'73 TX750 engine work. Going deep.

Yesterday I had a good day in the garage. It must have been all of the racing I got to watch this weekend. I saw Rossi hold onto the points lead at Motegi Twin Ring and then woke up early to see some World Superbike and Jonathan Rea continue his dominance. I also found a fun little road not far from my house that had the right amount of twisty bits for a quick fun time.

Whatever it was I got a good bit of work done on a couple of projects. I detailed the Ninja Race Bike Belly Pan in a post yesterday. The other project I worked on was the TX750 engine rebuild.


The first thing I did was get the lump up on the "bench". The bench is actually a $40 folding table that I got for taking to the track. I have worked on the engine in all of my other garages on the floor and my back always pays the price. I might need to brace the table as the engine is hefty.


To get any disassembly done, the cam shaft and cam valley brackets need to come out. I had to pull the valve rockers and that is where I have been stuck for a while. I needed a small slide hammer equivalent to pull them out of the valley brackets so that I could get to the nuts. I also needed to break the cam chain, then gently pound the brackets to break them free and use some light pressure with a pry bar to slowly lift them off.


With all the cam shaft hardware removed it is time for the cylinder head hardware. 12 fasteners in three different sizes hold the cylinder head in place. A couple of notes from this photo: the dollar store pan I got yesterday came in handy during the disassembly by keeping all of the stuff located in one spot as I pulled it off. Everything that got pulled, got bagged and tagged for future reference. I like using the freezer bags as they are heavier and don't rip and spill.


Pistons came off after the cylinders were removed. The cylinders came up with a couple of gentle whacks with the rubber mallet. Getting the piston pin snap rings out let me tap out the pins themselves and off came the pistons. All of the valves and pistons look to be in good shape. The engine was running fine with the exception of only having two gears. I'm following the original 1973 service manual and will be doing a lot of cleaning and measuring to make sure all of the hard parts are within spec. I also need to start gathering all of the gaskets and seals that I might have to replace.


That was as far as I got before dinner and my rumbling stomach put an end to my garage escapades. The engine sat beside the bike for a year before I did anything to it. I would like to get the bike running by next summer. Still a whole lot of disassembly to do and parts to source. This was the easy part, the hard part will be getting it all back tog ether so that it doesn't go "BOOM" the first time I thumb the starter. We shall see…

Blue

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