Powervalve Cover bolts rattling out

Front Royalty

Front Royalty

New member
While riding my '12 EC300E yesterday I noticed what sounded like the exhaust manifold fall off the bike. Inspected the exhaust and found that 2 bolts (both of the forward most bolts) holding the left hand PV cover had rattled completely out allowing exhaust to exit the cylinder head. Bummer. Took the bike home, replaced the hardware with stainless and applied anti seize, torqued hardware to spec (7-8 Nm). Ride 1 hr, bolts rattle out again! Loctite is obviously a bad idea on aluminum, so Im kind of stumped here. Im thinking some lock washers under the bolts may do the trick? Guess its worth a shot. Anyone else experience this? Thanks in advance!
 
Never had an issue. Never used a torque wrench. Just snug them up until they feel tight.

FWW though, I had an 8mm spacer fabbed up which I now run between the cyl and the original cover. Had to replace the bolts and then used some thin copper washers which work well. Same ones I use for the drain bolt on the coolant/water pump.
 
That is weird.....never had that issue before! I've used a oversized p/v cover and OEM and have never had them loosen up before.
 
use some brake-clean and compressed air to clean the holes before reinstalling the bolts with loc-tite, the spooge that finds its way into the bolt holes will prevent the loc-tite from bonding. 24hrs to cure. Use the blue, not the red or you'll never get them back off.
 
For something like that I would use the low strength 222 or pink. I use that more than the others as it's much easier to break them loose.
 
Found a couple of interesting tidbits upon further inspection. There are currently 2 pv cover gaskets installed. The manual calls for 1. Is this something set at the factory, kind of like the cylinder gasket stack? Also noticed that the bolts only make contact with half of the threads in the cylinder (10mm bolt thread length in a 20 mm deep hole).im going to install longer bolts for sure, to increase the amount of surface are making contact between the bolt and cylinder, in addition to the loctite 222. Anyone else see multiple gaskets on pv cover? Is this the backwoods/cost effective method of increasing pv cover volume?:D
 
There should only be 1 gasket. That in itself could be the problem as they may not be completely squished for lack of a better word.
 
That's not right on all counts, never should happen. One gasket and anti seize have always been fine.


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