TOPIC:

Yes I guess this little baby is going to keep me busy!

Fortunately I have access to some tools. Al welding and eng workshop with all the bells and whistles including a flow jet
I see some CAD coming up in the near future!

In the mean time it is stripping and checking and finding more crap to fix! But hey, that is part of the fun right?

Thanks for all the interest guys!
Rick

Gordy wrote: Wow this build thread is making me feel much better about the gremlins I found on my bike. Looking forward to seeing how things progress

Gordy, I have been following your progress too! Think I have quite a bit on my plate with this one lol!

Today I did some work in the business. And then decided to spend another hour or so on the 650.
Objective: remove swing arm and mono shock.

Needless to say, more gremlins!

Assembly before removal:



Found some damaged rubber spacers on the bottom mount of the mono shock.



Once the swing arm and shock was removed, found this on the bottom shock mounting bracket!




Think it is time to rethink the current shock and just go for a newer adjustable mono shock and remount it all!

yeah you will feel better in the long run.
rather than running down the road on that shoddy ass workmanship.

imho,
leon

Leon, exactly!

Ill rather take my time with this one and get stuff done properly....
This weekend I plan to remove the motor so that will be another kettle of fish!

Busy designing a floating seat that we plan to have cut on the flow jet. Looking forward to that

So as planned, removed the motor today!

Before:




After:

And some cleaning started. Decided to remove the valve cover just to peek for now.
Just as well! Like so many gremlins found thus far, found two bolts loose on the exhaust cam shaft

Maybe I need to strip and rebuild this motor cause this is becoming scary shit!




At least the valves look clean and overall, timing chain, cams etc seem to be in good condition.

it looks like some of those bolts holding the camshaft covers down are not stock. It is possible that the two loose bolts were actually stripped by the previous owner. the threads in these aluminum engines are very brittle... The first time i striped my engine down, i had to make a trip to the store for some helicoils.

I would remove the camshaft covers and check for wear on the camshaft journals. I think i see some wear in your photo where the shaft comes in contact with the buckets (#1, 7, &8).. possibly negligence by the prev owner. generally you dont want to see those wear marks...

Someone else should chime in on this soon though with a better idea

I always replace with high tensile steel allen bolts, and dump the tourque wrench, trust your hands.

The bolts stretch, and even if you are good at these it often takes a second attempt to get the cam timing right...some of these may have been tightened and loosened dozens of times already.

What a busy week!

Thanks for this info Tyrell Corp! I actually found one bolt which was stripped. The plan was to do as you suggested but now I will first need to have this stripped thread fixed.....Damn these people that work on machines and they don't know what they are doing

No doubt the threads are stripped because a previous owner dumped the torque wrench and trusted their hands. I trust my torque wrenches and haven't had any stripped threads. Ed

So it has been a couple of months since I posted. Got a few things done but still lots to do!
As I was stripping and cleaning etc etc just relaised that this pony had quite a few non standard things going on. Grrrr

Done so far:
- Motor cleaned and repainted
- Frame cleaned and repainted.
- Seat relocated
- Front end stripped, cleaned and reassembled
- Motor back in frame