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Not that it helps you now, but a socket that just slips in the dowel usually was good enough for me to slip it in, pinch it with a pliers, and yank it out.

Whiskerfish wrote: ↑Sun Mar 06, 2022 7:30 pm Never thought of having something inside to crimp it to. Nice trick.

Agree, great idea and the dual vice grips is somewhat artistic.

Slowly, but slowly - and maybe, eventually, surely (or is it Shirley?).

I have a Versah full rebuild kit in hand. I was going to run with their head gaskets, even with the somewhat uneven reports on NGW and other GW forums. This morning, though, I chickened out and ordered up some OEM head gaskets and a couple bits I also needed that aren't part of the Versah kit. It costs me another wad of $, but I really don't want to set this motor up and find that I blow a head gasket in a week or three of riding.

Valve Stem Seals
Today I replaced the the valve stem seals. Before I got into it, yesterday I popped in some spark plugs and filled the head with each puddles of fuel to watch for seepage past the valves. None over about 30 minutes or so. Not wanting to get myself in trouble and making things worse than they might be by screwing up some valve lap job, I kept things simple with a basic cleaning/wiping, oil, and reassembly. (I know many would be in for the whole enchilada once the heads are off.)
I didn't notice any slop/play/sway in the valve guides and things slipped nicely in/out/in/out. I think we're OK in the valve department.

Oil Screen
I've been working on those pesky oil screen screws for a couple weeks now. PBB, heat, JIS screwdriver, tap with hammer, PBB. wait a day. Repeat.

Feeling my oats after replacing the valve stem seals, I got a little more serious about that oil screen cover today. My JIS driver set has a bolt head on the end, designed for attaching a ratchet or wrench for leverage. Using a hammer and my largest driver, I tapped it in good, mounted up my ratchet, and gently but firmly turned - carefully, to avoid stripping or slipping.

Bingo! I got one. I got two. I got three. And there's always one that just has to say, "no, thank you." What a son of a...

I tipped the motor over on its side so I could apply downward pressure, releasing another dump of old oil. (Why didn't Honda really, truly put the drain hole at the BOTTOM of this motor? Rant over.)

After a couple more rounds of frustration, including a hopeless attempt to affix a vice grip to the screw head, I was starting to think that another week of soaking, heating, and repeating might be in order.

I really didn't want to haul out the (phillips, not jis) impact driver for fear of mangling the whole screw head, but I decided I needed a stronger cup of coffee for that baby. Alternating between impact and my little JIS/ratchet technique, with doses of PBB and some heat for fun, the impact driver broke her free! (I was sure I sheared off the screw at first, but I didn't.)

What I found was curious, and not so pretty.

I've First, there's the black sludgy sediment, which I also found sitting under the screen in the bottom of the case. I wiped that crap out before it could ooze down and out of reach. (Remember, my motor is on its side, so gravity does what gravity does.) I'd have preferred a pristine looking screen, but it is what it is.

Then there's the white crap. It has the consistency of a caulk- or silicone-like substance, perhaps some gasket sealer used at some point in the past. I have yet to find something like it sealing any bits I've removed. (The sealer for the valve covers is blackish, not whitish.)

Is it pretty typical to remove the screen and clean it with each oil change? Those screws seem not to have been removed in some time, or someone with Popeye forearms torqued them.

Do folks typically swap out the screws for bolts? I'm thinking bolts might work better over the long haul.

You're probably the first person to remove that screen since it was manufactured. And knowing that, it's actually not looking too bad.

The silicone-looking stuff may be cause for concern, if only because you don't know where it came from. But the other crap looks fairly typical.

And as much of a pain as it is to get to? Clean it up, put it together, ride the crap out of it. I guarantee most bikes go their whole life without that screen ever coming out.

That screen looks just right compared to the ones I have taken off for the first time.

I'm tinkering, puttering, etc.

I'm more than a month away from even trying to start this bike, but I've been digging into the carbs. Thankfully, they're NOT fully gummed up with fuel that sat in the bowls for years. One bank clearly didn't get fully drained, so there's been some heavy varnish to clean off the bottom of the jets (or is it the top? hmm). The other one was fully drained before the bike sat, or so it seems. I've cleaned three sets of GL1100 carbs at this point, and two of those sets were way worse looking than these GL1000s. I managed to get them dialed back in, so I'm feeling pretty good about the prospects on the '79 set.

The other day I decided I'd take a peek under the run/kill/start switch controls. There's an aftermarket kill button next to the controls. I'm not sure its purpose on the bike - aside from the stated function of killing the engine.

I don't know if the a kill button can work in reverse as a START button, but maybe that's what's going on here. I have not done much to chase the wiring, but the third photo below confirms that the OEM start button is definitely not going to work!
Fun. Not really. I'm pretty far from good at the electrical end of things. I'll sort it out via trial and error, I'm sure, and make decisions after that. Maybe another right control unit will be in my future.

OEM head gaskets arrived this past week. I spent days going back/forth on whether to paint the motor while it's out. I'm still not sure. I've been thinking black for the block, raw heads, and chrome valve cover gaskets, with the coolant lines, starter, and fuel pump in the stock silver look. Then I think about the first time gas spills onto the block, the speed with which the paint might chip/flake, the frustration I'll feel, and more. At that point, I'm back at "button her up without paint" and move on. And until that decision gets made, there's not much point in mounting up the heads.

Once the motor is back in the frame, I'll nab more room in the workshop. I need that room to get the bikes out from their winter storage spots, which I'll want to do in the next month. And by mid-May, my son will be back from college and eager to tinker with his CB550 cafe project I shoved into a corner after he headed back to school.

If going with a solid, non-metallic, use POR15 engine paint. Brush-on, two week cure but very tough and fuel inert. Levels well. Their metallics leave brush strokes no matter how you try.

I have painted several using the spray Duplicolor available at many auto parts stores. Some Black and some in the 1615 aluminum color. Held up reasonably well.

Pidjones: That's what I'm thinking, only in black instead of red. I do like that red!

Whiskerfish: I had figured it'd be VHT or Duplicolor until just now. It's the matter of spray-on that's had me wondering.

For me, a virtue of brush-on that I don't need to work up a spray booth or haul the motor outside for spraying.

Black enamel POR15. I guess that's the direction I'm going in with the block.

If it isn't three things, it's six.

I'm in "isolation" from work this week, working remotely as it were, after testing positive for that fake virus that's caused so much of a hassle. I decided to take some rest in the shed and degrease the block, work on carbs, and tinker in other areas.

Amid the block degreasing, I worked around to the front of the motor. All was well. And then I reached a finger in to play with the water pump impeller. Wiggle wiggle. Not good. I don't recall noticing that problem before, but I had been focused on trying to free a stuck motor when I pulled the radiator to free the motor from the frame.

OK. I've done that job before and have a gasket kit for an engine rebuild. No problem!

The first two bolts - the one at the top of the pump cover and the one near the oil filter housing - immediately sheared off. I wasn't hammering, yanking, etc. Or it didn't feel like it. (Maybe they were going to snap anyway?)
There's a little protruding thread on one, which may help me with extraction. I can get a Vice Grip on it, and it seems to hold well enough. The other, though, is flush with the cover.

I'm not entirely sure how to proceed. Should I drill and retap? I'm nervous because there's the hard metal of the bolt in the soft aluminum of the cover. Not sure an easy out would do anything. I don't think I've ever successfully used one.

Will the cover seal well enough with one missing bolt? Probably not

And I also need to get those darned pesky, frozen-from 45-years-in-place JIS screws out to pull the front cover and replace the water pump. The screws are definitely going to be a pain, I can tell. PBB, heat, my impact driver have yet to do anything. I'll be doing the "Heat, PBB, Impact, repeat" cycle for a while, I'm sure. I'd rather not snap them off and have more hassles. I'll replace those screws with bolts, for certain.

I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that the motor is not wedged in the frame. But it feels like cold comfort right now.

I can see it taking a couple weeks of on/off effort to get back to where I thought I was earlier today. I'm starting to sense that I may not get the motor back in frame before my son gets back from college next month and wants his bike out of the shed and his CB550 project in the work zone. Maybe I'm still playing around with this build NEXT winter.

Pull the trans cover off. It will be much easier to work on getting those bolts out. LH drill bits are your friend.

Grab an automatic center punch. It's a huge help in creating a starting guide hole for your drill.

In addition, I don't know your budget, but if worse comes to worse, a quick ebay search of front transmission covers comes up with a fairly decent amount of listings, a few of which are rather affordable. Something to keep in the back of your mind, at least.

You are already Soooo much ahead of others that try to do it in-frame! Shock, heat, lubricant all help in loosening the problems.

Thanks for the encouragement on all this.

Lucien's suggestion to head over to eBay was a good one. $21 gets me a replacement, delivered. I think it'd take me half that to get the tools to extract one of the bolts, then there's the time and aggravation.

Before I dropped the money, I wanted to make sure I could actually get the cover off without causing MORE issues. Thankfully, I was able to get all screws out with heat, PBB, an impact driver, and a JIS screwdriver. I think the biggest factor in breaking free the screws was the impact driver. It felt so touch and go for so much of it, but it's off.
I have to say that the design is really weird. There's a little "cavity" above the water pump that seems tailor made to collect dirt/grime - you know what I mean if you've been in one of these. And it's sort of, partly covered by a big section of gasket material: odd. And then there's that "shelf" at the top of the cover that's another storage place for dirt, grime, and assorted debris that you don't want in the motor. What's gained by having a "lip" that draws the cover up tighter under the belt covers and not just a rounded top edge like nearly all of the back cover? Hmm.

That water pump was completely done for. I'd guess the only reason it might not have been leaking coolant out of the seep hole is the fact that the hole was completely clogged with road debris/grime/grease. Maybe it was leaking. It needed to come out.