Old Engine - Crank Goes for Repair

I decided not to give up on the old engine even though it makes no economic sense to spend more and more cash on it, I took the crank to an Old Skool Engineering guru.

This is the most wonderful workshop I have ever seen.  Crankshaft heaven.

 Below is the crank balancing equipment.

 Here is the man himself.  

It will take about 6 weeks.

Installing New Engine

I'm working on the notion that I am not going to strip this motor down to it's crank.  I'm going to put it into the bike and see what it sounds like.  I know this is not the most secure way of determining the worth of any engine but I have a disassembled motor already littering my congested workspace and I have no more room.  My idea is that I'll get this one going and I might even get it back on the road with this motor.  In the meantime I will reassemble the old motor with new parts (or refubished) and then switch them over.  That way I'll know I have a good engine in it.  I'll then strip the new engine and so on.  Truth is I probably would never have know the old engine had a bad main bearing.  How would you know?

So let's get the "new" engine in the frame.

 The engine was propped up on a couple of car ramps.  I build up some timber supports and built a shelf across to the frame.

 And pushed it across.

 I used a car jack to support the transfer platform.

 And got it in nicely.  I then had to find a couple of helpers to lift the engine slightly so I could remove the platform and again rest it on the car jack so I could adjust the height to get the bolts in. 

New Engine Examination

As with any motor you buy without having heard it run, you're gambling with your money.  I got this lot back home and then started to see what was wrong with it.  Several of the cam cover bolts had been reworked as they had stripped the threads of 3 of the cam caps (this design of having the cam cover bolts go into the cap caps was asking for trouble in the first place - surely?) and these had helicoils in them.  The starter motor was missing and the clutch was trashed.  The steel core of the inner hub had come lose and the outer hub had massive grooves in it where the friction plates engage.  

 And someone had put in a clutch cover bolt that was too long and had scored a grove around the outer hub.

Oh and the oil pump drive gear behind the clutch hub was goosed:

I dropped the sump and checked for any damage in there.

 It was pretty clean.

I proceeded to adjust the valve clearances, get new gaskets and parts and switch over the clutch from the original engine, which was in pretty good shape.

New Engine from Holland

So the engine that came with the bike was completely shot.  The head and cams were done in, at some stage the clutch had exploded and the debris left behind had trashed one of the main bearings on the crankshaft. 

So I figured that the engine that came with the bike needed some serious surgery.  In fact it was a write off.  A project for another day.

The difficult thing to do at this juncture in a project like this, is to make the decision as to what to do next.  Trash the whole bike?  Sell on what serviceable parts there are left or look for a way to keep going?

Guess which option I took?  So I started looking for parts to replace those that were trashed or a whole new engine.  

So you get to the point where you think; is it really worth putting any more cash into this bike.  Well you all know the answer to that one.  If you are a marine, it's impossible to leave a man behind.  In the same way, it's virtually impossible for me to abandon a bike.  So I started looking for another engine.  These motors are pretty hard to come by as they have been used for drag racing for so long, they have all been snapped up.  However, I found a guy in Holland who was a drag racer and had moved on to Hyabusa engines for his drag racing and just happened to have a TSCC engine for sale.  It was a quinky dinky that my son was going to University in Holland so I was on my way.  And this is what I picked up. A complete engine and a spare set of barrels and pistons and another head.

 

Now I needed to see if it was in good enough condition to slide it into the frame.  I dropped the sump and the mesh filter (not much to see there) and took the clutch cover off to see what that looked like.