mikegarrison

This is a job that should be done with care by a competent mechanic. It's not complex -- it's well within the capabilities of the typical DIY car owner. But for people who change the oil themselves and tend to have somebody else do anything more complicated, it's not the best idea to do this job unsupervised.

A good rule of thumb might be whether you have a full set of high quality metric sockets and a torque wrench in the 2-20 ft-lb range and another in the 10-50 ft-lb range. Also a set of feelers for the valve clearances. There's also a set-screw tool that really helps do the valve adjustments. If you have that kind of stuff and have used them before, this is going to be easy for you. If you are wondering what I'm talking about, then it is not.

As with many other similar tasks, it comes down to how much you trust your mechanic (dealership or independent) to be throrough, competent, and honest. If you trust them, have them do it. (I would include printouts of these pictures and a detailed request that you want them to look for this in particular -- otherwise they probably won't be looking for it.)

Billman250

They will DEFINITELY not check for cracked retainers. I can almost guarantee they will not know how to either, unless you explain it to them.

We all know how that will go.

for retainer inspection, DIY!

Dave-ROR

Of course.

As I said, galling will happen whenever there is movement, yes, if it was possible to eliminate this movement of the springs against the retainers then there will be less galling, however, if you've ever seen springs moving at high RPM (even springs used in a Hendrick nascar motor) you'll see a damn good bit of movement and I've never seen a Honda that didn't have galling problems over time with uncoated Ti retainers. In this case, I'm not sure you could eliminate the cause of galling and my point in that statement was that the galling itself was a property of the metal, which some other metals normally used for retainers do not suffer from. After re-reading that statement I admit it wasn't clear what I meant.

I haven't claimed to be an expert, so I'm just speaking from experience, which is admittedly mostly not with S2000 motors (other DOHC VTEC motors mostly) but there's nothing crazy different going on with a F2xC.

If someone wants to use Ti retainers, more power to them, but they should be aware of the potential negatives and they should be aware of any additional inspection/work that is needed during regular maintenance. I won't tell anyone to not use Ti retainers, I'm just trying to be helpful.

mikegarrison

I agree. In fact, I will go farther and say that you probably should not use Ti retainers on a street car S2000.

Spec_Ops2087

I never specified how much a few is

10-20k = few
8k < 10-20k so your still good