Anyone here ever owned a Triumph 900 Daytona?

That's the old 885cc triple, and/or the more powerful Series III, not
the T509, T595 or the smaller 600/650/675s

Need a swift hand....

 

What's the problem? I've worked extensively on a couple of them and had
an 885 Sprint stripped right down. I've also got a factory manual for
them.

 

I think you're missing the point here. Think journalism and shite old
bike reviews.

 

Ding

 

A mate of mine has the 900 Thunderbird. He's just been trying to get it
running after a lay up. Long story short, the backfire was so big it not
only blew the airbox to pieces and him across the garage floor, it also
set light to the bike.

So "reliability good if well maintained but some jobs are challenging
for the home mechanic"

 

It's obviously a Triumph thing - I had a old Bonneville like that

 

In that case I can confirm that most jobs are within the scope of the
competent home mechanic, as long as he has a decent quality T45 driver
bit and a factory manual. Nothing about them is overly complex and from
my experience of a 75K mile old 1993 Trident Sprint that had been
neglected for a vast portion of its life, the cylinder bores still had
very visible hone marks when I took the cylinder head off to replace
the head gasket.

Relacing the air filter is a PITA as it comes from the factory as an
expensive complete airbox asssembly, but Sprint Engineering do a
cheaper replacement filter element. This still requires you to remove
the complete airbox to do the swop though, which on a bike damn near 20
years old is a job and a half when the inlet rubbers are like concrete.

Other than that they are easy to maintain.

 

I know all about that - my Trophy 1200 had the same lunatic airbox
design. Carbs-off job and something like two hours.

Yup. Except you absolutely have to lock the crank up when you've got
the camchain slackened off and are removing or replacing the valve
shims. With the 120 degree crank, it *will* try to "roll on" and the
camchain *will* try to jump the lower sprocket (and succeed). Happened
when we were doing Niall's T'bird. Luckily, there's enough slack in
the camchain, with the tensioner off, just to hook it back on
correctly, as long as one of you has a death-grip on the nut you use
to turn the engine over.

I think the Haynes BoL advocates using a piece of timber jammed into
the engine sprocket or something.

 

Sounds awful.

But don't you hoick the shim out whilst depressing the follower / cam
bucket with the cam lobe pointing outwards ?

Why would you loosen the cam chain ?

Paul.

 

zymurgy wrote:

I'm pretty sure that's what I did when changing valve shims on the
Daytonas.

I only did this when replacing the head gasket on a Trident Sprint -
everything had to be lined up again afterwards anyway, so locking the
crank wasn't essential at that point.

 

Ah, good question! I remember now. We had a Truimph valve shim tool -
the thing for depressing the bucket - but it was the wrong type and
didn't fit, so we just removed the cams (which is often a quicker way of
doing it anyway).