It's 4:30 AM. I live in a place where no 450 DOHCs exist, let alone parts for them... I still read this entire thing. Fascinating and congrats Jay on your awesome work and engineering. Absolute work of art. LOVED the graphs as well.
My doctor told me to cut down on sodium intake, so I'll just have to trust you instead.
I will be using this one
Anyone who has rebuilt air cooled VW engines will know that over-torquing crankcase or cylinder head bolts/studs leads to case distortion and leaks.(even though +10% always seemed fine to me)
I can confirm. Have heard the horror stories and also have seen engines with so much sealant/gasket glue that mechanics didn't even bother checking the rest of the engine before the customer approved some working hours.
On the
sealer/glue/etc part, I'd like to add another option, although take this with a grain of salt as I only ever used it on small 2 stroke engines (although some of them were high compression ones, to be fair, and some of them ran on everything from synthetic 2 stroke, to a mix with castor oil to mineral).
If anyone knows better about this glue, please correct me.
Dirko HT from Elring - It's supposed to be some german stuff, should work until about 300c (572f), sillicone based.
Funnily enough, I heard about this glue from a friend of my father who works on stoves, he said he used that glue to put new glasses (or should I say glass panels? I don't know) into them.
Got an old tube from him one day, searched around, saw good things, some places indicated that it was created for sealing heads and engine cases, so I went ahead and used it on quite a few 2 stroke heads (that originally used aluminum gaskets before I modified them, installed them gently, very light layer on both the head and the cylinder)...
No issues at all, and when I removed them, initially the parts are stuck together, but when you split the parts apart (not much effort required), the glue is always still soft and is quite easy to remove after splitting the parts, can probably scrape it off with a plastic pick (I honestly usually just use an old rag).
Never had a single leak from those heads as well, and some of them had gone through hell, one or two with extreme carbon build-up.
Never used it in my CB450 SOHC as I'm a firm believer in my old mechanics teacher who once said (in a different language) "Don't put glue where a gasket goes, unless you have to put just a dot to hold the gasket in place" - But then again, I 100% understand these engines are old, and some of them battered and abused, so the surfaces might not be that great and could use a little help.
