Kawasaki H2 Cassette Transmission Replacement.

Well hello and welcome back to GearHead Geeks where in this episode we are going to be replacing the transmission in a Kawasaki Ninja H2. This is a tale of woe so I will explain what happened as when once we start taking the bike apart. So stay tuned and watch the whole transmission replacement on this bike. So first things first is here is the transmission that is going to go in to the H2. It is a transmission out of an H2 SE and the reason I'm putting this in here is because of the fact that the gear ratios from third on up are exactly the same. But the gear ratios in first and second are slightly taller making this a much not a much but a closer ratio gearbox than the other one. And this is a good thing because to be honest with you first gear on my bike is pretty much useless unless you want your front wheel in there. I mean you can't touch the throttle without it just doing a wheelie. Second gear was a bit too short and it made it a bit hairy coming out of corners in second and you know you just give it a little throttle and the front wheel's up in there mid corner and that's you know okay for the most part but it's just a little too easy a little too hard to control excuse me. So a little bit taller gearing in second and first will make this thing much better so but the transmissions are identical other than that. This thing's a thing of beauty to be honest with you. But the real question is why oh why am I replacing it? Not because I want better gear ratios no what happened was put this in there you know what happened was I was getting ready to go for a ride and now getting ready I went for a ride on on a beautiful day Sunday was a very very nice day and I went up to Virginia City close to where I live and came down the truck route and stopped at a gas station and I shifted into second and it was going clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk and I pulled in the clutch and it stopped going clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk so what I did was I went and got some gas I finished getting some gas and then um I shifted into first and it was fine I thought oh something's going on here then I shifted in the second clunk clunk clunk clunk it real loud and you could feel it a vibration all the way through the through the bike so I thought uh-oh we have blown second gear so what I did is I got home I did is I when I shifted I shipped when I shifted in the first and then I would just hold the clutch in and shift in the third and that allowed me to um get home get home because I just went in third and beyond and once I got it home I chucked again and second gear was still clunking very very loudly and you could feel it it was a really really bad um clunk so what I've probably done I've been very hard on second gear and what I probably did is um just blew a tooth off the second gear um this bike has got 84,000 miles on it so I've gotten the goodness out of that transmission and as hard as I've been on it because every single time I shift into second gear I try to wheelie it and that does take its toll after a while so anyway um we're gonna we're gonna put a new transmission in it we're gonna see what's wrong with it here because I haven't taken it apart yet obviously because I'm taking it apart now um but we're gonna take it apart and take a look and find out what's wrong and once we do you're going to be right along with me so hang on and I will start tearing off all the rest of this fairing and we'll drain the oil I've got to go to the other side and pull the counter shaft sprocket a few things but you'll see all of that okay starting with a perfectly clean drain pan perfectly clean I've wiped it out it is dry to the touch it is clean I'm going to drain the oil because I want to see if anything comes out and it pops right off and the gasket is still on there but I don't see any particulate in there at all it's just super clean which is nice means nothing really was grinding away in we will gently evenly remove these guys spring all right and now we can take our pressure plate off there is a bearing inside here you want to make sure you don't lose you don't want to lose anything obviously but okay so now we have a 27 millimeter here so we'll work on it I think what I'll do here is pull some of these plates out of the way when you pull the plates out just go on ahead and stack them up on the pressure plate and that makes it a little easier for you to put them back in if you need to what's going on there we go a little brute force and ignorance okay there's that I don't want to get this guy out of the way now I can pull this guy off and has the rest of plates on it and there's a big washer that goes behind that no problem at all and this guy can come off okay so here we are so to remove this we need to we're going to have to remove the super charger gear this guy here um it's like our oil pump stuff has got to come off but other than that looks like we can get it out of there hopefully okay so after a little bit of reading um they tell you that you need to remove the supercharger chain so that's this guy is going to have to come off the oil pump chain has got to be removed so this guy has got to come off um I believe this sprocket has to come off for the oil pump and then we can get at this stuff so first things first let's uh get these guides off of here I'm using a five millimeter I think I'm gonna have to break it break those loose with a something a little more substantial there we go break that one loose these have got loctite on them so I know that they can be a little stubborn but anyway we'll this guy off okay so now our little chain guard is here put those bolts close by I've got a another little basket here for parts kind of kind of keep them separate we don't need the big ones don't need to be in there but we'll keep these guys where they need to be okay here's our chain for our oil pump um again this gear is going to have to come off this guy's got to come off so let's get this guide out of here guide is off there's there are spacers in behind each both of these so you got to make sure you don't lose those or bolts back in and this will be that part so our transmission is here here's our supercharger um here I think I'm gonna have to pull the um tensioner off it sucks but oh well actually well we'll see let's uh get this guide off of here if I can all right that comes out of there this is where the tensioner goes but I think I can uh because of the fact there's no oil pressure behind it it it might be okay um I still may have to it we still may have to undo it and tension it up but for now um what we need here is a six millimeter need something with a little more oomph we can do it and there it comes loose all right good shooting okay supercharger gear is off there's a washer that goes in front of that so we will keep that together and we'll keep our list together I'm going to go count the teeth on that sc because they they sent that also but anyway okay I was correct the oil pump drive gear driven gear excuse me is it's got some marks on it but it is a left-hand thread so bolt over there so great and it's got loctite on it so okay so now our transmission is basically ready to come out all right that's a t40 let's see what we got here see how tough these are not bad okay so now we will wind these boys out here we go let's do a double we're just doing a double check and making sure that everything is out that needs to be out and so far it looks like we're ready to pull this transmission out we'll see what happens here when I yank on it not much I'm going to go to the other side and give it a few love taps and those few love taps has it coming right out okay here we go I still may have to tap on the other side a little bit but we'll see yeah I think so um I really don't want the supercharger gear to come out it doesn't look like it is go to the other side and a few more love taps that way all right so now just a few more gentle little taps everything is starting which is nice the other side and check it's come out okay nothing is holding it on here here it comes all right boys and girls the moment of truth here comes this transmission get this chain out of there and find out what went wrong so far it looks okay I don't know what happened yet so I'm going to move this over to the bench and there it is the broken tooth I knew it was a broken tooth I could tell and it is what it is now did it hurt the other shaft at all well to be honest it did it chewed this guy up a little bit now is it is it still usable yeah it could be but we don't need to we are going to be putting in our other transmission this guy here so the only thing that we need to do is we're pull this supercharger drive off let's go take a quick look inside let me grab a flashlight so we all can see what's going on and I want to know where that goofy oh here it is right there there is the tooth yep so our tale of woe the good part is that we didn't have to go digging around for the tooth that's great it just broke off clean it's laying right it laying right there and we are in wonderful shape got a little cleaning to do here and there our supercharger gear is all in good shape um everything looks nice oh yeah no sweat this is this is great stuff all right that was really not the worst job in the world so it is the next day and I've been cleaning up some of the stuff on the counter shaft side just getting all that chain lube and stuff that builds up in there out of there making sure all the seals are perfectly clean everything is nice we are ready to go on ahead and put in our new transmission the new transmission I've been just making sure everything is wiped down and everything is good um I cleaned out and made sure that there is no debris or anything that had come out of the old transmission which it didn't it was a clean break there was no extra particles in there I've run through everything with a magnet so we're in good shape the oil has been drained anyway so we are ready to go ahead and start putting this bad boy back together so I will get things arranged and we will start in okay ready to we are ready to push our transmission in here we go and it's uh should be a fairly straightforward operation hold on for a minute okay here we go so I just need to uh push this in gently it's uh it's not the lightest thing in the world that's for sure so we'll take this by this shaft and we're just going to kind of get things going into and get them started look in there there you go it's going in make sure everybody's lined up yep okay and this has to go over the supercharger shaft make sure that's all lined up this is all lined up we're uh we're off a little bit there we go push in a little more one over the supercharger shaft I uh want to keep this gasket from moving around too much because it's brand it's actually a brand new gasket I just put it in a little while ago I was checking something in there making sure the clutch was okay which it all right well here we go keep on going here so far so good and there it goes it just popped right into place wow sweet how's that boom boom boom we were in neutral and everything is looking really nice super free everything is looking just wonderful I love it so I'm going on ahead and going to be putting in these bolts um I checked and they are 15 foot pounds so we will torque all those guys down to 15 as soon as we get them all in so nowhere in the service manual could I find an order for this so we're just we're just going to go on ahead and we're going to just go on ahead and torque these guys to 15 foot pounds that's what we're going to do let's start here let's go across and we'll go up here and we'll go down here all right our transmission is in and we are just about ready to start putting on the shift mechanisms okay and we're going to put in our shift shaft there's a washer here make sure that goes in because it got stuck on there and fell down so whenever you're doing that make sure that washer is amongst you and then this guy can just go straight in here and I wobble it back and forth so when it gets to the seal it it doesn't want to bind up on anything so we just take this guy we're going to get you need to go there's a pin and goes in between the spring and you just pop that in and it is good to go so the next thing we're going to be dealing with is a supercharger here's a supercharger chain now I had just changed this chain oh a few thousand miles ago just because and it was just for a maintenance thing I wanted to make sure it was okay so this is a brand new chain but it needs to go up inside and over the supercharger gear and it can be a little fiddly because you're blind and you just got to kind of find the gear and get it up over the top oh there it goes I do believe we got it yes we did so our chain is on so the next thing we got to do is we got to put on our supercharger gear now I'm not going to tighten it down but I do need to put the chain on and the supercharger gear and this is a stock size and this is all about getting the tensioner back in all right so our supercharger gear is on now this okay so I had to loosen up the tensioner for the supercharger chain to get it at least loose I had to pull the tank up a little bit and I still have to get it out to reset it but it won't stop us from putting all the rest of this together so now the the top adjuster can go in and we can then go on ahead torque it down and then go on ahead and put in the bottom guide and this is going to be should be simple enough let's take our five millimeter 89 inch pounds and we'll get that guy torqued in and there's 89 inch pounds just like the book says all these six millimeters all seem to be 89 foot pounds in here okay then we need to take this guide which goes underneath the supercharger chain and we'll get it started and you have to kind of work them both like that we'll go on ahead and wind these down and we'll wind this guy down and we'll wind this guy down and again with 89 inch pounds all right so our supercharger chain tensioner and guide are in the supercharger gear still has not been torqued down let's get the um let's get the oil pump put back together here and so to do this it's not really hard you take your chain here and it goes around this and then what you do is there is a this guy here goes on here and then you can take your oil pump driven gear and then what you have to do with this is you make sure that there's a there's an in and out on here so make sure the out is it says right on it out so you just go on ahead and you put this guy in place and it's a little fiddly and there it is okay so our supercharger i mean our oil pump chain is on there's a guide that goes in here so we will get that guide in place and it just has two of these shoulder bolts in it and it can only go on the one way i think okay so we've got the guide in um sorry the camera died again i seem to do that a lot but again we need to torque our guys down to 89 inch pounds we'll get that in that one's done this is the supercharger chain done and okay so the next thing we need to do is we're going to put on our oil pump gear and i'm going to clean up the threads with some a little bit of contact cleaner i've already cleaned up the bolt we'll just clean up the bolt again why not one more time not gonna hurt anything now i'm gonna take some blue thread locker and put some on exactly where the factory had put and we'll put a dab of blue thread locker on there maybe there we go we're getting some now good and now this is a left-handed so when you screw it in you turn it to the left to get it tight we'll wind it down like we normally do but this time we'll be turning to the left okay and take our torque wrench 89 inch pounds gear and get that i'm gonna hold this like this and here we go 89 inch pounds very good we're good so our oil pump is in there's a little bit slack in there but that's okay um i had replaced this chain previously so it's fairly new so our oil pump is in our supercharger gears are in we need now need to get the supercharger gear loctited properly so what we're going to do here is again on this we need to and this guy's got a oiling hole in it so you got to be careful of that and so we're going to get this guy clean first just like we did the other so that whatever and now i'm going to get this guy cleaned up so it's perfect again too so our supercharger calls for some non-permanent locking agent so we got our blue loctite ready throw some of that on there make sure we got a good we know our bolt is clean and this gets torqued to 15 foot pounds okay 15 foot pounds we're all set so the next thing to do is our shift shaft is in this is torqued down properly these two guys are torqued down properly our tensioner is is uh what it is i got to pull that thing out that's going to be a lot of fun but anyway so we've got all that everything is torqued down this is torqued down so we are ready to start putting up put our clutch on okay to install our clutch we first put it whoops there's a big bushing that goes on first it goes right up against the the oil pump piece this there's a bearing that goes on that and then you can take this and put your clutch on okay and the clutch engages into the to the the drive on the engine but the next thing you have to do is you have to rotate the um oil pump and i'll pull that back out and get it out of sync okay so you put this in and the clutch basket isn't all the way in what you have to do is rotate the oil pump so that it engages into the clutch and there it is and you heard it pop in okay so once your clutch basket is in you then put in this big washer you can then put on the clutch hub there is a washer with a bunch of teeth in it and i think what they did is in 2018 they changed it a little bit um it used to have some sort of dampening device in there so you've got that and then what you're going to end up with is putting on the nut and this nut's got a little it's been kind of has a little portion of it that's beat in a little bit so that it kind of catches on the thread and kind of self locks um they tell you to replace it every time but you can you can beat that back in and get it so that right now see it's the nut is stopped because it's binding on the threads like it should and so all that we need to do is um wind this in and we'll be good to go the first things first is we need to lock our our clutch holder in i want to get you don't want to do it too tight you just want to have it good enough to hang on to it it doesn't slip off okay and this is going to hit up against here so when we put the torque wrench on it it will have something to hold on to so i have set the torque wrench to 96 foot pounds i don't know if you can see that but it's uh 95.9 we're going to go with 96 so we're just going to wind this bad boy on and it popped right off but anyway that's okay it was buzzing at us now the first thing we need to do is we start with the fiber because it goes up against the clutch hub and there's a little um there's a ring underneath there and we can just start throwing these guys in and they go in this way there's one then we put in and if you ever put in a clutch plate a steel plate there's kind of a rounded edge and then there's a sharp edge the sharp edge always goes out that's the way they come from the factory and so one would assume that's what they you're supposed to do and i read that in one of the service manuals somewhere clutch pusher so clutch pusher goes in there's a bearing that goes on that this goes in here now we can put this on so we've got our disc engaged into there and this guy just gets pushed on into its holes okay and we'll get now you take your clutch springs put everything in there by hand get them started into the right spots there you go push this in a little bit and then you can just start these by hand make sure they start by hand and they go in because if you don't do it um it's really easy to strip them gently just kind of work them down try just do you got them wound down okay and then 89 inch pounds like every other six millimeter bolt one two and three done so in preparation for putting the cover back on what you want to do is what i did is i took a plastic razor blade and they tell you you need to put some sealant around any kind of grommet or where the cases come together in this case it's right there and right there so i just took this plastic razor blade scraped off the old sealant pretty well and then i'm just going to take a little bit of acetone and i'm just going to wipe things down make sure it's all cleaned up in those areas we'll just give it a little bit of a wipe good cleaning then for whatever um my my go-to sealant is yama bond number four um honda makes a number four bond and i i think it's the same thing um but this stuff is a good color for around cases and it actually works extremely well is it just does a good job of sealing so we just put a little dab here and a little dab right here and that's it that's all we need to do for for sealing that up we're ready to put our case back on okay so here's our case screws and i'm going to put one here and i'm going to grab another one right here and this is just to hold the gasket in place while we put this in up up there there's one and number two okay good and again 89 inch pounds we're just going to start here that's done case is all on everything's in its proper place a bit of a wipe and just an fyi um you can remove the um supercharger tensioner without removing the throttle bodies it ain't easy but you can do it so to begin the assembly of of our final drive side what we need to do here is um first things first is um you put in your clutch push rod make sure it's clean make sure you don't damage any seals when you go in with it just and it it you have to kind of fiddle with it to get it all the way in then there's this uh guard now i put the guard on loosely at first it it sits in there it sits on some dolls but sometimes it's very hard to get the sprocket on there with this in place so you just can kind of leave it loose all right so the first thing we need to do is get our um gear indicator sensor in place um it's there's an o-ring that goes around it make sure you've got that but you have to kind of work this back and forth until the until it indexes in so get our get your spacer and this should have just a little bit of oil on it to run that seal yeah we don't want to run up against a dry seal there that'd be silly so we'll put this guy on and slide them in and perfect okay now we can put our sprocket on slide it over you can just turn the wheel wherever i need it hopefully there it is all right so our guard is on our sprocket is there okay we have a lock washer for this we have our nut make sure your lock washer is engaged in the teeth our nut and we are going to be retorquing this thing to 105 foot pounds now let's see if we can get this guy in there like i say it's a royal kind of a royal pain to do this hose gets in the way but it comes around and then finally but once you do you get that you get it kind of lined up so we'll get our gasket on in its proper place push this on now the clutch the clutch may um it may have to be um dealt with a little bit because what happens is the um the fluid starts flowing downhill and you can um it will kind of push the slave cylinder out a little bit okay so it's in place so now all that we need to do there's a couple of a couple bolts that go in there okay tight that one tight okay so continuing on our clutch is all assembled everything works perfect that's in great shape um we've got our gear shift selector in the right place all all bolted down ready to go everything is all cleaned up um i haven't put this on yet but uh we need to torque this now there's a couple ways that you can go about this you can find some tools and grab onto it and try and torque it to 100 foot pounds excuse me 105 foot pounds and mess around with it and yeah it's it's and if you don't have a big torque wrench it can be a pain but there's another alternative and it's called a torque stick and these torque sticks are familiar to a lot of mechanics and what they do is you can put this on a half inch drive um gun like this it has a ton of power and you want to do that but put your socket on there put this guy on here and it will limit the torque that it it distributes to whatever size the torque stick is so here we go we've got our torque stick and just all you got to do is just kind of hit it so it stops and we are at 105 foot pounds it's just that easy the torque sticks are available on amazon they've been they are very very well tested they've been around for a long long time uh they're relatively accurate they're about within 10 percent which is good enough for a sprocket like this so consider that instead of doing something else and look how fast i did it i just boom boom boom i'm done and we'll then go on ahead and crimp over our um let's do it in the same place it was before a little closer how about that one yeah that's good and one more okay not going anywhere torque correctly super simple and away we go so let's get this guy lined up i believe he sits something about like that it was level when i noticed it was level when i took it off so you got to pay attention to those things and here's the bolt that goes in it nice nice everything's good everything's nice and tight wonderful so now then this guy just goes on and okay so we're ready to put some oil in this thing i think i'll put the oil in before i put on all the fairings and whatnot so that we don't they're not in the way but one of the hardest things you can do on an h2 is get oil in this thing without making a giant size mess this is a silicone funnel and it's basically for cooking i guess and these things you can just kind of flex them in and it does make life a ton easier to put oil in so i'm just going to go on ahead and start gripping in some oil here and we got a whole gallon in there without spilling a drop how cool is that and we'll have to run a little bit to check our oil level and we'll top it off if we need to put in some more and now we can go on ahead and start putting on the fairings and the only thing you have to do on this one is need to oops there's a hose that goes on to the um radiator because this is the overflow tank is in the fairing you just push this guy on these on then you can go on ahead and hang the fairing on there it'll kind of hang in place and the first thing you do with these is there's a you can snap it in so it's held in place and we can just start putting in the screws so we're all set everything is all done we're ready to start this thing so here we go everything's put back in nice get our key in and we will be able to the supercharger chain's going to make a little noise because it needs to pressurize but everything should be okay i think we're all good and away we go we are done the only thing left to do is clean up a little bit and then we'll go for a ride what it takes to put a transmission in a Kawasaki Ninja H2 um there are other Kawasaki's that also have that cassette style transmission so the operation is basically similar and even though this is not something you want to have happen to you with a broken tooth on a transmission i have been abusing this transmission for about 85,000 miles second gear has always been um one of my favorites for doing wheelies and it's kind of a you don't bang it you just kind of roll it on and the front wheel comes up and even at this altitude it does that you take it down the seat level and it's really nuts but anyway um the transmission broke so i found an SE transmission for a reasonable price and popped it in there um it is not a huge deal i mean the hardest part of the whole thing really was getting at the bolts for the supercharger chain and even though i didn't really film that very much it was just kind of one of those things where you're just gonna have to work a ratchet back and forth in there you pull it out and then you can re the whole thing comes out you reset it and pop it back in and just kind of fight those bolts but that was the worst part of the whole thing everything else was just basically a piece of cake straightforward boom boom boom go on through it so it's this is really to be quite honest a do-yourself job the bad part about the h2 is they don't want to sell you a different part so i had to get a whole transmission but the se transmission um is better suited for street riding so anyway thanks for watching um it's uh i know it's kind of a long video but you know if you go all the way through especially if you need to see how something looks um hopefully it's useful to you uh so again thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe like and we'll see you next time here on GearHead Geeks where we'll have something that isn't so much of a tail whoa so thanks for watching