It's fair to say that my current XT 600e has done a lot of work.
The guy I bought it off had done a trip to Cape York (nothern tip of Australia) I don't believe he treated the bike well therefore when he arrived back in the big city it was necessary to undertake considerable repairs.
He showed me an long list of reciepts and spoke of reboring, head reconditioning, bearing and gear changes etc. None the less the bike looked nasty.
I didn't necessarily believe the previous owner had actually done all the work mentioned but as I bought the bike for a bargain price ($1750.00 in 2000 so 7 years ago, the bike was only 4 years old at the time)
Soon after buying the bike it developed a very nasty bottom end knock. This ended up being a very poorly fitted keyway on the counterbalance shaft. I filed the keyways on both shaft and gear, made a new oversize key and used a healthy volume of loctite and away I went.
7 years on and about 50000KM the bike developed another very nasty bang (not really a knock). I expected this was bigend as I couldn't confirm what was repaired or the workmanship involved. If the key incident was and guide the workmanship was poor.
So the bike was stripped.
To my surprise the head gasket was blown which would account for the bang.
The 2 piston compression rings were aligned which would acount for the exessive blowpast and lack of compression.
The previous owner had rebored it, 1mm over, it truely does appear he did perform much of the work he mentioned, unfortunatly the workmanship is the primary issue, eg. volumes of silicon rather than "O" rings and gaskets..

The bottom end is tidy, There are 2 concerns I have,
1. lateral movement in the bigend is out of tolerance..
2. The bike would occasionally jump from 1st gear to neutral or second to neutral.
The gearbox is pandoras box to me. I havn't split the case yet.
Is it worth delving into the gearbox or could there be someother more obvious issue causing the bike to jump out of gear. (Should I start a thread for this?)

Any advice would be much appreciated.