Quote Originally Posted by tink View Post
All the air is out of the coolant system now & it runs good again. No smoke or steam out of the exhaust on the test drive up to 50mph even. So looks like she's all better now ~ Thanks again for the help!!!!
Awesome! Good to hear. How is the carb situation? Persistence does pay. The Mikuni is not a fun thing to pull apart and rebuild and I would definitely not recommend someone who hasn't stripped a carb before to pull this thing off their engine and take it apart without having a spare one handy. I would get one that looked tired and do an autopsy on it to see how its assembled and have a guide available while stripping it. A kit and a huge clean helps but it is usually the auto choke and the vac can on the secondary throttle butterfly that fails on these.

I have said it a number of times that I'm not a fan of the 4G5x engines because of my disdain of timing chains and the amount of work needed to replace them compared to a belt driven 4G6x. That being said, the Astron can handle scary amounts of abuse and neglect (they'll keep plugging along even when you can hear the timing chain flapping in the breeze) and the bottom ends are HD engineered. A friend of mine recalled that a healthy stock bottom end on these engine will hold its own in a fight up to 600 HP (geez, what were they thinking...) Not many 4 cylinder engines would handle half of that before bad things would happen to them.