Pistons, cylinders and heads

It was time to make the pistons shine since they were pretty dirty. Nothing was seriously burned so it was quite a bit easier than with the valves. Just some WD-40 and wiping. I figured it would be whole lot easier to fit the pistons in the cylinders first as opposed to attach them to conrods first even though those circlips tend to be a bit tricky sometimes to get in specially when theres not too much room. And that's the method the Workshop manual suggested as well. I had new seals and circlips but didn't see it necesary to replace the piston rings since they looked good and there was only 40k km on the bike. So a nice cleanup for pistons and the cylinder, a thin film of oil to cylinder pipes and with a help of piston ring compressors the piston slipped in to the cylinder.

The cylinder pipe gasket requires some flange sealant on both sides of it and I used the Loctite's product that was mentioned in the book and it was available in the local store. It was pink color so of course I had to choose the rags covering the intake holes accordingly! Then I inserted the cylinders, locked the pistons to conrods, inserted a new head gasket, the head and head nuts.

There are three torques for the head nuts: 15Nm, 30Nm and finally 48Nm. I had the self made tool and a digital torque wrench I invested on. I think the tool was worth spending some money since you can't break it by forgetting to untighten the spring and if we go by the book, you should loosen and retighten it between every nut. This one doesn't require any of it and it also shows the current torque, so it was quite convenient to tighten the bolts evenly (and of course working diagonally). The nuts and stud threads were greased before tightening as the book suggested and without greasing they would be looser due to friction.

Once the heads were tight it was time to assemble the oil pump and the timing belts. Oil pump should be filled with oil to avoid air lock in which case the oil wouldn't flow when the engine is started. Also I had all new o-rings for the pump. Horizontal cylinder to TDC by looking at the marks on the other side of the engine (timing gear and the gear on the crankshaft under the flywheel) and the mark on the pulley on the RH side. Then align the camshaft pulleys to their reference marks and put the belts on. I used my mobile phone guitar tuner app to tighten the belts to 110Hz.