It's been a while since I did something that scared me but the thought of splitting KZombie's engine case has me nervous. Still, last night, I began stripping down all the buffed-up covers and preparing myself for what is inevitable.
I pulled the clutch and timing and found this:
Not too bad; right?
The clutch plates were definitely stuck together. Like 70% of them came off in groups of 2,3 or 4 friction discs and plates. I noticed that most of the plates are rusty:
The FSM says to clean these all up well with kerosene or equivalent which makes sense and I will but should I also buff up the plates (not the friction discs) with emery cloth to remove those rusty square patches? Or just leave it. I'm thinking that rusty surface will be very "grabby" when the whole shootin' match goes back together.
Here's a close-up of the discs and plates:
I spent some time scraping off the clutch cover gasket which was like iron that had been glued to the case. A little sludgy oil was built up on all the horizontal surfaces along the bottom too but I reckon that is normal.
Clearly, the upper case half and the lower case half are glued together and that sealer/adhesive is hardened now but still a valid seal. I inspected the seal on the timing end of the crank and it looks good. No obvious signs of a tear in the sealing surface. I have a teeny-weeny flat blade screwdriver which I ran around the perimeter of that seal/crank-end and found a little dirt but the seal seemed to be pliable still. Hmm? Maybe it's still OK?
Another close-up of the seal in question:
Then I spun the engine around and worked over the left side. To my surprise and relief, the bolt holding the engine rotor/flywheel/whatever you call it, came off with little drama. I gripped the rotor with my workgloved hand and put the impact on the bolt and VRRRZZZ! off it came. No engine locking-up required. Nice!
End result of stripping down the engine's left side is here:
I could not for the life of me, get that rotor/flywheel off. I resisted the temptation to stuff a BF pry bar up in that shizzle and start banging it against the case sides for obvious reasons and over the course of the night spritzed quite a bit of PB down the threaded bore. Gently tapping the edges with the wood handle of my small hammer to hopefully get the oil to work-in. Ultimately though, I was never able to get that rotor off. My hands and fingers were suitably drenched in motor oil and penetrating oils by this point so I couldn't flip through the FSM but just
knew in my heart some page deep inside was showing another famous Kawasaki Special Tool # blah blah blah, that I didn't have.
Here's as close-up as I could manage with my oily hands on my slippery phone:
Later, after walking the dodgie and dinner, I was surfin' the forum here and think I found via a few searches that other guys that ran into this problem used "a ball bearing of 3/8" diameter and a matching threaded bolt". Or maybe I was misunderstanding. Does that sound like an at-home tool solution? In my brain, I visualize putting a 3/8" ball bearing down that rotor hole, followed by a threaded bolt and logically then as I tighten the bolt, it presses against the ball bearing which in turn presses against ... the crank? which then presses the rotor off.
Seems logical but makes me wonder:
- Isn't the stock bolt that I removed, threaded
into the crankshaft end to hold the rotor to it? If so, then what threads exist in the rotor to cause another bolt to press against this ball bearing? ie: what is the thread pitch of the magical bolt I need to buy and who sells individual ball bearings?
- are there other options to removing this rotor/flywheel piece?
My assumption is the rotor is wedge mated on the crankshaft end, so the crank is sorta inserted into a receiver in the rotor as seen from the inside. Will tapping the rotor so as not to crack, warp or distort it do anything at all?
Then, I ASSuME, I could potentially get to splitting the case halves for the ultimate goal of crank seal replacement. I reckon I should just go ahead and suck it up; pull the cylinder bank off to relieve the resistance of the pistons against the block during crank case separation. I really wanted to avoid this because installing the cylinder bank over 4 pistons at the same time looks to me like a real handful when you're basically banging rocks together over the first caveman's fire (my workbench and tooling at present).
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Achtungs!? ?