap and special alloys aren't available.

case in point, the cam chain adjusters plunger.