And welcome to the bike that has become a stone around my neck. This is a neighbor’s low mileage, low hours 08 420FE Rancher that "ran when parked" nine months or so ago. He asked me to clean the fuel tank, throttle body, change the oil, install a new battery and get it running. Right . . . . . !!

Two bent valves replaced later and a bore to the next oversize, the engine was discovered to be far out of timing and still hitting a valve. But the timing chain, tensioner and tensioner arm were all in good shape. The tensioner still had lots of push remaining and the teeth on the timing gear were all in good shape.

But looking at the shop manual, it could not be brought into proper timing the normal way. The pressed on timing gear on the end of the camshaft has spun about 90 degrees or so from normal. This leaves the exhaust valve widely open to the point of hitting the piston.

This is a bike that has had pititful oil service and had very sticky valves in the valve guides due to unburned fuel varnish. Our theory is that a valve stuck badly and when I hit the starter button after installing a new battery . . . . things spun on that camshaft. I will procure a new camshaft starting tomorrow because there’s no way to reindex this one and I’m not installing it "wrong" to get the timing "right".

Anybody ever heard of anything like this?

Rick