Drain oil for valve clearance?

So this might be a stupid question - my new pig seems to be pretty noisy in the valve dept, so I was going to adjust them this weekend, but I got wondering how dry the dry sump really is- do I need to drain the cases before I pull off the left side cover, or is there just a little oil in there?

Any tips or tricks for valve adjustment would be welcome - the only other XR I've done the valves on was my 1985 XR600R, which was a much different machine than this one.

While I'm on the topic, are the valves fairly noisy on these things? The bike itself looks practically new, but it has a fair amount of clatter - I can't believe it would have enough miles to need rockers or a cam chain tensioner, but is there anything else that I should be looking at? It also occurred to me that it might be clattery because I am listening to it inside my garage, without a helmet on, so maybe if I were riding it would sound normal. Thoughts?

No need to drain the oil, you will find a little behind the cover which is normal.
There is a good guide floating around on the net for doing the valves.....here you go
http://www.xr650r.us/tech/valves.pdf
If it helps here's my bike ticking over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUgWKPRlJBQ

Erm, no, no oil at all behind the left cover as it is a 'dry' stator, however a very mild "sweat" is tolerable.
No, like in zero , backward turning when adjusting the valves as otherwise the auto-decomp may/will lift an exhaust valve.
Best is to remove the sparkplug, and easiest is to do following:
- turn until the INlets are fully down, then adjust the EXhaust valves
- turn until the EXhaust are fully down, the adjust the IN's
Check your work by trying to fit a size-up (thicker) feeler gauge in the gap, this should actually not be possible, and the correct one should just fit.
No rocketscience, just do it & get handy with it, that's all to become experienced.

Thanks for the responses, that was easy. I think the last guy must have rotated the motor the wrong way when he did it, as the right exhaust valve was WAY out of adjustment, but the other three were spot on. Sounds nice and quiet now.

The auto-decomp seems to be working differently as well - before adjusting, the decomp lever was pretty necessary to start it, and when I started it up afterwards, I didn't need it at all.

Well, actually, I did run into one challenge - when I pulled the stator cover off, the little retainer clip that keeps the stator wire away from the rotor fell on the floor and it took me about 20 minutes to figure out where it came from!

despres wrote:Thanks for the responses, that was easy.  I think the last guy must have rotated the motor the wrong way when he did it, as the right exhaust valve was WAY out of adjustment, but the other three were spot on.  Sounds nice and quiet now.  

The auto-decomp seems to be working differently as well - before adjusting, the decomp lever was pretty necessary to start it, and when I started it up afterwards, I didn't need it at all.  

Sounds like you need to adjust your valves.
You should still need to pull the manual decompression level in to move the piston beyond TDC.

The manual and auto decompression serve different purposes. The auto decompression prevents the motor from kicking back and trying to start back wards which would most likely break your leg.

AURORA wrote:
Sounds like you need to adjust your valves.
You should still need to pull the manual decompression level in to move the piston beyond TDC.

The manual and auto decompression serve different purposes. The auto decompression prevents the motor from kicking back and trying to start back wards which would most likely break your leg.

I don't doubt your knowledge, but I am not positive the valves warrant re-adjusting: My logic is this - There are two ways valves can be adjusted wrong - too loose or too tight. Too loose is noisy, and that was what was wrong with it before the adjustment. For the decompression issue that we are discussing, they would need to be too tight, effectively hanging the valve open at all times. For this to happen, I would not have been able to get the .008 feeler in there in ANY position, as I would have had to use the adjusting screw to force the valve open. I did double check that I could get the feeler in there after tightening the nut, and I could, so I do not think it is possible the valve is hung open.

Also, it fired right up on the first kick, so there is compression, the 'hard spot' in the rotation just doesn't feel as hard as it did before. It also sounds great, the adjustment completely eliminated the clatter that caused me to go in in the first place...

Sometimes the decomp 'hangs' a bit causing one to cycle past TDC without too much effort, but then the kicker will become 'hard' again, ready to whack it into life. No problem, just one of the idiosyncrasies of this bike  
I agree with your valveplay wisdom fwiw, and will add I'd rather hear them in action than being dead-quiet, the emphasis in the latter case on "dead"