I bought a 1992 Kawasaki Balius just under a month ago and have just recently realised the value of checking history of a second hand bike thoroughly - the person who sold it to me didn't mention a million things that were coming up in terms of bike maintenance, and he also left out the fact that he did an engine swap about 10000km ago, so I have no idea what the kms of the current engine are. Anyway, the reason for this post is because I've just found out that the compression is really low in my engine, to the point that it won't start/one of the cylinders won't even register when tested.
Firstly, I wondered if anyone had a Kawasaki Balius engine for sale? I just bought one which turned out to be no good because there was carbon all around the valves etc. and oil was coming out of the exhaust ports, which the mechanic at Norjo's said meant that the o-rings around the pistons were leaking but which the fellow who sold it to me said had happened just because the bike had been lying on its front for a while.
Secondly, what is your diagnosis of the situation? The Norjo's mechanic said that it was very likely that compression was out because of carbon build-up in the valves causing them not to close properly, but it seems weird that it happened all of a sudden because as far as I could tell the bike was running reasonably well before (apart from a bit of popping from the engine when the throttle was fully opened up after warming up, I don't know the reason for that) except for earlier that night when either the spark plugs fouled up or I guess carbon stopped the valves from closing - either way after 5-10 minutes of revving the engine with the idle rate pushed up to 4000rpm it was working okay again. Later that night I dropped the bike, but it wasn't at a very high speed and I didn't collide with anything. That is when it stopped running. The mechanic said the other possibility was the valves being bent or something, but that also seems unlikely to me because a) all of them would've had to have been bent at once I would think (though maybe not because it was only one cylinder that didn't register any compression, the rest were only below 90) and b) I wouldn't have thought that the bike was dropped at a high enough speed to do internal damage to the engine.
I did also just find out that the previous owner was very rough with the bike, thrashing it everywhere, and the mysterious engine transplant could have left me with an engine which has done horrific amounts of km.
What do you think the problem is? Carbon preventing the valves from closing? Shonkered valves full stop? Or even o-rings? I don't know whether or not the mechanic repeated the compression test after putting a couple of drops of oil in the engine to test that.
Anyway, any help would be appreciated, I've been having a really poor run with motorcycles recently and I'm just hoping to hurry up and resolve this.
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i'll hook ya up.
Originally Posted by Anthrax
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