My old 850 Guzzi was noisy as snot too. Those pushrod engines are clicky things. But as we know, a noisy valve is a happy valve. In general it's better to be a tad loose than too tight. Never seen a valve burnt by being a bit loose. Of course for some reason those pushrod engines are noisy even after a valve adjustment. Go figure...

 

I do PayPal or a money order. Feel free to call me at 330-340-2655 if you want to shoot the breeze or get more in depth. Email me at mkrieger002@columbus.rr.com to get my address and/or a PayPal money request, which gives a bit of speed and safety for you.

As I say, though - if it ain't broke don't fix it. If the cam drive isn't noisy wait until it is. The wear is progressive and won't be an overnight catastrophic failure. It's just if you hear constant rattling from the cam drive it is time to do something. You won't be stranded unless you totally ignore the noise.

 

Reviving this thread, just to settle my own head.
I have an '09 with about 3400 miles on it. Around 2800 miles or so I started to hear a rattling noise between 5500-6100 RPM (this one is relatively mild). I think the bike has always had a similar rattle around 8500+ (this one sounds like lots of fast moving, loose change in the motor). These noises are noticed while moving under load. Other than the RPM ranges mentioned above, there is no noise. Think it's the cam chain? (I do)

I haven't tried to listen for the sound with the bike stationary.

For anyone who has definitely had a cam chain adjuster problem; did you hear the noise in those two distinct RPM ranges, and did the manual adjuster or manual adjustement of the auto-adjuster fix it?

 

Lutz, while I'm not in favor of running the OEM tensioner this way to stop cam chain rattle, perhaps this will diagnose whether the problem/noise is the tensioner. Try taking the end cap off and pushing the plunger in firmly with an allen wrench or other tool small enough to go into the plunger bore. Or try the method where you loosen the bolts on the tensioner enough to hear a click that indicates the tensioner has taken up a tooth on the ratchet. Ride the bike and see if the noise goes away or is affected. If the noise is still there, you probably have something else wrong. If it's gone, you know the tensioner isn't doing its job. Whatever you find, I'd return the tensioner to its previous location by pulling it out and resetting it according to the manual.

 

Yes and Yes. I pushed my adjuster in with an allen wrench the first time. The noise went away. Later I went with the 351 so I had the tensioner out. I cleaned it and installed it properly. Now the original tensioner works flawlessly.

David

 

Welcome to the world of Kawasaki cam chain tensioners. I have had TWO tensioners go bad in one bike and didn't bother trying to "fix" the one in the other bike. It is a poor design, requiring incremental adjuster movement to adjust for a chain set up that wears dynamically (aka not incrementally). I will post my thoughts in a separate posting shortly. But first, what backs my comments.

I've worked on my own equipment, being a gear head, for over 40 years. I've done some engine rebuilds, complete in two stroke and top end on four. I worked in a dealership in sales (started by setting up new bikes) and parts sales full and part time starting in 1983 and ending in 2006. I still frequent the dealership in spite of owner changes. I spent a lot of time with the mechanics and learned a lot there. After an injury and vocational rehab, picking up a mechanical engineering related technology 2 yr and technology 4 year to add to my teaching 4 yr (marketing ed/industrial arts) I spent ten years in industry before ending up back in teaching - industrial tech. Most of that time was in quality control in cutting tools and heavy equipment, doing quality engineering in the latter and a lot of research related inspection in the former.

What I am pointing out is that I have mechanical skills, knowledge, and problem solving skills. That was applied to the KLX when the second tensioner took a dump after only about 8000 miles, the first went at 5000. I looked into the causes and worked with the mechanics to decide what to do and how.

Now for the post. I hope it makes some sense.

 

The thing I've found interesting in both the KLX and some other forums is the expectation that Kawasaki engineers are infallable and that replacing these tensioner parts and resetting supposedly automatic tensioners would be a normal practice. If it is automatic shouldn't it be automatic? Why should I "reset" or back out (or jam a tool in it) until I hear a click, effectively doing a manual tensioning and also making it too tight? I don't buy it. One guy on the KLX site thinks it's okay to replace HyVo chains at 12,000 miles. Those chains are the same design used in some automobiles that run for about a lifetime and on the primary drives of many in-line fours. Other guys think it's okay to back out the mount bolts to effectively override the automatic system and over-tighten the chain. That pulls on the cams which ride in a plain bearing surface of your rather expensive head.

Now to address what I observed before making my first manual tensioner. The rack and pawl design with a spring will constantly put some minimal pressure on the chain slider which would promote wear. The spring isn't strong enough to resist kickback in the chain under crank deceleration, so it isn't of any value in tension control in that area. What it does is put enough pressure on the rack to push it forward and the pawl clicks in as the chain seats in and cam drive wear occurs… but not always completely.

The key point is that the automatic tensioner clicks in incremental amounts. Cam chains wear/seat dynamically (no increments). When the wear, which by my manual tensioner adjustments has proven to be minimal, isn't enough to move the rack forward forward enough to seat in, but just barely over the tip of the tooth there will be problems. And of course there is no way to tell this. Under cam drive deceleration the rack can kick back hard enough to force the rack back over the pawl, damaging the edges of both by chipping off the edge. This is the same effect as the rounding of shifter dogs when gear boxes are abused with incomplete or missed shifts, but on a much much smaller scale. It takes a magnifier to see the wear (actual rounding), but not the evidence of the wear (polishing of teeth). If this occurs over and over the edges round, much like shifter dogs can, but eventually the rack may start skipping over multiple teeth.

After two of the OEM tensioners in 15,000 miles, the second one costing $70 initially and then about $300 in rebuild costs after it failed, I have no qualms about recommending a manual unit. With simple adjustments on fairly wide intervals after seating in of any new components, the unit is reliable as a rock. I've got over 30,000 on my bike with a manual unit, I can't remember now when the last adjustment was made, but it still isn't making any rattling noise except when cold and that is due to play allowed for thermal expansion. I have another rider with a Concours who has 23,000 on his with the same minimal adjustment. Less than one full turn of the adjuster bolt. It is so small a movement if you look at the OEM rack you'll understand why it is possible to have one go bad and another one go without issue. It's just not worth the $70 for the automatic one if it fails again. The manual units are more reliable, the biggest problem with them is when a rider doesn't recognize when it rattles it is time to adjust it.

Now if you adjust the manual tensioner the way I describe it, or another way I learned from the Eliminator owners, you will have taken virtually all the play out of the cam chain drive, but put virtually no tension on it. That is the ideal, no play and no tension. The OEM automatic tensioner's spring actually does put unneeded tension on the drive all the time, pushing in. Ideally, all that need be done is take out all the slack.

The play is taken out by either listening for the rattle caused by the loose chain play, which can also be felt if actually doing the turning in by hand. Some people get wound up on the variability of hand tightening. I will tell you I put a socket on my inch/pound torque wrench, held it and twisted as hard as I could... I couldn't even get the beam to deflect. So obviously hand tightening is nearly impossible to overtighten, but I still go by the sound and feel. The fact is the play or noise is gone with minimal effort by hand, other than how hot the bolt may be.

Since this is all done at full operating temperature everything is thermally expanded to probably a thousandth or two of maximum growth over all, all inclusive. In other words the drive is as tight as it will get due to expansion. This will result in a very tiny amount of slack when the engine is cold, but that slack is so little it will be inconsequential as my roughly 30,000 miles show it to be. Far less than the play from a failing OEM tensioner.

As for the chain, again those chains are the same design used in some automobiles that run for about a lifetime and on the primary drives of many in-line fours. They are known for durability when bathed in oil - which they are. Do the research on the internet, I did. I also have never seen a cam chain actually break in the 22 years I spent in a mid-size dealership where I used to love to go hang out in the shop. The one thing I have seen is damage caused by loose cam chains beating up the sliders, variable cam timing as the chain slack allows it to vary by a large amount when the tensioner allows .250 movement when the rack pushes back and forth over 3-4 teeth, and overly worn cam chains from that slapping and snapping around. I will say I did see some Honda ATC200 engines, which use a roller chain, that didn't have the manual adjustment done on them at all, resulting in a lot of chain slap... enough to break the tensioner sliders in them and actually cut through the cylinder cam drive tower area on one. Incredible!

Now the negative points on the manual unit. You have to be aware of any ticking coming from the left side cam drive area when it's hot, so you can know when to adjust it. That's an actual audible signal that is far quieter than the clatter from a failed OEM automatic tensioner, indicating far less play. It's usually a small adjustment of 1/8-1/4 turn of the adjuster bolt (one full turn is .060" on the M8-1.25 bolt I use) and might only come about every several thousand miles. You also need to be sure to tighten the lock nut adequately.

You'll actually check your valves more often than it will need adjustment. All you do is every so often at the end of your ride let the bike sit there and run while you take off your helmet and listen on the left side to see if it's ticking at all. Just don't confuse valve tick from the head with chain ticking from the tensioner area. I even got a mechanic's stethoscope to do mine just to be sure. It was more for the Zephyr where the drive is in the center of the engine, the outside cam drives are easy to hear.

I hope this is of some help in understanding the whole process. It is what I've learned both from the rebuild time when we, the mechanics who built the top end (I was selling bikes well enough part time I knew I'd get the work done faster by them than doing it myself and could afford it) and I, decided a manual tensioner system was the best route and all the work, reading, and thought process in the past ten years since. It is not a guesstimate in the mechanical aspect, but it is not a statistically proven situation since I only have had two engines at my access. There is the back up from a few hundred other riders who have either made or bought manual tensioners for their bikes; KLX/KZ/GPz/ZR/ZX/ZL/ZG and DRz. Not all automatic tensioners fail. If the indexing falls in place properly for the mechanical requirements they will work. If it doesn't they will fail.

I really don’t know why the earlier goofy spring and thread design on the Zephyr 550s fail, I could care less, I just know the ones on the Zephyr 550s regularly crap out. Someone had actually screwed with and messed up the one on my bike apparently trying to make it work consistently.

I also bought into the “Kawasaki engines are noisy” with the KLX and ended up several hundred in the hole due to two tensioners going bad. I got the same comment on the Zephyr, but knew different. That bike has about 10,000 on the tensioner without any noise so far. I used the mechanic’s stethoscope on it to listen to the cam drive and heard basically nothing so there is no rattle of a loose chain and no “shushing” of overly tight tension on the slider. With the drive on the outside like the Concours and my KLX it’s much easier to listen for noise without aid.

I had my first Concours owner, who lives near me and has some of the same friends, bought one after bantering back and forth with a dealer. The dealer said nothing could be done and that his bike was “old technology”. He called me the day after he picked up the tensioner to tell me how it worked and that I needed to shorten the bolt a bit, which I did, but I still make sure it’s long enough. That was last fall. No problems, otherwise I’d hear from him.

You can bounce it back and forth all you really want, but when a tensioner does quit working you have to make a choice. Do you do stop-gap resets that may or may not work? Maybe do that a few times, but not if it happens over and over. Do you buy a new tensioner and sliders? Well if you have to buy new sliders you have tensioner issues and buying a new tensioner can run a fair price. Do you go with a manual tensioner that you or a good mechanic can understand and deal with, keeping tension at a minimum and not having to replace sliders as often since the chains never get overly loose? Many of us went that way. I am telling you it is a fix if done soon enough, within a thousand or so miles. If it doesn’t deal with the noise look elsewhere, because it’s no longer the cam chains. I spent part of an evening on the phone actually while an Eliminator owner was doing the adjustments. We found his noise wasn’t totally the cam chain adjustment. Apparently the pollution control air injection had some gaskets not seated right and making noise. He now rides a quiet, except for exhaust maybe, Eliminator. He knows the cam drive is tensioned decently without excess play.

Your call. But remember – “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” No cam drive noise = no tensioner problem, why bother changing it. If it ever goes, fix it then.

One thing I want you to understand, after the tensioner is adjusted at full operating temperature, the engine may tick a bit when started up cold. The reason for the ticking is thermal contraction/expansion of all the engine parts. When chain tension is set properly at full operating temperatures there is little if any actual tension on the chain so as not to cause premature wear on parts, so when the engine is cold everything has contracted in size and there is a bit of play in the chain for the first few minutes of warm up. It should be of no concern, because the engines warm up quickly and the play is so small. It is no where near as bad as the play when an adjuster fails and not all the time as with a failed tensioner. I want you to understand why, when the engine is cold, there is a small amount of cam chain noise. Presently my own KLX650 has done 30,000 miles with this manual set up, the Zephyr is approaching 10,000 miles without any problems.


I hope this clarifies things a bit.

 

I hope that "flawlessly" is better than that of the two in my KLX. Problem is you don't actually know...

And this has been my comment for 8 years before I actually sold the first tensioner, as stated in the Yahoo KLX650 group. I've seen the result of the mechanical flaw in design and paid the price. I've had a similar discussion in the KLX650 group and wrote the first directions for how to make the OEM unit manual back in 2001 or so. That is where the one rider thought it was reasonable to have to put in new HyVo chains every 10,000 miles or so. The same chains I currently have run over 30,000 miles, but use a manual tensioner. It isn't the money from selling the tensioners, it's the preservation of a motorcycle from a mediocre "automatic" tensioner design. One guy here had the materials, skills, and wherewithall to copy the part I make - good for him, he now KNOWS how well his cam chain is adjusted.

I'm here for the guy who doesn't have the time, skill, equipment, materials, or interest in making it themselves. It isn't easy to make them. I know, the first dozen or so were hand cut and tapped. Several were scrapped for angled threading. From what I've read, heard, and experienced it is hard to have any trust in the OEM automatic unit. The minute it fails to work once, it would be gone in any bike I own, based on the wear pattern I and a Concours owner both have seen.

It is a choice of course. Just make it with eyes wide open.

 

So were do I order this manual tensioner?

 

You can go to kriegercamchaintensioners.com