The first major maintenance I’ve done on the Super Tenere is the Valve Check that’s required every ~26000 miles. I’m a couple hundred miles early, but wanted to get it out of the way during the winter while I’m not riding it anyway. The basic steps are pretty common for a valve check, but getting to the valves on this were a lot harder than on the F650. It took about 4 hours of work to get it taken apart far enough to actually make the measurements. This was the first time, and I’m sure I’ll do it faster next time, but it’s still a pain. I then waited 2.5 weeks to get the new valve pads (next time I’ll try and find them locally) and about 3 hours to put it all back together. At least it should have only taken 3 hours, in reality, I screwed it up pretty good. After putting the new pads in you’re supposed to rotate the engine several times to seat everything before confirming the measurements. When I did this I forgot to put the cam chain tensioner in first so the chain skipped messing up the timing. I then wasted almost a whole day between researching, swearing, and doing the same steps over and over again trying to get everything back correctly. Thankfully I eventually did get it figured out though, and I now know a whole lot more about that motor.
In the end the intake valves were all in spec but all of the exhaust valves were tight so I guess it was worth the trouble. Hopefully I’ll get to do it again next winter. Next up is cleaning up and powder coating the rack I built for the aux tank and redoing the auxiliary lighting wiring.