The obvious part sticking through the valve cover is what got me the deal. And thanks to a quick web search that lead me to this place I found that it is likely a simple and cheep fix.
I dug into it this afternoon and pulled what looks to be all of the parts of the weight out. It looks to have failed at the pivot point in the mechanism. When that broke it was tossed most of the way through the cover then the cam gear and chain ground their way about half way through the weight.
After I removed all of the weight pieces I reinstalled the weight mechanism on the cam (minus the weight and spring) and then dumped the oil and pulled the filter. Let me tell you there was a bunch of aluminum shavings in the filter housing. Because I found so much aluminum shavings I pulled the motor mounts and lifted the engine to gain access to the oil pump pick up screen. The screen is accessed by removing a 5 bolt pentagon shaped cover on the bottom of the engine. I’m glad I did too. The sump cover was full of shavings and about 1/3rd of the pick up screen was plugged. I cleaned the screen and cover then reassembled the sump, screen, and cover and reinstalled the motor mounts. Tomorrow I’ll pick up some cheep automotive oil and a 2nd filter so I can run it for a few minuets to flush any shavings through to the filter and then change it all again and fill it with good oil after my new valve cover gets here Tuesday.
That brings me to my question. What are you guys running for oil? I picked up can-am oil at the dealer when I got the filter Friday. The reason I ask is, I run maxima in the rest of my bikes. Any thoughts?
While I am doing this I’m going to change the diff oils. I was planning on running Royal Purple 75W-90 in the front and 75W140 in the rear. Any thoughts on that?
So it looks like I’m done working on it until the valve cover gets here. Lets hope I got a deal and don’t have to rebuild the engine. But then again if I do, then I get to build an engine!
One last thing. This cam weight failure appears to be fairly common on the 400’s. If any of you have to deal with this, I strongly recommend pulling the sump cover and screen. There was a lot of crap in there. The screen is very fine and it sure wouldn’t take much for it to plug up and starve the engine of oil.
Jason
