Honey I'm home

Got it in, bit of a wrestle and some love taps but alls good. Clutch set, carb set, the gears are giving me a bit of grief, so I'm going to call it a day. A good day. Bundy calls, sorry P.

Out with the old....

Work has been particularly quiet the last few days, I opted to take some leave so I could switch engines and see how the 200 goes, today I'll get the 177 out , clean it up,  give the underbelly a good clean and check over, tomorrow I'll put the 200 in and take it for a spin. Can't wait!

Half way there, it really doesn't take that long to drop an engine, 6 cables, wiring and fuel, rear tyre, which I found to have a disturbing amount of play, way back in the beginning this happened, then it was the "restorers" had conveniently forgotten the spacer and had the split pin running across the top of the castellated nut, which of course loosened itself, this time I only checked it a week ago, I had noticed a change in the handling and braking, it was solid. I have a new one waiting for when I rebuild the Veloce engine transferring most of the parts into a matching set of cases I have sitting there gathering dust. So I took the split pin out and could undo the nut with my fingers.... 

Bit of a tidy up this morning and in with the newby.

ticking away

 

 

                                            

 

Apologies for the bad footage, but it's enough to get the point across, She burst into life on the third kick and idled away, I need to tweak the timing just a little but otherwise I'm happy with it, very little smoke this time, just the normal amount, plug wasn't oil fouling but had a bit of black soot on it. Still had the same response to the throttle, but I will just swap the engines over this weekend and give it a run, a tune and if it's going OK, leave it in for a while and begin to run it in.

I was stuffing about and decided to clean out the tool box, glad I did because there was a bit of water pooling at the rear from the recent rain, I just park it on the street outside work now, I have a piece of carpet upside down in the bottom to protect the bottom, this also collects all the dust and with the water, just turned it into a nasty sticky clay like substance, to my surprise I found a heap of change, $10.65 to be exact, score! I also had a champagne cork, zip tie, a nut and bolt and the plastic tag that had broken off my Armadillo jacket zipper. All things one should never be caught without on the road, you just never know.

Stage is set

Fully assembled, waiting on premix and a good stern kick or two. As for me, I'm going to wait until tomorrow to kick it over, today I have run out of time, motivation and sobriety. 

Almost there

A very productive afternoon, crank installed, cases together, top end on but only hand tight, stator in, alls left is the clutch assembly and some torquing down.

The cases went together easily, minimum of hammer love, not like before, the crank was happy moving freely after torquing the case nuts. I ran out of time and it was getting cold, should be able to kick it over tomorrow or Monday. Life's good.

A bit of prep

 

 

Ok some prep for the rebuild.

First up is a tool I just couldn't have gotten by without, my scribe. Thought it deserved a mention.

I made up a 1mm spacer for the inner sleeve of the fly side main bearing, I didn't have one before because I had read that the only reason the gap was there was so you could get the sleeve off with the factory puller, I have since been told that the gap also allows the seal to do its job better. The little selector arm is exactly the right size to snugly fit inbetween the crank webs for when I tap the sleeve onto the crankshaft, after heating it.

The third pic is the first crank I used and I was interested to see if it was out of true in the horizontal plain along the shaft. The marks represented where I measured with my micrometer. At 12 o'clock I compared the play in the conrod, the secondhand one was 3-4 times more play than the new one, that said it was still less than a mm at the big end bearing. The other measurements between the webs were the same for both cranks, so if the crank is out of true it can only be that the two webs have twisted somehow, I doubt it, but hey I'm no expert. Peace of mind that it's a new one going in.

Lastly, the wait for postage from the UK is about 3 weeks, which is what it was, I wonder though that it might have been quicker if they had of put the correct country on the address label? A testament to the postage systems world wide that it still found me here in country Victoria, Australia. I just hope that there isn't, by some freaky coincidence, a poor bloke in Elliminyt, USA is still waiting for his new crank....

Crank it up

The wife just sent me a picture of the new crank in a box sitting on the kitchen bench, waiting for me to get home. Looking forward to getting the hands dirty again, I'll fill everyone in as I go along. You wouldn't want to have this as a hobby and have a serious problem remaining patient, you'd go nuts.