DragBikeMike
Serious Thumper
Offline
SuzukiSavage.com Rocks!
Posts: 4194
Honolulu
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In October, I bought a good used cylinder head on eBay. I wanted a head to practice porting. At the time, I didn’t buy the associated head cover (either because it wasn’t offered on the auction, or I didn’t have the sense to buy it). Later, I purchased a head cover on eBay to use as a test bed for cam timing checks. I figured I could clean it up and install some fresh rocker arms, then use it on my ported head.
Last week, I was looking at the parts fiche and noticed the head and head cover are sold as an assembly. My heart sank. How could I have been so stupid? Of course, the head and cover are sold as an assembly because they use blind dowels. When they manufacture the head assembly, they lay out the dowels, assemble the head & cover, and then bore the bearings for the cam. That way the dowels will always maintain alignment between the upper and lower halves of the bearings.
I immediately tried to assemble the head and cover with a cam inside to see if I might have gotten lucky. No chance. When the cover was installed the cam would not rotate. Too bad for me.
I pondered the problem for awhile and decided to try and establish correct alignment and re-dowel the components. The process worked pretty good and it’s not too difficult, so if you’ve got a mismatched head & head cover, all is not lost.
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