Dirty Deeds Done Cheap

With the Velo tucked away, I've been just just batting about on my Suzuki to and from work.  I've been pretty busy on the work front since last May and having small kids (7 and 10 now) seems to mop up the gaps between putting an honest crust on the table.  Inevitably something had to give and it came just before Christmas when the Suzuki pegged out on me.

No compression, then some compression, then even with no compression on the kick starter it would start and run.  Yes, performance was down, but I couldn't believe it would go 110 kph with so little resistance at the kick-starter.  I should point out that the decompresser cable to the kick start broke ages ago and I bought the bike without the valve lifter lever or cable.  Finally, one night it just gave up on me and it was clear that the head would have to come off.

 

Endoscope

A while back I bought a USB endoscope to search for electrical wiring sealed up above suspended ceilings without having to rip holes in them.  For €16 it came with 5m of cable and worked a treat saving hours of work.  It just so happened that it fitted down the plug hole in the head of the Suzuki.  I saw a bore a tad glazed but without scratches or signs  bad damage.  I'm not sure this was much use but it was fun and made me feel clever!

Head off then...

So off came the head and it looked fine.  Nice healthy deposits for an engine with so many kms on it. Then I popped the valves out and hey presto!  

Clink!  Out fell the valve seat onto the floor

The valve seat from the left hand exhaust port fell out and rolled across the floor.  It must have been loose for a year or more - this was the source of that noise I couldn't trace!

I popped off the cylinder and found the rings were sound enough to show almost no stains from blow-by, so nothing to change there. 

The remedy was simple enough - I got another head, cam and rocker box from the same bike through e-bay.  €175 got me a very good set of parts, I doubt I could have had the head re-worked for that. Here's the excellent guy I got it from (click).

Straight from the box the inlet and exhaust ports were dry and so I decided to test the valve sealing.

Testing the existing valves

Good practice is to strip out the valves and overhaul the springs, guides, seats and re-grind, but I needed to get the bike back asap for work, so I decided to take a risk.  I manually moved each of the valves a dozen or so times then turned the head upside down and filled it with parafin and waited.  The idea is that parafin, having no surface tension to speak about is a "searching" liquid.  When painted or soaked onto a join, it will find any cracks or non sealing areas and pass through, showing up on the other side like a pee stain on a schoolboy's shorts.  When I worked in silo and pressure vessel construction this was a cheap technique used to find cracks in welds, with the parafin on the inside  and the outside painted with whitewash.  Anyway, after an hour there were no signs of parafin on the otherwise dry inlet or exhaust ports.  Good enough, then.

Re-assembly

So, a base gasket cut from my daughter's Barby doll box and a head gasket from Poland (cheap and efficient service - click here) and back together it went uneventfully.  I'm really impressed by the design and layout of this engine, it goes together easily and stuff just works!  As a final dodge, I fitted the exhaust headers with transparent bathroom sealant - cheap as chips and works really well!

The end result is like a new bike.  Not bad for a mere €175 + €16 (head gasket) = €191.  I bought this bike as a cheapo hack so that I could concentrate on the Triumph and the Velo, but this Suzuki is finding it's place in my heart!

Less and Less Original!

Well it finally made it! RPR 657's bits are all in one place again!

Donkey's years ago my life took a few twists and turns that made storing a project bike (blew it up you see) not practical or even feasable.  It just so happened that my Mum (bless her) had a spare out-house and it was big enough for my Velo.

The years rolled by and one day my Mum mentioned conversationally that there was a problem with the out house and that the neighbour had done something to the roof.  Instantly I forgot what she said (well she used to go on and on) and it was when I visited a few years later that I noticed that the roof had actually collapsed!  The Velo was undamaged by the tiles but looked ruined so I wrapped it in plastic tarpaulins and vowed to be back for it.  The neighbour had moved away...

So the years rolled on again and I was able to get the engine and gearbox plus oil tank and various other odds and sods delivered here through a mate's contacts in the transport business.  The chassis had to wait for a force majure and that turned out to be the passing away of my Mum in January of this year.  As is normal in these situations, things needed putting in order and one of those involved me getting some transport sorted for the chassis and a couple of boxes of other effects.

I struck gold with the transport.  Through Shipley.com I found a guy called Mattieu Rottreau - a Frenchman based in Birmingham in the UK for some 25 years.  He specialises in moving people's vehicles about all across Europe and is a total star.  If you want to move a bike or car either to or from the UK I recommend him whole heartedly!  You can find him here - mrparcels@sky.com.

So here it is.

People talk to me about the value of this bike and even just this chassis .  Adjectives like "original" and "authentic" are thrown about in these conversations like custard pies in a clown fight, but there's nothing further from the truth (again - see here).  

When I was just eighteen years old I had an altercation with a ford cortina and the chassis of the Velo was a write off.  I had to sell everything else of value I had to buy a new frame, swinging arm and forks from no less than Geoff Dodkin himself and I have the letter from him to prove it.  

So on my '61 venom, the engine's a '58, the maneto's a rare competition model, and the chassis is from who-know's-when.

Don't care.

Everything's back in one place again.  That's a good thing.

 

Catching up

Well I did say I miss out on posting regularly!

It's been what?  Over a year since I posted "gunge and schrapnell" and the Suzuki's still running.  It's still noisy as well.  The tips of the valve stems are pitted making the setting up of the tappets approximate at best.  What can I say?  It needs a re-build really but it does run well, so all in good time...

But, but, but the biggie is that I've finally got it together and the Velo's chassis arrives tomorrow morning!!
 

Two tanks and bits...

Cadavre - erm, chassis I mean.

Gunge and Schrapnell

Sympoms 

My trusty DR600 has begun to make some alarming noises.  Well, one alarming noise actually.  It goes tickety, tickety, tickety in time with the engine and is independant of anything transmission or loose and floppy like a loose number plate or clutch lever.

This bike is brilliant.  Me and my Missus have had some really lovely times with it.  It cannot be allowed to die!

Initial diagnosis

I stuck a screwdriver stethoscope on various places and confirmed it's to be heard almost everywhere inside the engine, although reassuringly louder at the top to middle.  There's enough compression for me to stand on the kick start all day when the valve lifter mechanism is disconnected.

A history of malpractice

I'll confess that because the only thing this bike has ever done is run, I have been as lax at looking after it as my predecessors.  I've maintained and changed the oil and filters as necessary, but little more.

Testing and investigation

To put matters right I tensioned the ballancer chain, checked the cam chain tensioner, spark plugs, re-set the tappets and did an oil and filter change.

Indications

Well the results were interesting.  The plugs were perfect, as was the cam chain tensioner.  The ballancer chain was as slack as a tart's knicker elastic and the tappets had closed up.  This is the point where you have to get a good grip on your sense of reason and not let the imagination run away, well I do anyway.  What makes tappets close up?  Deteriorating valve seats?  Valve train support, proplems?

I turned my attention to the oil and carefully drained it into a very clean container.  I set this up to filter through some coffee filter papers, aided with a drop of white spirit so that it didn't take all day.
Whilst I was waiting for that, I dropped off the sump and cut up the oil filter and had a bit of a look.
 

Oil filter cut up and unraveled, coffee filter paper on the left, white spirit for rincing on the right and no, those screws are from an old radio cabinet, not the Suzuki!  Yes my workshop got dirty.

I used a couple of nifty tools to go with the magnet on a stick my wife found for me in Liddle (of all places!) on sale. Magnets on sticks are so useful!  I pulled apart an old hard drive and popped out the lovely rare earth magnets and glued them onto some M4 rods I had lying around.  These I swiped over the filters and sump to try and find bad things.  My heart was in my mouth.

Ex-hard drive magnets on sticks.  Very handy tools.

In all I found seven tiny pieces of magnetic metal between the sump, filter and the old oil.  I don't know if that's all that bad as I doubt if anyone has done anything nice to this engine in a long time.  Is this terminal?  Is the bottom end breaking up?  I have no references yet.  Everything I have read says if you find anything you should drop the engine and fit a new bottom end immediately.  Before I do that I'm going to try a few other things.

What I did next

I gave the poor thing some very superior oil (all the cheap stuff was out of stock!) and put it all back together because I needed it to go to work.

The noise is still there, but it does sound like it's not in the bottom end.  I live in hope.  On the positive side, it sounds like a BSA, it's really smooth running and it goes like a train!  Next Sunday I'll pop off the rocker box and see if there's anything to see.

Hold your breath for the next installment!  Actually don't do that, sometimes it takes me an age to add a post.

Truth.

And then I woke up to find things had changed...

A couple of things have stirred my otherwise dampened imagination recently and it’s all about electric vehicles and specifically electric motorbikes.

Blindspot Electric Custom Motorcycles
http://www.blindspotcycles.com/bikes.html

Brammo Empulse R from the review in Cycle World here;
http://www.cycleworld.com/2012/11/19/brammo-empulse-r-electric-motorcycle/

Until now the debates have run back and forth over things like “feel” and ideas of what constitutes a real enthusiasts vehicle.  This has gone on safe in the knowledge that unless you want a bike that will outweigh a Honda Gold Wing but not outrun a Honda 500 and be limited to around fifty miles range then its all so much science fiction.  That is until now.

The first thing that, as I mentioned above, stirred me is something called Graphine, a material that I believe will change a lot of our world.  It’s a form of carbon that turns out to be ridiculously easy to make (one scientist uses water dispersant and a computer DVD drive) but it has electrical, thermal and mechanical properties that could replace silicone and steel.  I could babble on for ages but I’ll cut to the chase instead.  Watch this link, right up to about 3 mins :15secomds (after that it repeats in silence with Spanish sub-titles). 

So unless you were distracted during that you will have surmised that a very fast charge, long life battery is a practical feasibility now.  For electric vehicles that’s a game changer.  

Of course there’s a lot of work to be done before we consumers will see the benefit, but if think how fast your tech such as phones and cameras have developed in the last ten years, then you can begin to believe that this is no longer science fiction. 

So the second stirring thing I referred to earlier is this rather extreme but nonetheless exciting illustration of how it could feel – you need sound, by the way;

Inspiration and procrastination

As I was scanning through Faceache tonight I stumbled on thiss little nugget;

Take your eyes off the gallery setting and just concentrate on the machine.  Yes it's a Honda wet dream from sometime in the eighties.  As I recall, duller than ditch water but equally reliable and endowed with Honda's "Euro styling", which at the time I hated. 

No, I don't like it much now either, but whoever built this has uncovered some interesting lines.  Remove most or all of the bathroom acessories these were festooned with and you end up with a purposefull looking bike.  As I've been discovering lately, a low powered bike with good tyres and springy bits can be husled along at a supprising rate.  So much so that it can really unsettle riders of very sporty bikes not to mention run rings around expensive large engine cruisers.  

This is all very exciting!  These things are at the bottom of the heap along with CX500s and those Yamaha XS twins that exhuded an aura of beigeness.  They're machines though and machines can be fixed to become characterfull and entertaining.  Let's look at the Wet Dream again. 

The builder/ exhibiter is probably going for the "diamond in the rough" appeal.  The essence of biking lurking somewhere in the rat bike before you.  This is fine if you like bikes but don't know much about them.   It certainly works as an exhibit, but what if it had a pair of half decent forks, rear sets and good sticky tyres?  The shocks look newish.  What if you knew you could give it all the beans and hold that into the next bend with confidence?  All that and then when you arrive, you can have a cuppa and admire the lines.  Oh a double-entendre - I must be right!