Hi folks,

yamaha has a design flaw in my bike. a certain percentage of fjr1300s end up with valve guide failure, aka "Tickers". the valve guide wears into an oval and this allows the valve to smack into the head at wierd angles, eventually ruining the valve seats and the head itself. as the wear progresses you start getting oil leaking from the head down the valve stem into the exhaust port, where it coats things with oil. so you get some wierd metallic ticking noise (whic is why bikes with this problem are called Tickers), increased oil consumption and whatnot. yamaha's offical test for this is to pull the headers and check for signs of oil. i pulled my headers for another reason today to do some exhaust work. anyways, i took some pics looking for signs of oil / crud in my head and in the headers here are the pics of the outermost head and header pipes that i could access:

leftmost port:


leftmost port closer:


leftmost header:


rightmost port:


overall i see a lot of exposed aluminum in the head, and some pretty clean steel in the headers, not a lot of oil. but you can see some carbon buildup / smoot in both the head and the headers and i am wondering if that is an early sign of oil leakage. any experienced engine guys have any thoughts?

 

Those ports look pretty clean to me. Have you seen blue smoke @ start up or have your friends reported any as you ride?