Smoking Lifan GY5

[wilserchinarider]

Well, I have had much enjoyment w/ my Lifan, and have put almost 2000 miles on it since purchased almost a year ago. Last December, I dumped the bike in a waterhole roughly 15 inchess deep, took 20 - 30 minutes before I could get it restarted, and then drove the 2-3 miles back to the hunt club.

The oil looked a tad milky so I changed it right away, and thought all was fine. Bike still runs well, but I have noticed that more often than not, I get a bit of smoke out the tailpipe for the first couple minutes of warm up.

Not sure if the waterhole incident is related? What would cause a bike like this to smoke a bit during warm up? Thanks in advance for any help! I think I have Rotella 14-40 oil in it...might have also topped up w/ 20-50? Thanks!

Mike

[FastDoc]

A little smoke on startup, common to Chinabikes, is more likely to be due to leaky valve guides/seals than anything related to the water hole incident. It may be more prominent with a synthetic oil, but even so it is safely ignorable and no big deal.

[2LZ]

We have a member here with a well-docmented account of a particular incident he had with a water hole.
If you spun water (and most likely muck) atround inside it, even for a short ride, that does not bode well for the rings and bore, etc...etc...
Luckily, they're cheap to rebuild.

[SpudRider]

If the bike runs well, and you are not burning a lot of oil, I wouldn't worry about it. ;)

Spud :)

[Thorgram]

Holy Deja vu! I almost thought my old thread had been resurrected! Identical thing happened to me except I was a big idiot and kept riding, got stuck again and didn't change the oil right away. I ended up changing out the piston, rings and head and gaskets. I got the whole lot for $40 or something like that so it was easier than taking chances. Mine was really messed up though, the smoke got worse as time went by to the point that it was raw oil coming out the tailpipe. A new exhaust fixed the smoke made by the left over oil. :)