1972 Daytona

I don’t have time to read all this shit, just show me the pics...

December 29th, 2003 and my brother and I brought this 1972 back to my house after a 24 hour road trip to pick it up. At least I’m assuming it’s a 1972 Daytona, I haven’t checked the serial numbers yet, but that’s what’s on the bill of sale. The plan is to fix it up and make it into a vintage class race bike.  The bike is in pretty rough shape, below are some before pics so you can get an idea of what’s missing. Things like the seat and lights are minor, since they wouldn’t be suitable for a race bike anyway. The engine turns over and it shifts through some of the gears, but I’ll be opening it up to take a look in the engine before trying to start it.

There’s a good deal of stuff missing off this bike, but a lot of it are things that would have to be replaced for Vintage road racing anyway, like the seat and handlebars.

I would have also had to remove any lights that were on it, but this bike didn’t have anything in the way of an electrical system to speak of, no lights, horn, cabling, coils, etc.  Still not sure what direction I’ll take in regards to an electrical system, I’m thinking magneto.

My work space is a little more cramped this winter now that I have a second bike and somehow ended up with an old chair and ottoman. The only good thing about the chair is that it gives my boy a place to sit while I work on the bike and he won’t get into too much trouble.

No lights or gauges of any kind...   pipes, plug wires, battery box...      chain, seat, motor mounts...             air filters, electrics, etc.

Overall the rear end is pretty rusty, the rear suspension will likely have to be replaced and I believe that’s not a Triumph rear wheel on there.

The front end is just as bad as the back.  The fender is likely garbage, the forks will have to go, the rim might clean up, but we’ll see. The actual brake assembly looks ok, although there’s no cable or lever to test it out with. The front tire is pretty rotten as well, but most of this stuff would require replacement with racing parts anyway.

The bike had been stored in a pretty damp area, so all the bolts are rusted, but the engine itself doesn’t look too bad. I’ll need all new engine mounting plates and likely new head bolts, but hopefully not much more in the way of external engine parts.

The slides in the carbs move freely, so the carbs might not need more than a good cleaning and new gaskets/o-rings, I won’t know for sure until I bolt them back on and try to run it.

Starting the teardown.

Shot of the missing pipes and motor mounts.

It looks pretty grimy, and the carbs weren’t connected tightly, so there’s the possibility that moisture entered the head, a possibility made all more likely by the complete lack of pipes.

This picture was suppose to show the 15 inch rear wheel, not a stock Triumph wheel as far as I know. I’ll know for sure when I get the parts manual in the next day or two.

Most of the bolts were pretty loose, and with all the missing motor mounts, it didn’t take much to pull the engine out of the frame. I got it up on the bench so I could take a close look, lot’s of crud on the engine, but nothing too serious.

Eventually I’ll strip the frame and either paint it or have it powder coated. I haven’t powder coated the chopper frame because I’ll likely be welding bits to it and cutting off other bits, but this frame will likely remain unmolested.

In addition to any remaining engine mounting bolts being finger tight, the top end was also loosely put together. The rocker boxes came off with no problem and looked pretty good inside. I’ll need to replace the valve springs, but that would have been done anyways.

The pistons look good and are marked at .020 over, hopefully I can get away with just honing the cylinder and keeping the current pistons. The bottom end seems tight, and the tappets move up and down when turning over the engine, so the cam shafts are there.  I’d be tempted to leave the bottom end alone if it wasn’t for the unknown factor, and the sludge trap. Before I continue pulling it apart I’m gonna give it a good wipe down in order to keep things inside as clean as possible.

The cylinders were smooth to the touch and didn’t look too bad, although the flash from the camera lit up the inside enough to see some rust near the top. Whether they will have to be bored or just honed remains to be seen.

The engine cleaned up pretty good.  All that crud on the outisde was just that, crud, that easily wiped away. Take a look at the pictures above and compare them to the ones to the left, so far I’m pretty happy with the engine.

One of these days I’ll remember to drain the oil before pulling the primary cover.

Maybe I spoke too soon, something was repaired on the underside of the engine. It looks like a good clean repair from the outside, but I’ll reserve judgement until I take a look at it from the inside.

Moving right along, got my parts book and shop manual and went back to pulling everything off the primary side of the bike.  The three nuts holding the stator on (that round thing on the left) came off pretty easy, but the leads that come of the stator and into a protective sleeve was pretty stiff, or the sleeve itself was stiff, 6 of 1... so pulling the stator meant feeding the cable down through the case and through tht little clipthat you can see between the 2 sprockets in the picture above and to the right. The clip can come off, but the secondary sprocket blocks access to the bolt, so I had to move it around in order to get the wire to slide out nicely, nothing major, hardly worth mentioning.

Once the stator was off I could fit a piece of wood in the lower half of the case and removed the rotor nut, the piece of wood jammed between the chain and the secondary sprocket, preventing the rotor from turning so that I could remove the rotor nut.  No tab washer on the rotor nut, so I'll have to mark that down as something I need to get for the rebuild.  So that's the charging system, stator and rotor have been removed. Next is the clutch.

Those little retaining nuts that hold the springs in place can be a pain in the ass to get out, you can see the three of them there on the clutch pressure plate.  You have to use a special tool or big screw driver with a notch cut out of it to go over the bolt, the problem is that the nuts are dimpled in order to catch the end of the spring and prevent the nut from backing out.  According to the shop manual, you should stick a knife in there so that the spring doesn't get caught on the dimple and you can then back out the nut.  This is a fine idea, unfortunately I have been cursed with only having 2 hands, so this job proved frustrating, but not undoable, and eventually I got the three nuts, springs and cups out. Once these were out I removed the center nuts and could pull the clutch pressure plate and all the clutch plates. The nuts, springs, pressure plate look brown in the picture, rest assured, that's not a trick of the camera, everything, while wet with oil, does seem to have a surface rust film on it, I'll have to wait and see how they cleanup, I think I mentioned this during last winters rebuild of the 650, I need a media blaster.

At this point I have all the clutch plates out, and the rotor and stator out, a fit of coughing from my cold caused me to pack it in for the night, hopefully I'll be feeling better this evening and will get back to it. The next step will be removing clutch basket, there's a bolt holding it in and I took one run at it but I wasn't able to get it off, it's on there damned tight.  I checked with the shop manual but they didn't have any insight into how to easily remove it, so I'll just give it another try when I get back to it.

As a vintage TT race bike, I won't need to power anything other than the spark plugs, so I'm thinking that I can cut down a little weight but not reinstalling the rotor and stator. I was talking to one of the racers last year who had a Triumph, he indicated that he just ran off a small battery, no rotor or stator, I can't image a battery would be much lighter than the rotor and stator, but what the hell, if I don't need to use them then I may as well set them aside for use in a future project.  Since the races are fairly short, he just runs off the battery and then plugs it into a charger after the race.  I'm also considering a magneto, although they can be a bit pricey.

OK, a nights rest and it’s back to trying to get the nut off so I can remove the clutch basket.  I had put that chain vice grip on there to hold the clutch basket but I couldn't get enough leverage to turn the nut.  The plan was to order a clutch locking tool, basically a device with both the inner and outer teeth on it so that the clutch is locked in the engaged position.  I ordered thetool on Thursday but it hasn't arrived yet, a little disappointing after getting the parts manual and shop manual the next day when I ordered them.  I could have rigged something up, but the tool fits both 500 and 650 Triumphs, BSA's too I think, so I figure it might be worth having.

So, it's the weekend and I don't have the tool, so I figure I'd try something else.  I got a long pipe and slid it over the end of the vice, and then I was gonna use the handle bars and slide them over the end of the socket wrench (yes, I'm sure the manual for the socket set, or any wrench of that type, will tell you not to do this). 

Remeber the bars?

I had planned on replacing the bars with something a little more race ready, it's a good thing, since the bars weren't all that beefy:

Below is a picture of the result of the wrench breaking through the side of the bars.  So, still no clutch locking tool, but with a set of chain vice grips holding the clutch pretty good, I decided I still wanted something that would give me more leverage, so I figured I'd call it a night (a Friday night to be exact) and I'd pick up a breaker bar the next day.

So, Saturday and the wife is back to work part time and I've got the boys to myself.  The first part of the morning consisted of getting them ready in order to take them for the oldest to get a haircut, then by the time that was done I had to take them out to the SO's work so she can come out and feed the youngest in the back of the minivan while I run across the street to find a breaker bar.  Unfortunately they did have one, but they did have a nice thick 3 foot bar that would do the job.  I picked it up and after we got home I entertained the boys until they both fell asleep (I'm very entertaining).

Now, with my new bar on the end of the socket wrench and the other pipe on the end of the vice (pictured to the right), I put some muscle into it and very soon I felt the nut loosen, not sure how to describe it, sort of like a "pop" and then it could be unscrewed easily. With the nut off, the inner part of the clutch slid out nice and smooth:

I was fortunate enough not to have the little barrel type bearings spill all over the place, and not even into the oil I still have sitting in the pan under the engine.  Seeing my good fortune, I grabbed one of those little magnets on a stick and pulled the bearings out.

Once the bearing were removed I pulled the outer part of the clutch basket, exposing the "clutch hub", and a very clean case from the looks of it.

I grabbed my handy clutch hub pulling tool that I had bought for the chopper and threaded it into position, then put the wrench on the end and an adjustable wrench on the inner part of the extractor (not shown) and tightened the bolt on the end of the extractor down.  This pulls the clutch hub off of the shaft.

That's it for the primary side, nothing left here that needs to come off before splitting the cases, my next step was to remove the cylinder block. The 12 point nuts came off without a problem, but the cylinder was stuck on, probably from the gasket or any goo that was used during assembly.  Not wanting to beat the thing with a hammer and damage the fins, I thought back to Vermort 9 and a discussion about rope in the cylinder block, although the point of this was to prevent the primary from spinning.  With this in mind I grabbed a couple rags and shoved then into the cylinders.

Next I bolted the head back onto the cylinder with the rags inside.  I grabbed the sprocket for the crank shaft that I already removed, and I put it back onto the shaft, the sprocket has 2 holes for you to thread bolts into, so I grabbed a couple bolts (although I didn't have two that fit nicely) and shoved them into the holes.  Once this was done I stuck a screwdriver between the bolts and started turning the sprocket.

As the pistons moved up they pushed the rags into the head until there was not room to move anymore, with a little muscle (not too much thankfully) I kept turning the sprocket and the cylinder was finally pushed away from the engine cases.  Now that the cylinder had separated from the cases I removed the head and the rags and pulled the cylinder off the studs, being careful that the pistons didn't slam down against one of the studs and damage them.

With the cylinder off I could inspect the pistons, looks like I may have to replace them, the front and back sides of them look a bit scored, there's actually of bit of a shallow groove in one of them.  This means a trip to the machine shop to have the cylinders honed or bored and a new set of pistons ordered.

Before proceding, I thought it might be a good idea to clean up a little, so I shoved some parts in boxes, labeled them, and piled them up the bench for safe keeping.

Having learned my lesson with the oil in the primary, I decided to drain the oil prior to undoing any bolts  I positioned the engine on some boards on the bench and slid a drip pan under it (these pics aren't the greatest, but you can see the drain plug before and after removal).

While the oil was draining I started undoing any obvious engine bolts.  To save myself some grief during the rebuild, I grabbed a little baggy from the pile, along with a Sharpie and some labels.  I also grabbed my parts manual and started labeling the bolts as they came off, which is now striking me as extremely anal.

I haven't read through the shop manual yet in regards to splitting the cases, but once I got all the bolts apart I tried to simply pull the left hand case off, no luck.  There's gotta to be another bolt inside one of the right hand cases, I know on the 650 there is one under the outer gearbox cover, so my next step is to check the manual and then I'll likely be turning the engine over and attacking the right hand side.

OK, Last night I attempted to pull the engine cases apart while leaving the right side of the engine in tack, unfortunately that's not possible, I have to at least pull the gearbox in order to reach a couple bolts holding the two halves of the case together.  With the right hand side of the engine stripped, I flipped it over and started on the right side, ideally I'd have an engine stand for all this:

I started by removing the outer gearbox cover, which simply meant removing the kickstart, shifter and the bolts holding cover in place.  Once these were undone,  the cover slid off easily, leaving the inner gearbox cover and still no access to one of the bolts required to split the case.

There are two bolts in the bottom of the inner gearbox cover and once removed all you need to do is remove the main sprocket and then knock the shaft through with a rubber mallet.  This pushes the whole assembly out.

View from  left side

 

The gearbox came out as one assembly.  The 500 gearbox is quite a bit different that the 650, one of the obvious difference is the position of the camplate.
 

A shot of the empty gearbox, looks pretty slimy in the picture.

Finally, with the gearbox removed I was able to get to the 2 remaining bolts.  The bolts came out with no problem, allowing me to easily pull the cases apart.  Unlike the chopper, there were no big chunks of metal sitting in the bottom of it.

The 500

The 650

This shot shows the other side, but more importantly it shows the state of the pistons, you can see that they look a little nasty.  Nothing obviously wrong with the crank, but I'll need to pull it in order to clean the sludge trap, so I'll be able to inspect it at that point.

To remove the crank and cams I need to remove the timing cover, and gears, etc.  I had no problem with the bolts holding the cover in, except for one. All the others were philips head, but the one giving me problems was a flathead.  The screwdriver just couldn't get a good grip, so I tried one of those bits that are suppose to bite in and remove stripped bolts, but all that did was chew the shit of the head.  I figured I hosed the bolt, but before giving up and drilling it out or trying to get a dremel in there to cut a good grove in the head, I got the impact drive and shoved it in there and gave it a whack with the hammer.  Much to my delight the impact drive worked the bolt ended up coming out without anymore difficulty.

With all the bolts loosened, I turned my attention to pulling the timing plate and auto advance unit.  The auto-advance slides down onto a tappered shaft and it’s a pretty tight fit.  There’s a tool that can be used to extract it, basically it’s a bolt with a long, thin shaft sticking out the end.  You stick the bolt onto the end of the auto-advance unit and start screwing it in, the long shaft rests agains something inside cam and as you tighten the bolt it pushes the auto-advance out.  Since I didn’t have the tool I just the head off a screw, cut it to the appropriate length and dropped it in the hole, then stuck a regular bolt on and tightened it.  Sure enough the auto-advance popped out.  This doesn’t make much sense without seeing what I’m talking about.

In the upper left of the picture to the right you can see the shaft that the bolt screws into to remove the auto-advance.

The cover, timing plate and auto-advance removed, I set them in a box and took a look at the timing gears and oil pump.

With the cover off I can set my sights on removing the oil pump, gears, cams and crank from the right side of the engine.  The bolts holding the cam gears in place are left hand thread adn the gear holding the crank gear is a right hand thread, knowing this makes taking the nuts off much easier. There’s only 2 small nuts holding the oil pump in place, so this comes off fairly easy. With all the nuts off, it was time to remove the gears.  There are specialty tools that I picked up when tearing down the chopper last winter, so I grabbed the crank pinion gear removal tool and screwed it into place and removed the gear.

Once the crank pinion gear was off I grabbed the tool for the 2 cam pinion gears.  These tools work by threading them onto the gear, then turning the centre part down which goes down through the centre of the tool and pushes again the pinion to pull the gear off.

With the gears removed the cams can be removed by taking off the little oval plates that hold them in.  These plates allow the cams to be pulled without pulling the cases apart, the 650 doesn't have these, requiring the case to be split to switch cams.  At least the '70 650's didn't have this.  I put the intake and exhaust in different boxes just to save some confusion later.

Once the cams were out I grabbed the rubber mallet and knocked the crank out of the case.  Rather than hitting the end of the crank I decided to rest the remainder of the engine on the end of the crank and then I hit the case with the mallet, pushing it off the crank rather the knocking the crank out of the case.

So, with the engine basically stripped, I decided to clean up the work bench, put the tools away, and make sure there were no parts laying around.  It’ll soon be time to fire up the parts washer, but first I think I’ll take a look at the sludge trap.

I accomplished everything I wanted to for the night, so I stuck the crank in a box and will pull it out later to pull the pistons and the sludge trap

The plan for this nights work was to get the sludge trap out of the crank and get in cleaned out.  For those of you not familiar with these bikes, instead of an oil filter, the Triumphs of this era had a tube inside the crank that would collect crud that was forced out of the oil based on centrifugal (is that the right word?) force.  As this sludge builds up it can end up blocking the oil passage and starve the crank journals, or at least that’s my understanding. So, like I said, the plan for this evening was to get the sludge trap out and clean it.

The photo above and to the right shows the use of the impact drive, although this position seemed proved a bit awkward, so I ened up repositioning things.

I checked the manual and the suggestion was to get an impact drive and use that to get the plug out that holds the sludge trap in place.  OK, a regular screw driver isn’t gonna do it, so what the hell.  The manual also says that if I run into difficulty that I should use a 1/8” drill bit to dril out the dimple used to hold the plug in place. Since I haven’t tried the impact drive I wasn’t sure if I’d run into difficulty, so, the impact drive it was.

From this next picture you can see that I got the plug out, but I managed to chew it all the shit in the process.  It took a shit load of beating with the impact drive, to the point that my hand was killing me by the time I got it out.

I was expecting things to be a bit moist in there, but the insides was mostly a bunch of dry crud, you can see some of the build up in the previous picture.  Next I need to remove the bolt in the crank that holds the sludge trap in place, presumably so that it doesn’t spin.  This was a fairly easy task.

This the plug and bolt removed, I decided to take a picture of the tools used thus far.

So far so good, but this is when things took a turn for the worse.

According to the manual I remove the sludge trap tube with a rod that has a hook on it, hmmm, I don't have a rod with a hook on it.  I tried a few things, like bent piece of metal, which didn't work, I tried using a drill bit to dig into the tube, but that didn't work, then I got a great idea, I'll thread a tap into the tube, then I can just pull the tap and the tube out as one piece, brilliant. I got a big tap, got it in place, and then pulled it out, oh wait, it's not pulling out. OK, the tube is in there pretty tight, so how to I pull the thing out. I know, I'll attach an old drill to it and that will give me some leverage.  So, with the tap in the tube and the drill on the other end of the tap, I pulled, and nothing.  Maybe if I give the drill a little whack with the rubber mallet....

I see. So that was a bad idea.  I think I'll get the rest of the tap out and wait for Les to post a picture of the tool he made to remove his sludge trap, and I suppose I need to pick myself up a replacement tap.  (Take a look at that nasty scoring on the piston too).

Getting the sludge trap out has not been an easy task, I even doubted at one point tonight whether there was even a sludge trap in there.  It's a tube that fits pretty snuggly inside the crank.  I was looking in the hole and I couldn't see it, so I called my brother who did his 500 last winter. I recall he doubted that there was one in his as well, so he posted a question on Les' Triumph Choppers list and he was assured that it was there.  He described what I should be looking for and it does appear to be there, but it's hard to tell.  Basically there's a little 1mm lip about 1/4" past the threads for the plug that goes in the end. He got his out by using a 1/2" drill bit, he shoved it in the hole, gave it some power, and the bit caught the tube, spun it in place, freeing it from the crank. My issue is that I currently don't have a 1/2" chuck. There are other (read better) ways of removing it, like Les' method, but I'm no closer to having his setup as I am to having a 1/2" chuck.  At some point this weekend I'll get it out, one way or another.

Time is marching on and I've been trying to get the sludge trap out for about a week with no luck. I had reached the point, more than once, where I was convinced that there can't be a sludge trap in there, but I pressed on with the assumption that it's got to be there.  So tonight I was gonna try Les' suggestion, found here: http://triumphchoppers.com/gallery/album41

I started by sticking a 1/2" rod that I picked up today into the hole that houses the sludge trap so that I could mark where I need to place my set screw.

I was pretty sure of the size that I picked up for a set screw, but I grabbed the little thread measuring tool that comes with the tap and die set just to make sure.

With the hole drilled I grabbed the ole' tap and die set and with the appropriate tap I threaded the hole I just drilled (bored yet?).

So now with the hole drilled and tapped and enough room for the head drilled in, I slid the 1/2" bar into the sludge trap and lined it up with the hole at the top of the crank so that I could get the screw in there

With the location marked, and no drill press, I decided to file a shallow concave groove where I was gonna drill my hole (insert smart assed remark about drilling my hole here).

OK, #8 NC 32, that's what I thought, so according to my chart I need a 9/64" bit, fortunately I got a handy Christmas present this year

Looks like my sister wrote her name on the workbench that I got from my ole man when they moved last summer, that's gotta be a 25+ year old signature.  I couldn't locate any set screws at the locate shop, but I did get these little allen head screws, so basically I'll just have to drill out a little area for the head to fit in

With the bar in place and the screw in there, the next step is to use a slide hammer to pull the bar back out. I don't have a slide hammer, and the hardware store I went to today doesn't sell them, and since I want to get the damned sludge trap out I decided to lock the bar in the vice and hit the crank with a rubber mallet (I'm such a fuckin' hack it makes me laugh sometimes). I hit the crank, then I hit it again and again, and eventually I got the bar out. Now, if I were a cup half full kinda of guy, I'd be relieved that I was able to confirm that, yes, my crank has a sludge trap and all this work isn't for nothing.  If I were a glass half empty kinda of guy, I'd look at this and swear my head off.  Since I'm not prepared to take sides, I'll simply leave my reaction to the following situation as this: Hm, now that's odd.

What you're looking at is only part of the sludge trap, the outer most part, which means the rest of it is still in there, and in there tight enough that rather than get pulled out with the outer rim, it broke right off. So here I sit scratching myself and wondering what to do next. I tried the same method again, but this time by putting the screw it tighter, nothing, then I shaved the screw down to make it pointier in the hopes that it would bite in to the trap, still nothing.  I've heard of people using a drill bit to bite into the trap, I've tried that with a 1/2" bit before I knew the ID of the trap is 1/2".  My next option is to give it a try with a 9/16" bit, but I hate to pay over $30 for the bit (at least that's the price I saw when looking).  My other option is to re-drill the rod so that I can get more of the screw sticking out the bottom side of the rod.

I wasn't sure what to do to get the damned thing out, so I screwed around with it, tried the set screw thing again but this time by turning it, still couldn't get it out.  By poking and prodding, I got a small screw driver under the edge of the sludge trap and with a little tap with the hammer I could bend it back away from the wall of the crank, which was probably not the best method. After doing this for a bit to try and pry it free I shoved the 1/2" drill back in there and came out with this:

That's another chunk of sludge trap on the end of the drill. With this bit of success I continued to pry at the remainer with a screw driver and the drill and finally ended up with the sludge trap out (you may want to go back to Les' picture for a comparison):

With the sludge trap finally removed it was time to shift gears and start stripping all the remaining crap off the frame so that I could have a little more room to move around.

I started with removing the front end, which is just a matter of removing the three large bolts on the top of the triple trees, after putting some wood under the frame to support it. The triple trees seem to be in decent shape, but the down tubes and the rest of the suspension is pretty much crap, so I'll be keeping an eye out on E-Bay for a cheap replacement when I have some cash.

With the front off it was just a matter of a half a dozen bolts to get the swing arm and rear section off.  No damage of any kind here, but I will have to go over everything to see what needs to stay and what needs to go in order to get the bike ready for racing.  I'm hoping I can get away without changing anything, but we'll see.

Now that the frame is apart I removed the rear wheel and popped the frame up on the bench so I can give it the once over. I also found out today that I can get my frame sand blasted at work this spring, which will save me the hassle of stripping it myself like I did last winter with the chopper.

It looks like a previous owner laced a 16” rim to the hub, I might swap this with someone for a proper sized rim and a decent brake for racing.

With the frame sitting on the bench, pretty much stripped of everything and waiting to be sand blasted, I figure I'd plod ahead with the engine. The pistons that came out of it were .020 over (over the stock bore of 2.7165 if you were wondering), so I assume the bore is around 2.7365, but I don't have a decent set of callipers to measure, that's something I need to pick up one of these days.  The walls look to be in decent condition, so I'm not sure what caused the scoring in the pistons.  I'll be taking the cylinder to the same place that did my 650 last winter, I'm hoping they just need to be honed, but worse case is that I have to go to .030 over.  I think it was $14 a cylinder for the honing, not sure what they charge for boring but I don't recall it being too much.

Anyway, before taking it in I needed to remove the tappets and tappet blocks. The tappets slid out relatively easy, and it was easy to see the difference between the 500 and 650 tappets.  The 650 pushrods have cups on the top and bottom of the pushrods, but the 500 has the bottom cup on the tappet so the pushrods will only have the cups on the top, at least for the models I have, but I digress. 

I marked the tappets with intake left, intake right, exhaust left, you get the point, although I don't think it matters, they're all the same part number, and there's a good chance I'll be replacing them anyway. To remove the tappet blocks I needed some sort of drift, I've heard if you pound them out without one that the fins that stick up might break. I grabbed a piece of wood that fit in between the fins and hammered it out. Oh, this was after removing the set screws.

Here's a shot of one of the tappets, showing the fins sticking up. The block needs a little cleaning, but nothing too serious. So with the 4 tappets out and both tappet blocks removed, I need to wipe the thing down and get it to the shop that honed the 650's cylinders last year. Not a whole lot done tonight, but at least a little.

Damn, I’m a whole year behind in updating this page. That last picture was taken in February of 2004 and here it is, February 2005 and I haven’t added a thing. Time to get to work, I’ll pull some posts from RMH and try to match them up with the pics.

Posted April 11, 2004

I decided to pull the connecting rods and have a look at the crank journals, and more importantly, make sure that the oil passage through the sludge trap was ok. Not much to taking the connecting rods off, just a couple nuts per rod, and metal tab washers, I ran the wire brush I had picked up into the sludge trap and rinsed it out with the parts washer, and repeated.

Then I pointed the washer into the crank to see if the oil feeds to the journals were running clean. From the following pic you can see that on the top of the journal to the right has cleaner shooting out of it, but the one on the left has barely any flow

I did a little more cleaning (you can kinda see the brush I used in this next picture) and then stuck the nozzle of the cleaner and shoved it in the end, this time you can see fluid coming out of both the top and bottom of the right hand journal, but only the bottom of the left hand journal, there was still some blockage going on. This procedure made me glad I pulled the connecting rods, or I may not have known when the trap was sufficiently clean.  The fluid is also coming out the top of the crank and out of the end in the picture to the right, so there isn't a whole lot of pressure built up. On the left is one of the bearings, I haven't been able to get it off, although it spins quite freely, so I'm thinking I'll just make sure it's been loaded up with oil soluble grease. Once I finished cleaning it I decided it was time to teach the boy about air compressors, so while I put a few things away, he started on drying the crank

An inspection of the journal bearings show that one set is a bit scratched, an inspection of the journals themselves show that one has a few blemishes on it (the second last picture on the right journal shows one of them if you look closely, right above the reflection of the light), so I might have to resort to getting them ground to the next size down, not really something I wanted to have to do, although I had it down to the chopper last winter. Not much done, but at least a little. In the last picture you can see the corner of a red tool cart, that was a surprise from the SO, she didn't want the garage floor littered with tools again this season, so she picked up a two level rolling cart. The tools that are on their currently are ones that were given to me last week by my BIL who is moving and was getting rid of a bunch of his doubles and triples. He didn't want to lug them out to Ontario, I'll keep most of them aside in case he moves back some day.

Posted April 24, 2004

I finally fired up the new blasting cabinet. I grabbed one of the tappet blocks out of the Daytona and tossed some glass bead into the cabinet to see what it could, so far I'm pretty happy with the results. There was little to no dust during the process but the compressor kicked in pretty soon into the blasting. I've got a bunch of parts off the Daytona to do, but I'm in no hurry, so I'll spread it out and not over work the compressor.

Posted May 15, 2004

Didn't do any wrenching on the bike today, but I did replace one of the wheels on the minivan after getting some new rubber put on one of the rims. I also got time to download some pics off the camera and came across the ones I took a week or so ago when I started looking at the head of the Daytona. My apologies for the graphic nature of the work bench, it's in desperate need of a cleaning, but that won't happen until I start reassembling the bike. Pulled the head out of the designated box and decided to pull the valves to give them the once over and so they won't be there when I blast the head.

The liquid wrench was required to get the plugs out, they were stuck in there pretty good. One lesson learned, pull the plugs BEFORE pulling the engine. Without any real leverage I ended up sticking a 3 foot bar on the end of my socket wrench, holding the head on both hands and pushing the bar with my side. Gave me some sore ribs, but I got both plugs out.

So, the first step is to grab the clamp that I bought for the 650 last year (I found some Hylomar, LES!)

Repeat as necessary...

Mount the clamp and start turning...

...until the springs are compressed enough to remove the little bits that hold the springs in place...

...and mark accordingly by taping those little bits to the valves using colored electrical tape.

...and voila!

The valve guides seem to be in decent shape, and it doesn't look like there was anything escaping into the rocker box chamber, all in all it's pretty clean in there. The rockers still "need" to be disassembled and cleaned, then things will start going back together. I'll be getting the frame blasted at work in a couple weeks, then I have to find out what it'll cost to powder coat it.

Posted May 15, 2004

I may have mentioned that I dropped my frame off with one of the guys at work who said his guys could sand blast it for me, for free of course. Well I got it back today, neatly wrapped in plastic. The idea was to now get it powder coated, but first I figured that the industrial blasting it got will likely require me to sand it down a little. I start enwrapping the plastic and it seems to be a dull gray, but I expected this, sand blasting isn't going to leave it all shiny. I keep unwrapping it and it's really gray, much more gray than I was expecting. I finally get it unwrapped and it looks good, a nice consistent gray color all over, but this isn't the dull shine of a freshly sand blasted piece of metal, it's primer. Damn, they not only sand blasted it but they primered the damned thing as well. It's a rough surface which will need some sanding, but it side lines my plan to have it powder coated, there's no way I'm gonna go through the trouble of removing the primer. So I think at this point I'll leave the primer and eventually take it in to have it painted by a pro, rather than the spray can job I gave the chopper. It'll take some wet sanding to get the primer nice and smooth but I'm thinking that I'll just wrap it up and leave it until I'm ready to have it painted and then let the paint prepare it the way they want. The only thing I did was to pound the bushing out of the swing arm. I left them in there knowing I'd want to replace them and not wanting the insides to get sand blasted. Took some pretty solid whacks but I got both the bushing out. Before I get it painted I'll likely have to go over it and remove any primer that's in spots that it should be, then have the painter tape off those areas before it gets painted. Now I have to start asking around to see if I can find a decent painter that's local and not going to charge an arm and a leg. I the meantime, I think I'll go pull the rocker boxes apart.

Posted August 16, 2004

Not much done on the Daytona lately, but I did tear the rocker boxes apart, not much to them. With the Bonneville I had to heat them in order to get the spindles out, but with this one I just used a wodden dowl and hammered them out, they came our pretty smooth.

With everything apart it’s time to start the rebuild, which means the ordering of parts, the grinding of journals and the cleaning of the old parts.

 

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