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P700 Pioneer 700 Valve Adjustment Guide

Montecresto

Montecresto

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Just having the pics to look at before starting the job. It does start easier when hot. Before I adjusted them, it used to take a few cranks if I had just turned it off a few minutes and tried to crank again.

Just got back from a 6 day hunting trip, was nervous the first few miles, but she ran like a top for 380 miles.
Well indeed, if it was hard starting when warmed up you sure needed the adjustment.....glad you completed it, had the help you needed and that it’s running good now. ;)
 
Guitaraustin99

Guitaraustin99

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Just adjusted my valves using this guide. Very easy to do (I’ve never messed with valves before.) Thanks for the guide!
 
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HeyWatchThis

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Just bought a 2014, 700-4 and haven't gotten the service manual yet but wanting to do full service before much use. Saved a lot of time finding out what needed to be removed. Much appreciated and well done!
 
DG Rider

DG Rider

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Just bought a 2014, 700-4 and haven't gotten the service manual yet but wanting to do full service before much use. Saved a lot of time finding out what needed to be removed. Much appreciated and well done!
FYI, the 2014 m/y service manual can be found in PDF form on the interwebs for free with a little searching...:D
 
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HeyWatchThis

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FYI, the 2014 m/y service manual can be found in PDF form on the interwebs for free with a little searching...:D
Thank you DG Rider, I will look around. In the past I have been successful at finding service manuals for several different things I've owned. Thanks for the welcome and the info.
 
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Shadmejean1

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Is there a way to tell if your valves need adjusted ? I hate to take this thing apart and them be ok
 
OneBadGADawg

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It’s not possible to know anything without doing the step by step inspection per the repair manual. Good news is that it really can be done in under 120 minutes and I think it’s a small price to pay for the piece of mind. Is it a Honda and is it likely you’ll find no adjustment is required, yes. Is it worth gambling 2 hours of your time on a good engine, no.
 
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Timberland1

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Good write up. Tip: remove the spark plugs, zero compression, crank won’t rotate away from you at TDC, standard procedure and you should be looking at the plugs anyway.
 
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amhielkema

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I called the service department at Village Motor Sports in Grand Rapids, MI yesterday to schedule an appointment to get the valves adjusted for my 20hr maintenance on my 2018 P700 and I was told by the guy in the service department that I was wasting my money and that he has never heard of one where the valves needed to be adjusted so I didn't make an appointment.
 
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DG Rider

DG Rider

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I called the service department at Village Motor Sports in Grand Rapids, MI yesterday to schedule an appointment to get the valves adjusted for my 20hr maintenance on my 2018 P700 and I was told by the guy in the service department that I was wasting my money and that he has never heard of one where the valves needed to be adjusted so I didn't make an appointment.
Several 700 owners have stated that they found the valves out at the first adjustment. I highly recommend that you Do not skip the first valve adjustment!
If you want to skip the ones after that...that's your business. After break in they tend to stay put pretty well.
 
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HondaTech

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I called the service department at Village Motor Sports in Grand Rapids, MI yesterday to schedule an appointment to get the valves adjusted for my 20hr maintenance on my 2018 P700 and I was told by the guy in the service department that I was wasting my money and that he has never heard of one where the valves needed to be adjusted so I didn't make an appointment.

700 valves are always out of adjustment at the first service.
 
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amhielkema

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Thanks for your support. I called Fox Powersports and scheduled an appointment to have the valve adjustment done. They agreed to do it for $150.
 
William

William

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I’m checking valves today, with this guide... Anyone want to come do it for me? I pay in alcohol...
 
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jwfirebird

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maybe if you were a bit closer, really by far the easiest machine ive ever had setting valves, the prarie and can am you have two cylinders and you cant get your hand in or see either cyl. the honda is so easy once you get the covers off the first time and deal with the lock tite thats alot harder that checking the valves on this

mine were not out i checked it this week and because of the stripped screws and needing to use it i didnt do it at the first service, its 500 mi and about 70 hrs, and they were good.
 
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William

William

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026B04EB 9266 43B9 97D7 EF75518B13F2
Not bad yet...
 
RB3offroad

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Disclaimer: This guide was intended to help walk 700 owners through the valve adjustment procedure. You must decide if you have the skills necessary to perform this procedure, and act accordingly. (Translation: This does not make a lube tech a master technician, and if you screw up your machine, I take no responsibility. Know your limits.)
Additionally, it was written for a 2014 M/Y machine (the only year in existence at the time). The 2015 and newer are almost certainly identical spec wise, but it is up to YOU to confirm this before proceeding.

Now that that's out of the way...

I finally got around to putting together a valve adjustment guide for Pioneer owners who are willing to give it a go yourselves. If you are not comfortable with any part of this, i suggest you take the machine to your dealer ( or indy shop ) and let them perform the task. If you want to save some coin, you could always strip the plastics yourself, and the shop should give you a break.

Unfortunately, some shops never perform a valve adjustment during a "service" unless you request it.

You will need basic metric hand tools with metric sockets and wrenches of 8, 10, 14mm, etc. A 17mm is needed to turn the crank. A flat and Phillips screwdriver as well.
 
You will also need a 6mm hex bit or wrench for the timing mark inspection hole plug. DO NOT USE A TORX OR "CLOSE-TO-IT" STANDARD HEX, or you will strip out the plug.

Less common tools you will need:
You will need a 24mm socket or wrench for the crankshaft hole cap ( to turn the engine over ). Socket would be easier, and can be bought individually at Sears for not much $$$.

A set of feeler gauges with the proper sizes: .15mm ( .006 in ) & .32mm ( .013 in ). Cheap gauges may not have these sizes.

A torque wrench with the proper range of 17 newton meters ( N.m ) or 155 inch pounds ( in-lbs ). 13 foot pounds ( lbf.ft ) is also the equivalent, but it is rare to see a foot pounds wrench that goes this low. You want these numbers in the middle of the TW's range, as accuracy diminishes at the extremes of a TW's range. This is to torque the adjusting tappet lock-nuts, which i strongly recommend.

You will also be removing about 1 million of those Honda plastic rivets. I use a flat screwdriver to remove them and stab my fingers at the same time. Honda does make a tool for this. I have never been tempted to buy it...until i worked on the Pioneer.

Finally, you will want to wear quality gloves, be it latex or whatever. Used oil causes skin cancer, and at the very least makes your skin look horrible. Latex also keeps the blood in when you stab your fingers while removing Honda rivets.

Valve adjustment intervals: First 100 miles or 20 hours, and every 600 miles/100 hours thereafter. Factory adds the cover your ass line of "...otherwise, only if noisy." to those intervals. Valves are to be adjusted at "room temperature"...IE cold. I let mine sit overnight.

Abbreviations we will be using:
FSM - Factory service manual.
TDC - Top dead center on the compression stroke. This is when the piston is at its highest point of travel during the compression stroke. This is where we adjust the valves.
Tight valve - one whose adjusting tappet to valve tip clearance is too small.
Loose valve -  one whose adjusting tappet to valve tip clearance is too great.
CYA - Cover your ass!

1st, wash your machine ( if you plan on it ) to prevent crap from falling in the open engine. Also plan on changing the oil afterwards for the same reason. Always cover openings if possible when not using them to prevent this. As you can see from the pics, i skipped the whole wash thing.

Most time consuming is simply to reach the valves. 2 seat owners may not need to do some of these steps.

Read through this whole post BEFORE you start!

Lets get started....

Remove the airbox cover (which is NOT present in this pic :D ;) ), NOT the airbox lid!

View attachment 53172

Then remove the seat bottom...

View attachment 53152

..and backrest...

View attachment 53153

Next, remove the plastic trim behind the driver's seat. This will start your adventure with the rivets. One screw as well...

View attachment 53154

Next you will remove all the rivets and screws from the drivers-side plastic surround on the top of the seating frame ( this is the plastic under the seat ), and remove the plastic.

Move to the passengers side rear step ( 4P only ) and remove it for access to the timing mark plug and crank access hole plug. If this is your 1st time, you might also want to remove the floorboard as well...but once you know what you are looking for, you won't need to remove the floorboard...

View attachment 53158

Using a 24mm socket or wrench, remove the crank access hole plug (1). Use a 6mm hex bit/wrench and remove the timing mark inspection plug (2)...

View attachment 53159

Now, move back to the top of the machine and remove the 2 valve access caps ( arrows ) with 2 each 8mm bolts...

View attachment 53157

Now you need to find TDC!

Finding TDC:

This is the easiest way to do this for me, and i can't see how any other way would be easier...

Insert a clean 17mm socket into the crank access hole on the back of the engine, and rotate the engine ( clock-wise only! ) until you see the intake valves open and close. If you don't know which are the intake, stop and take the machine to a dealer at once.

Anyway, once the intakes are closed, you are only approximately 180 degrees of crank rotation from TDC. Get down and start looking through the timing mark access hole as you slowly rotate the crank. You will need some light to see what you need to see, so a head-band type light is very useful here.

On the right ( vehicle front ) side of the hole you will see a small protrusion cast in the engine case in the vertical center of the hole. This is your alignment mark, and try as i might, i could NOT get a good picture of this.

As you rotate the crank, at some point you will start to see some letters and lines cast into the flywheel. You may also feel some increased resistance from compression. The 1st thing you will see is an "F", followed by a line. This is your key to the fact that you are very close to TDC. Shortly after the 1st line, you will see another line with a "T" above it. This 2nd line is what you want to align with the protrusion cast into the engine case...

BE VERY GENTLE WHILE ROTATING PAST THE "F" MARK, as the engine gets very easy to rotate at this point, and its easy to go past the "T" line, and once you do that, you get to start all over ( DO NOT ROTATE THE ENGINE BACKWARDS, EVEN A TINY AMOUNT ).

So this is the pattern with left being the bottom of the hole, and everything in quotations is what you will see in the hole as you rotate:
[Bottom of hole] <<<crank rotation <<< " F | | T" [Top of hole].

This is from the service manual of how it will look...(Please note that the letters will be rotated 90 degrees from this diagram, with the tops facing the front of the machine !)

View attachment 53164

EDIT: Thanks to @Rinconruss we now have a nice pic of this!

View attachment 53149


If you did this right, you are now ready to adjust. As i stated before, the engine rotates very easily at this point, so gently remove the socket you have been using to rotate the crank, so it doesn't get turned by accident.

Now head back up top to the valve access holes. Push/pull up and down on the rocker arms. You should be able to feel a very, very tiny amount of movement in the arms before they contact the valve tips. You may also want to try to insert the smallest feeler gauge you have to check this. IF there is no play, you may have messed up on the TDC find procedure, and should repeat it.

IT IS possible, however, that the valves have tightened up ( reduced clearance ) this much, especially if you have been having starting/performance issues. Repeat the TDC procedure, and if there is still no play, then you likely just have valves that have tightened up considerably.

Adjusting clearances:

Adjustment specs:
Intake: .15mm +/- .02mm ( .006 +/- .001 in ).
Exhaust: .32mm +/- .02mm ( .013 +/- .001 in ).

Now we are to the hardest part of describing how to adjust valves, because it can be hard to put into words just what needs to be done here.

Study this picture...

View attachment 53150

...and you can see what we are trying to adjust here, but there are some pitfalls. We want to measure the gap between the valve tip and the adjusting tappet ( or screw, in this picture ). What we don't want to do is have the "feel" of that gap thrown off because of putting our feeler gauge in at an odd angle due to our access windows. This becomes more likely with thicker feeler gauges, so the exhaust side of the Pioneer can be a little difficult to judge. For this reason, i bend the tip of my feeler gauges a bit to get a good straight angle between the tappet and valve tip.

Select the proper feeler gauge for the valve you are trying to adjust, and try and insert it between the valve and tappet. If its the right size, it may be hard to insert at first, but should move easily after you get it started.

View attachment 53161

Again, the drag on the feeler can be hard to describe, and honestly, probably varies from person to person. Remember this one tip when it comes to valve adjustments: Unlike most things in life, when it comes to valve clearance, too loose is preferable to too tight. Loose valves ( within reason ) are likely to only make noise ( this is not a license to run way loose valves, BTW ). Tight valves are more likely to cause serious engine damage and performance issues.

Now, the best way I've heard the proper feeler drag described is to imagine pulling a sheet of paper out of a thick dictionary. The FSM also offers the tip of judging the drag while pulling the gauge, not pushing. If you get a light drag on the gauge, then you are lucky, and no adjustment is needed. Repeat for the other valves. If they are the same, button the machine back up and go buy a lotto ticket.

If the feeler gauge cannot be inserted, has a ton of drag or none at all, you are going to have to adjust the clearance. This is done by loosening the lock-nut and rotating the tappet with a flat screwdriver...

View attachment 53162

...If you are doing the intakes, you might want to unplug the fuel injector harness, since it takes up real estate that the wrench wants to occupy, and you don't want to break it off. Remember to plug this back up before turning the key on, or you'll get a code...

View attachment 53160

Remove your feeler gauges while adjusting the tappet screw, as you don't want to dimple them. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule to doing this, and it doesn't take much of a turn to change the gap pretty significantly. Furthermore, tightening the lock-nut ( even while holding the tappet ) also changes the clearance minutely. Trial and error are really the only way to get this right, but you will quickly catch on...

Turn tappet, then snug down the lock-nut with a wrench. Re-check, until proper feel is obtained. It may take many tries to get it right...
Once you get the right feel, move on to any others that might need to be done.

Once done, i strongly recommend you use a torque wrench on these lock-nuts. If they come off, it will fubar something expensive pretty quickly. The last time a veteran Honda tech did this by "feel" i got lucky and only had the lock-nut land in a recess in the head of my VF500F Interceptor. Use a torque wrench.

Valve adjusting tappet lock-nut Torque: 17 N.m ( 1.7 kgf.m / 13 lbf.ft / 150 in.lbs ) Please the see note below on revised torque settings before torquing!

This is a "staged" shot. You should have a hand at the wrench head acting as a pivot...

View attachment 53163

Tip:
My service manual for the 450S Foreman lists this torque in a range of 144-150 inch pounds ( in.lbs ). It used the exact same adjusters and lock nuts. For reasons why you might want to use the lower setting, see the next tip...

Tip:
Experience has shown me that no matter how carefully your torque these lock-nuts, they eventually strip. Once the torque wrench makes its' torque, the nut should stop turning, and not turn again when you reapply the same amount of torque. If it turns every time you hit the same reading, it is stripping, and i do not trust it to stay put. At that point, i replace the tappet and lock-nut. They are cheap, and I'll post part numbers in the future.
NOTE: After repeatedly stripping the lock-nuts, I have revised this torque setting down to 130 in.lbs on my machine with no issues. The lock-nuts simply cannot repeatedly take the recommended spec for torque.

Not tip?
It used to be recommended that anytime you adjust "forked" rocker arms like the Pioneer has, a feeler gauge be used under BOTH tappets at all times. This obviously requires 2 sets of feeler gauges, and is done because if the rocker didn't contact both vales at exactly the same time, the rocker would twist slightly in the clearance it had on the rocker shaft, and might not result in perfectly adjusted valves.
I used to adhere to this religiously, but i have dropped that technique in modern times. For one thing, there is little room for two gauges on this machine, and for another, i believe machining clearances have improved since the 1st generation Honda V-4's ( notoriously sloppy valve-trains ) to the point where this is not really needed. Adjust both sides of the rocker as close to each other ( as far as drag ) as you can, and i feel you will be A-OK. FWIW, i have never seen a Honda FSM even mention using 2 sets of gauges.

Once torqued, i like to check clearances again as they could change ( especially if you aren't locking the nut down very tight with a wrench before torquing ). Then, I like to rotate the engine a few times, then repeat the TDC procedure, and re-check clearances. Sometimes messing with the rocker-arms throws the valve-train out of alignment a bit, which can throw off the clearance. My 450 did this, and i always had to make the initial adjustments a little tight to get the final where i wanted it.
I have not seen this on my Pioneer, so it should stay the same. This last check is the final word on adjustments, and if all passes, you are done, and can button it up, change the oil, and go riding.

In operation, a light ticking noise is normal, so don't flip out if you hear that. No noise would be a bigger concern.

There you have the Pioneer valve adjustment. Just put everything back together.

Finally,
If you found this guide useful, PLEASE leave some feedback or just say thanks. This will show that it is being used and bump it for new users to see!
Thanks.
Nice write up!
 
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William

William

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Well the exhaust I could have left alone, but the intake was way off. I fit a .011 in them before I adjusted them... The way I did it is once I got them where the .006 and .011 felt good, I put the largest size I could in to kinda tell me I did them right. I could fit a .007 in the intake very tight, and a .008 wouldn’t go in. Same with exhaust, a .015 wouldn’t go in, .014 was very tight... Figured since looser was safer, this way was best. I’m glad I checked them!!!!
 
William

William

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I swear I picked up a couple of horsepower! Can’t beat that.... And it cranks way better than it ever has. Sometimes it just fires right off almost as soon as it turns over. Sometimes 2 engine rotations. It did take 4 rotations since I bought it new. Which tells me they were wrong since new... I think I will go re race that Polaris ranger etx 325cc that smoked me last time!!! LOLOL!!!
 
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