A couple of weeks ago my WK400 Trail started ticking quite loudly on the way to the office (I use this bike as a commuter hack now). My first thought was the valves needed checked although it was unusual for the tick to just suddenly appear I didn't really give it much more thought. I rode the bike for a few more days and then last week I took the bike apart and went to check the valves.
Now you can imagine my surprise when I slowly levered the cylinder head off and discovered one of the camshaft bearings had almost slipped off the end of the cam. WTF!! How is that even possible??
After taking the cylinder head cover off I found my answer. The two dowel pins that sit at either end of the camshaft were not there!! How is that even possible in this day and age? I can just picture the guy in the Shineray factory going home and finding a couple of pins in his pocket
Amazingly the engine has not suffered any real damage except for a couple of nicks out of the cylinder head casing where the camshaft moved over and the cam lobes struck the casing, and caused the ticking noise that I thought was the valves.
So if anyone reading this has a WK or Mash bike, or knows anyone with one. Then I would highly recommend taking the cylinder head cover off to check you have the pins.
How can a brand new bike leave a factory nowadays with critical engine parts missing? What's maybe even more remarkable is that I made it to 2900 miles with no cam pins and the bike kept running even when the bearing had pretty much slipped off the end.
