Hi guys

Just bought a 91 GS500E, and doing a total restoration
The previous owner haven't been to nice to service the bike, and i have a bad feeling that it has gone way to long between fresh oil's
it has about 60.000 kilometers on the dash, and i was just wandering about the cam chain, when do you usually change it?
and how many kilometers should i expect to get out of it?

what are your experience?

Thanks

Rune 

Rune, as I recall, the cam chain isn't really a wear item. Keep running it till the cam chain tensioner runs out of adjustment. With that said, I bet there's a specification in the service manual for how much stretch is allowed. If it's in spec, keep going. My bet is that something else will break long before the chain.

Yeah i know...

It's just, i know that many people fit a new at somepoint, and it would be devastating if it got pulled apart...
what experience do you have with it? how many miles without problems on a chain?

Not trying to speak FOR burning1, but I'm pretty sure his avatar is him racing. So it would be safe to say he has put a LOT of hard miles on his cam chain.

And to my knowledge, the chain in a GS is endless, which means you have to split the case to get the chain around the crank.

yes its endless, but if you pull out the cams, you can use the old chain to pull a new one down and around the crank, and then just rivet the new one.
so its not that big a deal...

what im really looking to find out, is just what experience people have with their chain, if they have ever broken one, or how many miles they got so far without problems.
but thanks for the info anyways

Thanks, Big Rich. To be fair, my bike probably only has 7K miles at this point, and I've never owned a bike past 35,000K miles or so.  There are a lot of guys here who have put 50,000+ miles on their engines. Those are the guys who have the most experience with cam chain wear.

Oldest bike I've ridden had about 60K on the odometer, but was probably at 80K on the engine. I can say, that in the past few years of on-line motorcycle involvement I've never heard of a cam chain failure on any bike, I've never seen anyone replace it. I have seen plenty of cam chain tensioner failures, and heard of a few worn out or damaged cam chain guides, though.

Since motorcycle chains are sealed and constantly oiled, I'd expect an extremely long service life out of them, on par with the kind of service life we see from cam bearings.

Now that I think of it, the only cam chain failures I've heard of are from vintage bikes (pre 73). Cb360's have poor top end oiling and cb350's with terrible slipper tensioners that got chewed off. My CL175 had a cam chain sheared off, but that was on start up due to installation error. But those all lead away from chain failure. More like other design flaws in the engine.