When I last left off I had just begun tearing down the FZR, draining and removing the tank and radiator. Since then it’s been a few small steps forward and 600 steps back.
After I took off the tank and the carbs, I noticed the rubber intake boots were in bad shape. Here’s the one for the #1 cylinder, but this was what all four of them looked like-
No big deal, really. A new set of 4 was $20 or so on eBay. What was worrying, however, was what I found when I looked through them into the inlet valves.
Many of the valves had some crap built up on them, but this one in particular had oil pooling in it. I’m not sure but I think this is similar to the problem my Trans Am used to have where the valve seals would leak a bit of oil when the car would sit for a while.
I thought about just ignoring it (dumb), trying to fix the seals myself (even the Haynes manual advises against this), buying a whole new top end and replacing the whole thing since they’re only like $50, or just taking it to a professional to look over the engine and sticking to repairing the things that I’m actually able to do myself.
I’m going with the latter. While I had the carb off I did replace the intake boots, though. This necessitated the use of the most jerry-rigged system of socket extensions and allen keys known to man
Shockingly it worked despite splitting open my thumb. For reassembly I was much smarter and I removed the coolant line that was in the way and just used a normal socket. I probably should’ve done that to begin with, but how would I have even learned otherwise?
One of the few other things I could do today was replace the clip-ons, which were bent so badly that the throttle wouldn’t spring closed if I let go of it.
So that’s where it stands as of now. I have a new clutch cable ready to install, but I need to get some WD-40 to lube it up first. If I’m feeling especially productive I’ll do that sometime after work this week. Everything else is reliant on hearing back from the local bike mechanic on if and when I can take it in to get the engine gone through.
I’m still happy with my progress at this point though; I’ve already done more work on this bike than all of my cars combined. If I had more space to work I might try and work on the engine myself, but when it comes down to it I do actually want to ride this thing come spring and not have it blow up.