Head Gasket Replacement - Tips?

[pete]

This weekend is going to be the fun of replacing my head gasket after it nearly let go on Sunday. I know it's been weeping for a while but sustained high rev's resulted in a brief loss of power, oil everywhere, and a not quite blown gasket. Babying it this week has it pretty much oil tight and operating normally thankfully.

I got my new genuine gasket yesterday along with new exhaust gaskets and a new tensioner gasket.

The plan at this stage is:

- Drop the exhaust.
- Remove tensioner.
- Tie cam chain up to frame.
- Remove cam shafts.
- Lift head.
- Remove gasket/clean surfaces.
- Reassemble.
- Do cam timing.
- Check valve clearances.

Anything critical I'm missing or anything else I need to know?

I have the factory manual to refer to as well which I will have a look at in detail tonight.

[Dogma]

Do valve guide seals while you're in there and check everything you can about the valves. Slop in the guides, condition of the seats, etc. Check the rings, bores and pistons too. You may need to hone the bores and lap the valve seats. Some people do those no matter what condition they find things in.

I don't tie the cam chain to the frame, I just make sure there's a long enough wire tied to it that I'll be able to pull it back out of the cases. If you tie it to the frame, the head and jugs can't come off.

[1980GS1000E]

Some say that the base gasket needs to be replaced as well.

[Nessism]

Hi Pete,

You used Athena gaskets right? If so, I'd do the base gasket at the same time as the head gasket.

[pete]

Cheers guys... I fear I missed some more crucial information from my original post though

It has less than 28000km's since the rebuild, so I know things like honing and valve seals are all good as I got that done during the rebuild. I also had the valves faced and tipped and lapped them in.

I'll still be inspecting things anyway and if there's any carbon build up from running rich while I was still getting it jetted right I'll endeavour to remove some or all of that as well.

My one stupid mistake is as Ed says... I used Athena gaskets

The good news is I used a genuine base gasket, so I don't see a need to worry about that and will do my best to separate the head without disturbing the base gasket.

Dogma, good point... I was thinking of using something I could bend into a hook so I could just hook it over the frame which should let me be able to drop it down to get the head off etc.

Edit: Forgot to say that I'm positive the whole reason for this is due to the Athena gaskets being crap. I recently did my stator and the Athena gasket I used was brittle and just fell apart when taking the cover off. Needless to say there is a genuine gasket under there now. When I do this I intend to take lots of photos to shoot up a reminder Athena gaskets are crap thread...