Shane - Superlite (#43)

Thursday night we cruised around to Brent's place again and did a little bit more. We pretty much just finished off opening the engine up and figuring out what was broken.

After flipping the engine upside down we got the sump off and found nothing surprising. The gears in the gearbox were all perfect with no wear of the surface hardening. We couldn't find any sort of residues or bits of things floating around and everything looked like it's an engine that hasn't done all that many k's. We also found that it's possible to unbolt the conrod without splitting the cases, which is what the previous owner must've done because the base gasket is undisturbed and still full sealed. That's very pleasing.

We put the sump back on, just doing things up finger type and then pulled the clutch cover off to have a look at what sort of damage the previous owner had done. The ad on trademe said that a clutch plate had been broken and we couldn't figure out how that could happen until we opened it up. Once the cover was off we could see there were only 3 bolts where there should've been 4. When Brent had the push plate assembly off we could see that 1 of the 4 posts was missing. Looks like the plates weren't sitting properly when the plate assembly was bolted down and they just kept screwing the things down until the post broke off. It was probably about that time they decided to cut their loses and sell it.

After that the wife and I bailed out with a bunch of photos that had been taken so we could document the progress of things.

So, state of play at the moment is a parts list that looks like this:

2x Conrod Bolts - 5565115-001
2x Conrod Nuts - 5565116-001
1x Cam chain - 5565469-001
1x Cam chain tensioner - 5565468-001
1x Cam chain tensioner O ring - 5576910-001
1x Clutch inner plate - 5565831-001
1x Clutch spring - 5565827-001
1x Bolt - 5565879-001
1x Crankshaft oil seal - 5869461-001
1x top end gasket + oil seals set (head gasket, cam cover gasket etc)

Funny thing is that the gasket set adds up to more than the rest put together!!

That lot will bring it back up to perfect condition for a bike that's probably only done about 30,000k's over 9 years. I'm even more convinced I got a hell of a good bargain and I'm bloody glad I didn't buy it when it first went up on trademe.

The broken pressure plate


Clutch with the post missing


A great view of the conrod bolts


The lightest she'll ever be ...