Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I've felt like all my bikes are falling apart lately. They're not
really, but they both have problems. The Goldwing needs some pretty
serious starter attention, as the starter's got several problems at the
same time. The biggest one is that the starter clutch, a device buried
deep in the engine, is not working right all the time. That could be a
symptom of slightly overfilling the oil at the last oil change, or it
could be an indication of impending doom. The starter motor itself is
also showing signs it needs to be rebuilt, and sooner rather than
later. sigh
The Z was also having problems, but of a much more benign nature. I could hear one exhaust pulse louder than the others, which suggested that at least one of the exhaust headers was coming loose. Annoying, but hardly the end of the world. I fixed that today, by tightening all the header nuts, each and every one of which was way too loose.
Imagine you've got a nut about a half inch across, and you grab it with your fingers and tighten it just as tight as it will go. That's about 5-6 lb-ft of torque, depending on how strong you are. If you get a screwdriver-shaped nut driver, and really cranked them down, you might get up to 10 lb-ft, maybe 15. Well, these nuts are supposed to be torqued to 12 lb-ft, and they all required at least a 1/4 turn, some of them requiring a half turn. That's pretty loose.
I have a theory that if I'd left the situation for another 5-10 heat up/cool down cycles, I would have started losing nuts off the headers. Now that would be bad, but fortunately I caught it well before that point.
The Goldwing isn't going to be so simple to fix. Rebuilding the starter won't be bad, that's just a matter of unbolting it and pulling it apart to put in new bits and clean out the dirt. If I have all the parts handy, it'll take less than an afternoon. But if the starter clutch is croaking, that'll mean taking the engine out of the bike. This is not a trivial task.
For one thing, I don't really have space to do it. The garage holds the sidecar rig and all the bikes, but not with any room to work on any of them. If I pulled out the two solo bikes and put the sidecar rig in the center, I might have enough space to pull the motor, but then where do I work on it? I could leave the sidecar outside the garage, but I want to move the engine the shortest distance possible to go from bike to work bench. On top of any of those considerations, I have to take the sidecar body off to do it, and once I've got it off, where does it go? It'd have to be outside, which is kind of icky. I'm not looking forward to this one.
The other complication is that if I went to all the trouble of pulling the engine out of the bike, I would definitely want to replace the clutch (easy as long as the engine's out) and look at a bunch of other stuff to make sure it's all working correctly. In particular, I'd want to check to see if the top end needs to be rebuilt, which is a many-weeks-long process (the rebuilding, not the checking). Maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to discount that lower-mileage Goldwing...
Posted at 14:07 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater