I have an 03 with just over 9k miles, when I pulled into work the other morning it was making a loud clacking almost like a hammer on metal. Is it possible the cct could fail so early? I turned it off and restarted but nothing out of the ordinary. I rode it home at the end of the day, about 7 miles and it didn't make the clacking sound at all. any ideas? btw, I've redlined it a few times but I rarely even rev it to 6k. Gotta love that torque!

 

Sounds like the ccts and yes they can go at anytime is it still making the noise?

 

I started it up a few days later and it didn't make the noise, but I haven't ridden it because I really don't want to blow my engine up. I'm gonna rejet this weekend. Since I'll have it ripped apart how do you know if the CCT's are bad?

 

You could pull the ccts and take a close look at them (make sure they smoothly move through the full plunger stroke with good spring tension) ... but if you pull them why not just replace them with manual APEs (since it's no more work from that point) and you'll never have to worry about the "CCT black cloud" problems again.
Of course if you pull them make sure the cyl is at tdc first....