VF500F Resurrection

I picked up an '85 500 Interceptor for a project. It was described as "just needing a new fuel hose", which I've heard before. No matter, I wanted it whether it needed a hose or an entire engine...
It indeed needed quite a bit more than a fuel hose but it runs! In fact it's the funnest bike I own (a couple Ninjas, FZ600, Seca Turbo that is not yet done) and an '85 700 Interceptor.
It has a pretty mean valve chatter coming from the back pair that I need to look at, but it runs great and has a lot of power for a 500. Very happy...

 

you need to inspect for signs of "mushrooming" on the tops of the valve stems. valves are the weak point on a 500 and can destroy the engine in a second if one drops into a cylinder, the typical failure.

 

Thanks for the reply, that is good to know. It seems every bike/car has a typical cause of death. Now that the 500 is running I'll be tearing it down to see what else it needs. Are internals, like valves, springs, pistons..., hard to come by for these?

 

Squirrelman, any idea what the roof cause of the 500 valve problem is? Is there anything I can do to help avoid or prevent this?
Thank you

 

Valves and (new) springs are hard to find. Valve float due to the springs is the major cause. I mushroomed a valve on my race bike (86 engine), likely from the long straights and my short gearing. You could do it when the bikes were pretty much new too, but you had to be thrashing it long and often. As these bikes get older, with more miles, the springs are even more suspect.

Not to say you can't have fun on a 500 and run it fairly hard, you just want to keep journeys close to redline short and rare.

 

Not sure where you are but there is a guy here in Houston that did great work on my 500 heads and valves. Got it done pretty quickly also.

 

And choose your head gaskets wisely. I did not and paid for it later.

 

The valve clatter could very easily be timing chain clatter but of course check your valve clearances asap but these valves rarely go loose they just get way too tight with time. Unless of course someone tried and failed to adjust the valves properly. My first engine blew up with a dropped valve. Very common even with all my valve heads in very good shape. I had a spare 86 engine and I found new valves, springs and head bolts for it but they were very expensive, valves came from Japan and springs and bolts from a parts place in the netherlands, absolutely not worth it from a sane economic standpoint but I've had mine since new in 1984 so there's that. If you do jump in, best of luck, check your cam chains, guides and tensioners well. Also, get the best head gaskets you can, you probably won't find OEM but Athena I think is ok and more available in Europe than in the USA.

 

Thanks for that info.
Checking the valve clearance is the first thing I did. Tight they were, but not horrible.
I am used to Yamahas and Kawasaki easy chain tensioners. I still haven't figured out how to adjust (or inspect) this one. I looked into it a couple weeks ago, but couldn't really grasp it, so I moved on to the other project(s).
Does anyone have a way to dumb down an explanation, or know of a good tutorial video?
I keep riding it, short trips mind you, and it performs great aside from the tick. A previous owner stuck a pressure gauge on the block and it is healthy in that aspect.
I swear the ticking is in the block realm, not in the head, so maybe the chain is slack. If it were bearings, I'd assume the oil pressure would be low(er).

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The tensioners are not adjustable. And there's really not much to inspect, unless you are disassembling. Sometimes you can see if the chain runner rod is bent, or something looks wrong. You replace when they allow chains to make noise essentially.

If you are running in neutral and you rev the motor pretty high and quickly release the throttle, does the noise (ticking) get louder when the engine is "decelerating"?

 

Oh, ok, gotcha, yeah, by checking chain I meant you can feel the tension of chain and turn the engine over a few times by hand feeling if it goes slack at any point, at which time you might notice it VERY slack and you could say that's your problem. Your tensioner could be shot though and you'd have to take out the cams to take it out and see if it has any broken parts or the old spring is totally shot. There's a gimmicky "fix" of taking the old stiff plastic sleeve cover off of the spring which may or may not do anything but it could be worth a shot if you're going that deep into it. Also, the old tensioners develop a groove sometimes that stop it from sliding and providing any tension. Getting used parts for that would be pretty easy but you'd just be hoping for the best at that point using close to 40 year old used parts. A click in the crankcase area could be the starter clutch, some folks here have complained about. I've never had that happen though. Also, balancing the carbs seems to minimize some clicking noises even though it seems somewhat irrelevant, it actually does work sometimes. In my experience however, you could have a bad/noisy rod bearing and still have good oil pressure. I've had that happen to me more than once. The noise doesn't change as it warms up? I had a clicking type noise that turned out to be a big crack in one of the carb intake boots and it still ran pretty well but it was loud and pretty obvious. Maybe moving on to another project is just the thing you can do unless you enjoy opening cans of worms. Good luck!