The New And Improved Unofficial R65 Forum V2
General Category => Totally Off-Topic Discussions, Rants, Tire & Oil Threads, Etc. => Topic started by: Tony Smith on August 17, 2014, 10:13:43 PM
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Or it may be that I hate the person who worked on it, I seriously doubt a qualified mechanic would have done some of the things I've seen in the past two weeks.
Why do I hate them I hear you ask, well here is a little list of the major points.
Whoever last had the cylinders off decided to use a major quantity of RTV instead of replacing the cylinder base 'O" ring and pushrod tube seals. I simply do not understand how the oil feeds to the rockers survived the experience as I dig a cylinder of RTV out of each stud base, the longest was nearly 3/4".
Someone had the carbs apart and decided that using loctite green on the jets was a way-cool idea. It took me a whole day using a fine jewellery torch to gently heat things up enough to remove them all. Oh and the spring on the mixture adjustment screws were not needed so they were discarded.
Yesterday I decided to give the beancan a quick clean and lube. eight hours later I had cleaned out the grease that some moron had packed it with.
Then I thought that I'd replace the cone couplers on the front engine mount stud. The helpful PO had got there first and had found it too hard to refit the washers either side of the couplers and had cranked the bolts right down. I had to borrow a "Porta-power" hydraulic ram to spread the frame enough to fit the new neoprene couplers I bought and the panel washers I had to go and buy (not the right ones, but they will do).
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Last weekend on Saturday I honestly thought that I'd have the old girl running by Sunday afternoon, I came down with something overnight and did touch it again until this weekend. On Saturday morning I told my wife she would hear it fire up.. ... Ha! It's Monday and courtesy of having to spend so much time unraveling the lunacy of the PO I may not finish re-connecting everything today.
And one more thing. I have a special hatred today for Australia Post. Last Monday I bought a set of fork seals from an Australian parts supplier - thereby paying about double what the set I also ordered from Moto Bins in order to have a spare set, cost. There are two places called Clifton Beach in Australia one is where I live in far north Queensland and the other is in Tasmania. Guess where my fork seals are?..... This is in spite of me asking the supplier to write QUEENSLAND in letters at least three times bigger than Clifton Beach.
And it's just one week after Australia post managed to deliver my pistons and barrels for the KLE. It took Fedex exactly 4 days to shift them from Hebron Kentucky to Mascot airport, Sydney Australia AND to customs clear them and put them into the hands of Australia Post. It then took 9 days for Australia Post to shift them form Sydney to Cairns where they were delivered to me at work.
Whinge, grizzle, moan!
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The joys of previous owners - The Bean can packed with grease is a new one.
You'll get there.
For all the opposite reasons I was very grateful to my bikes previous owner who was either a skilled and careful mechanic or did almost nothing at all to the bike in it's first 28 years and 6000 miles. Every single nut an bolt was perfect complete with factory paint tell tails in some cases. It was as if they'd never seen a spanner. The real sign of care was that the fasteners that must have been touched like on the rocker cover were very lightly torqued just as they should be. Somebody knew what they were doing even if that was mostly nothing.
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'The Bean can packed with grease is a new one.'
New Bean can? Where?
Ive just spent 2 weeks trying to source a new one for a buddy and he eventually had to go for some fancy electronic thingy that cost about $350.
Where can you get a 'new' bean can?
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'It then took 9 days for Australia Post to shift them form Sydney to Cairns where they were delivered to me at work'.
Jeeez! That is even slower than the Indonesian postal system (New handlebar switches from Motobins to Bali took 8 days!)
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For all the opposite reasons I was very grateful to my bikes previous owner who was either a skilled and careful mechanic or did almost nothing at all to the bike in it's first 28 years and 6000 miles.
Ah I'm pretty much over it today. I am disappointed that it didn't run yesterday, but hey. there is an ever diminishing pile of things to do, the list I made a year ago has got fewer and fewer outstanding items. About the only thing down to "hope" now is that I can free the clutch that has not operated in 20 years and ride around for a while - I do have a new clutch to fit, but was hoping to put that off a few weeks and tackle seals for the final drive and gearbox at the same time - I need to ride the gearbox that is in it to see if it is OK or not. If it has problems I have a high mileage, sound but noisy box from a R100RT I can put in and do a proper rebuild on the R65 box.
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'The Bean can packed with grease is a new one.'
New Bean can? Where?
Ive just spent 2 weeks trying to source a new one for a buddy and he eventually had to go for some fancy electronic thingy that cost about $350.
Where can you get a 'new' bean can?
Far as I know, you cannot get a new one. The path you have gone down, providing it also dispenses with the model T idea of springs and bob-weights to handle advance retard is money well spent.
My problem was that the MPO had quite literally filled the beancan with wheel-bearing grease, and a fairly heavy one at that. I almost didn't find it last weekend, only that I was idly rotating the beancan with my fingers and thought that it was a bit "stiff", I popped the top off intending to simply lubricate the bronze bushes it turns on and check the advance/retard unit. Imagine my surprise when I found around 1/4 lb of grease in there. Mind you, it was all rather clean and shiny inside......
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I have to say that mine came apart very easily, the bike had done 33k miles through the hands of 8 p/o's. I had one problem with a frozen fastener which proved to be a non OEM addition from a p/o.
The bike was complete and original, which I am sure helped!
The quality of the bike (IMO) is superb and has cleaned up very well.
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The bike was complete and original, which I am sure helped!
The quality of the bike (IMO) is superb and has cleaned up very well.
The thing is, I would probably have never bought my R65, ignoring the fact that it had a blown pot it showed a lot of signs of neglect and inept care. However at the time, that was not a consideration, as I had damaged my wife's R65/80 which she loves to bits. given the price of multiplicity of parts that I needed (and remember that back on 1994/1995 the internet was just getting going) and my only source (that I knew of) were my State distributor, Motobins and one specialist wrecker in Sydney, ?i bought it simply because it had all the things I had buggered up on my wife's bike - basically everything from the steering head forward.
I never intended to rebuild it, that really only became a viable option because of the reach f things like eBay and forums. Even so, as the saga continued I found myself having to dig deeper and deeper to buy stuff I needed. On a cash spent basis it owes me about $AU3,500 which looks favorable against the $AU4,000 to $4,500 that a presentable "survivor' in good order commands. But to bring mine to that standard involves a repaint, a complete frame strip and repaint and a hell of a lot of soda blasting of alloy, all of which is going to cost a lot more than $1,000.
On the other hand, the world would be boring if we didn't have projects and I am pleased to have seen it through to the end (or close to the end at this stage to be a bit pedantic).
oh, and my fork seals arrived today too......
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How about zero to no valve clearance on both sides. Idle speed went to 3k after I brought it back in line.
Battery had about 1/2 inch of water in some of the cells. The rest were dry. Picked up a new AGM battery on Amazon for $45.
Clutch cable is pinched and damaged between the timing chain cover and the frame. I'm still working on that one. Probably have to loosen the cover to free it.
400 cc of oil in 1 fork tube and 300 in the other. Went with 190 of 10 wt in each and got rid of the clanking. Does the manual really say to put 600cc in each fork tube?
That's it so far....
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How about zero to no valve clearance on both sides. Idle speed went to 3k after I brought it back in line.
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Doing well so far.
If your MPO was female, we could introduce her to my MPO and try to breed them.....
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A problem i cannot blame the MPO for.
I finished putting the engine together 3 weeks ago but wasn't able to start it due to the starter motor being locked up.
Due to being busy at work, a family emergency and just generally being cheesed off (wife on 2 month tour of Europe and whilst I could never take the time off to go for that long I was going to head over and meet up with her for the last three weeks, now i cannot go because of work) I've been sulking.
I pulled the starter out yesterday and discovered that the shaft had rust welded itself to the bush in the "nose" and that was why it would not turn.
A few hours saw it cleaned up and a new bush made for the "nose", then I put it together and was about to bench test it when I saw I had assembled the arm that throws the Bendix into mesh the wrong way around. Pulled it apart again and reassembled but not yet back in bike.
I normally try not to work on Mondays but we are so back-logged I am going in for at least 1/2 day today (whoops just noticed it is 4:00am, how time flies when you are having fun (research)...
retract that, I am going to have an hour's sleep now, go to work for as a short a period as possible then come home have a couple of hours sleep and then maybe work on R65.
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Previous Owners (POs) often take a verbal beating down. It's often deserved and exposed by crap wiring, unsafe mods, poor engine service, hidden damage or just ignorance of what maintenance chores need to be regularly done. I often wonder why a PO does not RTFM (Read The F**king Manual). Unfortunately, a service manual seems unnecessary to some folks.
So it has transpired over the past few months with my assist in getting friend Dave Heinlein's '78 R100/7 back on the road. This bike was purchased on-line and shipped to Texas from Lord knows where. Cosmetically, a real beauty, but obviously needing new tires. No biggie, that.
As both myself and forum member Mike "Bengt Phorqs" worked Dave through the stem to stern maintenance work and got the bike ready for its true first ride, a serious problem raised its expensive head. The final drive splines were pretty much gone! Appears the complete rear wheel had been replaced as those spines were all but perfect. However, the crown gear splines were nothing more than sharp edged 'speed bumps'. No ride this day.
Off went the crown gear to Bud Provin's Nickwackett Garage for replacement. Not rebuilt splines but an actual replacement using a new OEM BMW spline drive. Big money unexpected but gotta do it.
The bike is now all back together and we rode off outta town for a nice lunch and tour through the North Texas horse ranch country. Back to Dave's for a minor clutch arm adjustment and I noticed there was an occasional chatter as Dave would pull away on a test run.
Back home and another deferred maintenance issue seems to have exposed itself. Not a really serious problem right now, but we do think the flywheel splines are getting 'toasty' due to lack of proper moly grease- just as the rear splines were ignored.
Too far in on the resto work to stop now, so we'll do a full swingarm detach and gearbox pull when our one week of Texas winter arrives. Fortunately, Dave leads a comfortable bachelor's life so there's no 'home problems' with his Airhead addiction.
(https://bmwr65.org/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi196.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Faa1%2Fmontmil%2FDavids%2520BMW%2520R100%2520slash%25207%2FBMWsAtMoms04_zps57c849be.jpg&hash=07acc8a18163f4a13cafc2b7b18e00b775235c78) (http://s196.photobucket.com/user/montmil/media/Davids%20BMW%20R100%20slash%207/BMWsAtMoms04_zps57c849be.jpg.html)
Mongo, Dave and Crunch in downtown Aubrey TX about to raid Mom's On Main cafe.
(https://bmwr65.org/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi196.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Faa1%2Fmontmil%2FDavids%2520BMW%2520R100%2520slash%25207%2FBMWsAtMoms08_zps35ed76dd.jpg&hash=43150e3d0f07b0f402d730581e3a4976d5d2a662) (http://s196.photobucket.com/user/montmil/media/Davids%20BMW%20R100%20slash%207/BMWsAtMoms08_zps35ed76dd.jpg.html)
"Somebody" has new tires.
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Previous Owners (POs) often take a verbal beating down. It's often deserved and exposed by crap wiring, unsafe mods, poor engine service, hidden damage or just ignorance of what maintenance chores need to be regularly done.
"Somebody" has new tires.
In this instance I have to own up that the locked by corrosion starter motor was probably down to me for two possible reasons.
For the nearly 20 years the bike sat under a few old bags, the starter motor cover was off and numerous mice made their home in the starter motor cavity. When I decided to assess the R65 as a rebuild to running order I used a pressure cleaner to get the worst of the dirt, wasps nests, mice nests etc off it, I particularly spent a lot of time spraying out the start cavity as it was really, really manky - the starter buried up to is neck in dried mouse droppings.
Therefore, if the mouse piss and sh*t didn't cause the corrosion, I did with the water blaster.
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crap wiring, unsafe mods, poor engine service, hidden damage or just ignorance of what maintenance chores need to be regularly done.
I trouble shoot and repair data/telephone systems and AV stuff for a living.......... whenever I arrive on site and listen to their tale of woe I always look for the human problem first and then the equipment that usually gives 5 9's reliability.
When I'm working on something myself I suspect myself as the culprit until I can prove otherwise LOL
"It hasn't worked since we had our air conditioning fixed"
When did you notice the problem? "oh it's never worked since I've been working here"
"The copier never works in the morning after we have coffee"
And on and on....... seems few things break compared to amount of items that are screwed up by humans on a daily basis. We are our worst enemies
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I trouble shoot and repair data/telephone systems and AV stuff for a living.......... whenever I arrive on site and listen to their tale of woe I always look for the human problem first and then the equipment that usually gives 5 9's reliability.
When I'm working on something myself I suspect myself as the culprit until I can prove otherwise LOL
"It hasn't worked since we had our air conditioning fixed"
When did you notice the problem? "oh it's never worked since I've been working here"
"The copier never works in the morning after we have coffee"
And on and on....... seems few things break compared to amount of items that are screwed up by humans on a daily basis. We are our worst enemies
I spent some time trying to work out exactly what to quote and then decided that your whole post was "rolled gold".
Vocationally I started out as an electrician, segued into computers, initially as a field engineer for the once great company NCR. I've ended up at the back end of my vocational life as a lawyer, but that is another story.
In the early 1970s, a local timber products company installed the then latest and greatest NCR mini to handle stock control, inventory, wages and accounting. Its installation was a major event and there was even local newspaper coverage.
Problem was that starting about three weeks after installation, at precisely 8:45 every morning, it crashed. Firmly believing that it was an electrical/electronic problem I cataloged every piece of electrical machinery onsite - ranging from little to massive saws, kilns, steam boilers, conveyor belting etc. etc.
I could not find anything that was being switched at precisely 8:45, and in fact given the protection on the supply line I could not understand how anything external could affect the computer anyway.
After two weeks I was at near despair, the customer was unhappy, my boss was unhappy and I was very unhappy. Worse on some days when I actually had equipment set up to monitor the supply line and sat in the computer room waiting for it to crash - it didn't.
On this day I was sitting in the computer room doing two things, firstly contemplating a new career somewhere a long way away and secondly contemplating the exquisite beauty of the girl who was employed as the "punchy" to enter the data.
Sitting quietly in the corner as I was, she had quite forgotten I was there. At precisely 8:45 the secretary to the boss of the place (who was also very "comely" came into the room with two cups of coffee, went to the "punchy" and engaged her in a passionate embrace and a lingering kiss - during which time the computer crashed.
Now the early 1970s were a less tolerant time and I was very young, so you can imagine my difficulties, firstly in explaining to the two young ladies that passionate embraces whilst wearing (I think) Lycra underwear and computers do not mix, and secondly in finding reasons satisfactory to the customer and my boss to account for both the recurrent crashes and their sudden resolution without giving up the two girls, who in the very brief time that the "punchy" had been there had formed a "relationship of personal intimacy".
The lasting memory (remember I was very young) was that too such really hot girls were gay and therefore off the market.....
In any event, once the means of generating a large static potential was dealt with there were no further problems.
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I learned how to program on some old NCR mainframe. Nothing even remotely interesting happened anywhere around it, that I saw.
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I learned how to program on some old NCR mainframe. Nothing even remotely interesting happened anywhere around it, that I saw.
Out of curiosity, what model if you recall?
also what language, i.e. were you back when NCR was going it alone with their own programming language, or after they had done the sensible thing and implimented Cobol and Fortran?
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Ed, sorry I forgot to add - I am a NEAT3 survivor. About 10 years ago after failing to interest a museum in them I tossed the books which for some reason or other had survived since the mid 70s.
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NEAT3. I don't remember the model of the computer. It used punch cards for input. I am a pretty fast typist, so it sounded cool when I was typing out the punch cards.
Later I learned Cobol and Fortran, but that was in college and we were using Apple II computers, I think. Pre-GUI anyway.
Then I took a chemistry class and lost all interest in computer science, though with all the calculus I had already taken, I ended up with a minor in math.
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NEAT3. I don't remember the model of the computer. It used punch cards for input.
I *think* all the early NCR mainframes and minis (at least by 1973/4) ran :- Neat/3, Cobol, Fortran and Basic.
I spent a lot of time fixing punch card reader/writers. I hated the things with a passion, that only diminished the first time one of NCR's "legendary' flying head disc packs crashed and I got the job of cleaning it up and fitting a new head so that the customer's IT staff could try and recover data (Back-ups, we don't need no steenking back-ups).
Whilst at NCR I interspersed my computer work with fixing cash registers and accounting machines. I loved the beautiful mechanical complexity of the type 33 accounting machines. I was so determined to fix one once (the root cause of the problem was the heavy grease Dayton used to cost the bottom level "storage" racks with thinking that this would be a good idea for machines going to tropic Australia. This machine came from the former Gold Mining town of Charters Towers and decades of dust had turned the aforementioned grease into concrete.
Fixing it involved pulling the machine down more or less to component parts and cleaning it out (I used a steam cleaner)
Int he course of of putting it back together I had to order some parts that were not on the normal service fiche. This excited the interest of someone in Dayton who ended up telling me that:-
Field stripping a 33 to the extent I had was not an approved procedure, that tech orders required that the machine frame be returned to Dayton for re-working (but the re-working line had closed 10 years previous, and that the only reason he was going to allow the parts to be sent was that nobody else was ever going to use them and that once I admitted that I could not make it work correctly I would research and follow tech orders in future.
Well, I did put it back together and it did work correctly - passing the new machine 24 hour self test with flying colours.
Sadly the company that owned it had quietly gone bust and shut the doors in the interim.
My boss was not happy at the amount of time that had gone into the machine with no invoiceable outcome. He arranged fro a local museum to collect it, where it is to this day, probably the best condition mechanical adding machine - anywhere....
I left NCR shortly after and went to University to do my first round of Uni studies.
Very occasionally I run into old NCR comrades. The one sI felt quite sorry for were the old school techs who could fix mechanical cash registers and accounting machines in their sleep. Many of them failed to make the transition to electronic cash registers and computers and slowly fell by the wayside as the machines they knew simply faded away.
I feared that the same thing would happen with the new wave machines which is why I decided to leave. The ultimate outcome for NCR and indeed the whole accounting machine industry is proof that I made the right call.
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I bet rebuilding carbs is not a problem for you!
Maybe I did Fortran and Cobol on the NCR. I bet Pascal was on the Apple IIs.
Chemistry and biology still work much as they did when I studied them. Particle physics and astrophysics are another story.
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I bet rebuilding carbs is not a problem for you!
Maybe I did Fortran and Cobol on the NCR. I bet Pascal was on the Apple IIs.
Chemistry and biology still work much as they did when I studied them. Particle physics and astrophysics are another story.
Yes, I do seem to get along pretty comfortably with most mechanical things.
My first exposure to Pascal was the "P" system environment available on Osborne 01 luggable computers, I recall helping a friend implement a Pascal system on a Apple IIe and not very long after that rigging a cable so that he could transfer all his Pascal source code to an IBM PC.
Pascal was the last language I invested any personal time in, by the time "C" was beginning to become the dominant programming language I was exiting the industry and moving on to other things, C+ and C++ hold little meaning to me and in all honesty I could not tell you what the difference is. I have been fiddling with Linux off and on since the mid 90s and every once in a while I form the intention to learn something about C++, but so far the intention has failed to translate to action.
I agree, as we get older we tend to seek more "permanence" in things, which perhaps explains where I fetched up, working in an area where change and innovation move at geologic speed.