Original thread here, written by: ioneater I've got about 70 hrs and 700 miles on her now. After hydro-locking it in a puddle a few days ago I decided to give the valves a tickle with the feeler gauge since I already had the valve cover off. The owner's manual calls for Exhaust to be .008, Intake .006 (all measurements in inches), rats! A quick call to Tasky's reveals they like .006-.008 on Exhaust and .004-.006 on Intake, I'm still out of luck so....... I now have an excuse to go see the brand new 310, 449 and 511 they have on the floor while The above image shows the timing marks for TDC in RED. They need to be positioned horizontal as somewhat depicted by the GREEN arrow. You'll also notice that both intake and exhaust valve lobes will be angled toward the spark plug equally at about 45 deg. as another method of verification. I used the kickstart lever to line it up, just takes light touch with the spark plug removed. These x-lite motors are shim-under-bucket style, meaning the cams ride directly on the valve buckets instead of the older engine's method of having the sliding "follower" between the cam and the shim. You have to remove the cam and the bucket to get to the shim, which rests right on top of the valve stem. I used a strong magnet to extract the bucket and shim as one. CAUTION: you need to have a rag or something stuffed down the cam chain channel during disassembly and reassembly to prevent an errant shim or bolt or other FOD from falling into that channel and into the netherworld at the bottom end. My tight valve had a 1.65 mm shim. Did the math and determined I either needed a 1.60 or 1.55 so I took both at the dealer's gentle prodding. I tried the 1.55mm first and it brought the valve right to .008, perfect! Circled in GREEN above is the left hand exhaust lobe with the edge of the bucket barely visible underneath it. Now for the REAL reason I wanted to post this thread. The 3 socket head bolts circled in RED above are specific to the locations you see them in! The workshop manual is WRONG with the pictures it provides as reference for the Exhaust cam hardware installation! The Intake cam picture is the correct reference for the Exhaust cam. You will notice this yourself if you take note of each of the 6 bolts as you remove them. The 3 M5 bolts NOT circled are interchangeable. I caught this when finger tightening the bolts and found one of them to bottom out before the bolt head was making contact. The 2 M6 bolts get 88 in/lb's of torque and the 4 M5 bolts got 48 in/lb. That's about it. I thought the bike was pretty clean before starting this job but the camera makes it look completely filthy. I blew all loose dirt away from around and above the engine area to minimize the amount of crud that might fall into the top end while it was exposed. Hope this helps somebody else along the way. .
