My VFR800 is now 13 years old, and I've had it for 10 of those, and the valve clearances have never been feedled with in that time. Checked a couple of years back, and still in spec. Now sitting on around 100,000 km.
I've had 7 other Hondas: only two (2!) didn't have noisy camchains: one (90 VFR750) had gear-driven cams, the other was a 2-smoke. One (VTR1000) had had a tensioner let go (almost always the front one, as it doesn't get any oiling) and lunched the cyliner and valves. Luckily, it was the previous owner. One of the first things I did was fit APE manual tensioners...
Honda are shit at camchain tensioners - they should give up (like their tensioners...)
The 3rd and 4th Gen VFR750's are the best: not too whiney, and you can flip the cams over and turn them into a twin-twingle, with no other mods required (sparkplugs fire every stroke). No such luck with the RC46; it's based on the RC45 and has the geardrive at the right-hand end of the camshafts, which is why it's so fecking noisy. And why they did away with it, because the cakemixer racket it makes is very hard to pass Euro noise regs with (i.e., IMPOSSIBLY loud). Took me 18 months to get used to the farkin' whining. No problem now - I always ride with earplugs in and music streaming from the phone via the Sena, so the cakemixer's just background noise (and somewhat drowned out by the Satantune anyway).
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