How do you change valve cover gasket Kawasaki Vulcan 1500?

Answer 1

My buddy and I just changed the valve cover gasket on the rear cylinder of my 1994 Vulcan 1500. The manual and most wise mechanics recommend that you drop the engine, but we got by just lowering it. Detaching as little as possible (which was just about everything except the rear engine mount) and splitting the frame on the right hand side to drop it about 2 inches so we could get in there. This makes it much easier to get everything back together though since it's only a couple of inches out of place. We just used a couple of jack stands and a standard car jack to lower/raise the engine. The only down side of doing it this way is that you can't get a torque wrench in there so you have to guess the torque when you're putting it back together. We loosened/tightened the valve cover bolts by fitting the 10mm socket on it and clamping a vice grip on the socket since a standard size socket wrench won't fit. It worked pretty darn well, but was admittedly very unprofessional. It took us about 5 hours - though we could have saved an hour if we had a motorcycle lift.

Hope this helps a bit.