Honda knows of the problem .. You may get warranty it's pretty much up to your dealer .. He can get good will warranty from Honda for bikes out of warranty ..

 

If Honda will cover it wouldn't the dealer be more than happy to fix it? Or does it depend more on the Honda rep for the area? Nice to see from inside, all I can see is looking through the whole and I can see where they put that slot in the threads area and that is exactly where the piece broke. Thanks for the info, Ill update after I speak to the dealer.

 

My friend just bough a new 420 ES is there a way to prevent this? or should he just get his oil changes done at the dealership so they have to fix it if they screw up?

I read this strip the drain plug a few times now.

Is this just a 420 thing? because we change the oil on two newer 500 Foremans ES all the time. I don't see the ES mentioned in the above info by "HondaMechanic"

 

I have a 07 Rancher ES, Have 2000 miles on it, Have had no problems with it at all. I hope that this oil plug does not breakage does not happen to me, I have the Honda warranty till march 2011,I wonder will this be covered if it happens to me? I hope so

 

I guess just to be very careful when tightening the drain plug, but as far as Im concerned I was, I used a torque wrench set it to the specs found in the manual that comes with the bike and it still broke, and broke fairly easy.

So far I have not had much luck either, just been told if it is not under warranty they will not cover it. Very dissapointed with Honda at this point but we will see. Mine is about 2 years old but I have hardly used it, 3 tanks of gas max!!!

 

we see the same with oil filter cover bolts (8mm) .
Best is to always use a new washer ( yeh, I know, we don't but we should) and only tighten pinch tight -- the washer does the work..

 

Yah, I was more worried about those too but torque wrench worked just fine for those.

 

I had the same thing happen to me two days ago after researching the net forms this is verry common. Honda is aware of this but is reluctant to do anything except replace case at buyers cost. In some cases I have read that Honda paid partial or all of repair exspences. My dealer said they would contact the district service manager and see what he could do for me. I think we should all report this to the dealerships and insist they report it to district service managers around the world. This is clearly a bad design. Even when torque to manufactors specifications with a torque wrench it fails. If enough reports come in they may put out a recall. I don't think it should be up to the consumer to pay the cost for a bad design. Too many people are trying to fix the problem themselves and I believe it will eventually lead to more problems down the road. Pass the word on different forums and hopefully we can have this problem rectified.

 

Same story here. Dealer says they will talk to the District Svc Manager and see what they will do. I actually called the customer service helpline today and spoke to a them because the dealer said I might be able to get some info there, very reluctant to do anything is accurate, he just said you have to take it to the dealer so they can see what the problem is. He did say they are aware of this issue and that it has been sent on to corporate. I don't really expect them to pay for the whole thing as my warranty is long over, but I would expect them to own up to this bad design and cover the labor or something.

 

I stripped my drain hole about a month ago. I called the dealer - they said it would be less than $100 to fix. My son dropped it off. I called the next day and they said it would cost $1200.
I brought it home.
I can JB weld a piggyback plug - but how do I get the broken pieces of of the crank case? I can only assume that there are broken pieces in there.
if I leave them in there, what is likely to happen?
The worst part of Honda's bad design is that if you strip the threads (not terribly uncommon), it is very likely that you'll end up with (2) chunks of aluminum in your crank case, and to make it even worse, it seems nearly impossible to get the broken pieces out.