Katana engine strip

This week I took a very big step in life. And no, It didn't have anything to do with women, kids or houses.

Tempted by curiousity fed by "Jan Smit's Power Parts"-logo's on the cylinder head I decided to pick up the spanners and disassemble my Katana's engine. Well at least the head because after inspection trough the oil sump I haven't found any reason to suspect anything wrong with the clutch and/or gearbox.
External inspection had shown no modifications to the intake ports or cams so I was very curious about the engine capacity.
The previous owner had told me it had been rebored because the engine had started to use oil.

First I took my Haynes manual and read how to go about. First thing to do was to remove the bearing caps from the cams. Easy except for two bolts not wanting to go along so they snapped. A good beginning is half the work they say so if that'd be anything to go by I'd better stopped :-/
The trick with removing cams and also the head is take it easy. Slacken the bolts bit by bit, a quarter of a turn at a time.
After removing the camchain tensioner the cams were a lot easier to remove.

Remember: This article is not a guide how to do engine work but just a report to show my grandchildren how brave I was when younger ;-)

The bearing surfaces showed only minor wear marks in the caps, the cams and the bearings in the head looked perfect as to be expected from the most reliable engine ever to be produced.

After slackening the head bolts in the right order and removing them along with their washers the head was very easy to remove, no persuasion with big hammers or lumps of wood was needed.

Ofcourse the first thing I did was take the vernier caliper and measure the bores. Hmmm... only 73mm, only 1mm bigger from standard, resulting in 1104cc instead of 1074. Well at leas that makes it a real 1100!

The engine block needed some more persuasion to break free. Some taps with the plastic hammer along the base were enough to make it break loose.
Though I had cleaned the engine thoroughly before I couldn't prevent some dirt that had accumulated along the head bolts from falling into the crankcases when pulling the cylinder block up.

The bores and pistons are in good shape, the hone-marks in the bores are still visible and no serious wear marks.
I was stunned how much dirt was in the cylinders, don't know if it's all carbon buildup but I'm glad I decided to clean it.

The pistons are made by ART, OEM supplier for most Japanese bike/car manufacturers an commonly rated as one of the best. Wiseco and the likes are often criticized for high tolerances in the manufacturing process so I guess I should be glad to have some quality oversize pistons instead of just more cc's.

When trying to fish some dirtballs out of the crankcases I spotted a weld on the crank. Later I read on the internet (GS Resources) that GSX1100's built in the second half of '82 came with factory-welded cranks. Now this is great news because I had though many times about having the crank welded and balanced as a precaution but now I can safely get some more power out of the engine without the risk of the crank turning itself into knots.

Well so far so good, I am very happy to find my top-end in a good shape. A bit dissapointed about the amount of tuning that has been done but far outweighed by the healty condition of the engine and the discovery of the welded crank.

Next we'll start cleaning the lovely TSCC combustion chambers and pistons (will follow soon)