Wrench'n Ride'n

Got to go for a wee ride yesterday. Not far. About 270 odd klicks. From home here to Glenorie. Then down to Sackville Ferry. Up to Bilpin. Back to Glenorie and then home. All roads I have done and reported on in this blog. Sharon, a very dear and old friend, has this year started riding. Her first bike was a GPX250. Now she has a very nice and loud red Suzuki SV650S. She rang and wanted me to go for a ride with her. How could I not. The LT has not had a good ride since the stud repair. Commuting to and from work is not a ride. It is a chore. So 600 odd kilometers after the repair I headed up to Glenorie to collect Sharon. The LT is purring along nicely. It is good to be back on the open road again. Arrive at Sharon’s and she fires up the SV. She has had a Yoshi muffler put on it. Oh the magnificent sound that comes from the new muffler is pure music to the ears. She has asked me to ride the SV later so she can hear what it sounds like now. Off we head. I set a pace that I t...

Thank you to Pezz_GS and Wato from the ADV forums for coming around this afternoon to have a look over the bike. Turns out the left hand carb was out of sync. Pezz put that right quick smart. Both said the engine was sweet sounding. So Sonny and I did a good job after all on this engine. I took the bike out for a short ride. Everything seems fine. A big thank you to everyone that has either laid their hands on the bike or offered help on the many forums I posted to about this saga. I have learnt so much about BMW airhead engines over the last month. Now to get some rides in.

I fired up the engine this afternoon. What a lovely sound. The sound of no grinding. Pulled the clutch in and no grinding. Just that wonderful sound of a boxer firing away. In fact the engine sounds better than the one I took out. Sonny came around and set the swing arm for me. He has been a champ right through this whole rebuild. He was still on a high from his 600km ride yesterday. The bike is fully back together. The fat lady has not yet sung as I have not taken it out onto the road. I will go for short spin tomorrow after work. I will have to revisit the driveshaft bolts as I did not loctite them. But that is easy enough to do.

Sonny was off on a ride today. Poor guy has been hanging out for a good long ride. WHAT ABOUT ME!!! He offered to help today. He needs to go for a ride. So I did all the work solo. Started at about 11am. Gearbox out. Flywheel came out. There is oil everywhere. The rear main seal was not sealed without the flywheel guide ring. I spent a good hour or so removing oil from parts that should not have oil on them. It is a dry clutch after all. Fly wheel guide ring was put in. Clutch in. Gearbox on. Shining with oil. So far so good. The moment of truth! I turn the crankshaft and there is no grinding. Swing arm in but not centred. Drive shaft uni bolted to the drive shaft from gearbox. Boot put on. Bolting the uni joint and the boot are the two hardest jobs by far. Very little room to work with your fingers. Lots of oil over your fingers from inside the boot. Stop for dinner. Then pack tools away. Tomorrow just a few more things to do and then I will fire it up and see how g...

Why all this agony over one stripped stud? Why go to all the trouble of buying another engine that is of unknown quality? Why not fix the stud hole? Fit a bigger timesert? Why? The below photos will show you the condition of the hole. I have yet to take a photo of the helicoil that came out of this hole. But as you can see it has made a mess. The advise from the bike shop was that they could not make the hole bigger to put a bigger timecert in. Looking at how much meat there is left between the stud hole and the opening for the cylinder I think they are right. Shudder.....

Saturday 8/11/2008. 8am. Sonny and I have a sleeves rolled up and we are ready to do start to reassemble the bike. Cylinders are off the old engine. Made sure I kept the pistons in the cylinders far enough to keep the rings in. New gudgeon pin circlips have been fitted. New O rings fitted. The engine is set to Top Dead Centre for the left side. On goes that cylinder and piston. The barrels are torqued down. This time it was done in small amounts. Guess what? Not a stud stripped. Repeated for the right side. Yes this is going great. Stud in the new old engine. This one is not repaired. This is the repair that was done to my old engine. Timesert did not have enough thread to hold onto. Sonny hard at work. He did the electrics. Being green colour blind is no help when I touch wires. Trying to figure out what went wrong.... Something old and something new. In goes the flywheel. Later on we found out that this was not done correctly. We left out the fly wheel ...

Photos will go up later from todays work. The engine is back together. Cylinders, pistons and heads have been swapped. The engine stud in the old new engine did not strip when I torqued it up. Helps when you torque in small jumps. Engines runs so sweetly too. It was fantastic to hear it running again. BUT!! We have put the clutch back together incorrectly. I think we have put a pressure plate in the wrong way around. So when the engine is running and you pull the clutch in the engine stops dead. The one circled in red and the highlighted raised bits are what I think is grabbing the clutch. We will take the gear box out and undo the pressure plates tomorrow.

So how to fix this stripped cylinder stud? Get another engine. Yep I have had throw magic beans at Motohansa and buy an engine from them. Seems I have an R80 engine. Comparing the engine number against the data base at http://www.bmbikes.co.uk/chassispages/enginechassis800.htm it looks like the engine came out of a R80RT from October 1982. It is coated in what is almost grease. The oil is that thick on the casings. R/H cylinder was leaking at 80% in a leak down test. L/H exhaust nut thread on the cylinder is trashed. So my current barrels etc will be fitted to this new old engine to fix this. It does turn freely so at the end of the day all I need is the crankshaft and casing. So a big parts swap is about to happen. Sonny (aka Rockster) helped me to collect the bike this morning. We both drooled over the low kilometre Japanese grey import BMWR100Rs’s they have. Both in very good nick. Go mate swap the Rockster for one of the RS’s. ;-) So starts the head scratching! ...