Last time, I was performing a laying on of hands on the whirring heart of the engine of my 1976 Z900A4…
Although under close inspection the oil-pump showed no ill effects from four-and-a-half decades (and given there were no tell-tale marks on the screws), I can reasonably assume that this was the first time its innards had seen daylight in 45 years so it would have been foolhardy to build the engine without inspection. An oil-pump failure can kill an engine stone dead!
This month I’m going to make a start on putting the top-end together and I’ll begin by pulling out my head stands and popping the valves back in the cylinder head. Given how relatively inexpensive a set of heads stands are, I have never understood why folks struggle without. The first job is so easy to forget. I know, I have done, and that is to fit the valve spring seats. The steel seat is for the springs to push against. If you fit the stem seal before the seal, you then have to try and
