Originally Posted By: Steve128
Originally Posted By: Zedhed
Originally Posted By: dblshock
I've heard that and also that it's overstated...5W-30 is spose to do the trick of wetting the rear lobes by 2000rpm anyway, mine are on the lite oil and both work perfect..good looking too.
Right, wait and see then.....
Even Honda admitted they made big mistakes on the Gen I VFs. Bad hardening on the cams, bad lifter geometry, oil starvation. They last until about 30K and then the cams are shot.
Just go to the VFR forums and get educated.
And if you do go to the vfrdiscussion forum, this is what you find. A production problem, not oil starvation, cam issues, etc.
The great camshaft crisis in 84 about off killed enthusiasm for the
VF... as you know every stop gap measure was tried in curing the
problem but the real culprit was Honda's short cut in machining steps
of the cam bearing blocks... they dropped the line bore step and
machined the cam bearing blocks separately... this resulted in mix
match of clearances... in short the cams flopped about... hard coat
damage soon followed... For a cure Honda... in 86... went back to the
more accurate and expensive method of line boring the cam bearing
blocks... You can note the external difference in the head design...
the 84's & 85's rubber valve cover gasket is flat... whereas the 86's
rubber valve cover gasket is half circled covering where it was line
bored...
Honda was typically silent for a long time and this led to all sorts of home
cures including better top oiling kits... shorten oil change intervals... larger
gapped valve clearances... installing new cam tensioners... auxiliary
cooling fans kits... etc etc etc... but none of these address the root cause...
Only after Honda took a lot of stick did they finally go back to the timely
process of line boring the cam bearing blocks on the head so the
tolerances complimented each other...
In the void of official guidance Mechanics went to great lengths to address
the symptom but failed to establish the root cause... the hard coat damage
was still miss matched cam bearing blocks... the evidence they needed to
look at carefully is the fact the edges of the cams fails first... their pet
theory of a lack of oil would make the center fail first...
Honda would never modified their engines by depleting critical oil
form the main galley and take a chance to starve the main bearings
just to reroute oil to the top end... it's a kin to robbing Peter to
pay Paul... there's only so much oil an engine will pump...
Publicly American Honda was silence... then they blustered refusing to
acknowledge they had a problem... but in private they we working at a
fever pitch to establish a root cause... but it was the owners who
blamed it on all the wrong things and then some... and you can see it
continues today...
Naturally Honda's final corrective action was to sell owners a new line bored
head... at cost I think... all in all Honda's great camshaft crisis almost kill
the publics love affair with the V4...
Unfortunately for the V65 engine... all the years 83 through
86... were affected by the short cut at the factory and thus
don't have line bore cam bearing blocks... you can verify
this by identifying the valve cover gasket...
To tell the difference between line bored head and the one that gots
the short cut... take a look at the valve cover gasket... if your gasket
sports little half circles molded into the rubber... then you have the
expensive line bored head... no little half circles... then you have the
short cut heads...
If you venture inside the valve cover... it is possible to identify 3
types of cam shafts... the original... a second generation with a small
oil hole in the cam lobe... and the final type with both the oil holes
and closed end caps...
From vfrdiscussion.com.
V65 Sabre Vf1100s
Well I enjoyed mine!!!!. They were AWESOME machines to ride all day long at 120+ down 395 in Oregon, O YEAH BABY, handling and lean for days. The warp drive kicked in @ 6-7 grand with 10.5 red line, was mid to top end power(121hp) and with six speed gearbox, Air suspension, dual disk front brakes, shaft, 5 gallon gas tank nice LCD read out, adj handle bars... Better power to weight ratio (6-1) than Porsche 911(9-1)! Very, very fast comfortable sport tour. I believe it was designed to motor the autobahn for three hours.
V4 are making a comeback and there is a reason... I like the big v twin i own now, (Victory Kingpin). It's half the cylinders and I am too. :>P