Shane - Superlite (#43)

I finally stopped sulking about it all (cheered by news that I have a replacement in the pipeline) and went and had a look at my Triumph to see what happened on the main straight of Paeroa.

The first thing to do was take the fairings off so I could get to everything and locate where the problem was. Even before I'd taken a bolt out of the fairings I could see the belly pan was full of sludge (oil and coolant mixed together). This didn't surprise me because even though it didn't drop all of it's oil at Paeroa when I got home the trailer (and probably the road from Paeroa) was covered in oil. I hope nobody had an off because of it as there wasn't any sign of oil leaking at Paeroa, just coolant. I wasn't surprised there was coolant because it was hot and stopped very suddenly with no chance to cool down.

However, once I got the belly-pan undone I could clearly see the sludge had a large collection of bits in it.



From the amount of debris it was major.

Upon locating the hole it confirmed what I already knew, this engine was never, ever going to be a runner no matter what.



NOTE the pipe on the right is the exhaust header that I had cut

From the picture above it's pretty obvious the cam chain actually snapped, flailed about and gouged a really big hole in engine casings. The pictures don't show it but inside the top of the gouge is a whole lot of twisted lumps of metal. I couldn't even identify what the lumps were just peering through the hole.

The bits in the bottom of the belly-pan are the top of a conrod and the gudgeon pin from a piston as well as all the bits of casing and a bolt that was in that area.



So it's seems the engine did a really good job of destroying itself.

I'm guessing that the over-rev I'd had earlier when the gearbox was playing up bounced a piston off a valve. Most likely it was the piston that was no longer firing. It didn't have a whole lot of air being compressed on the top of it to slow it down at all, the piston and conrod were the seized originals that we'd cleaned up and put back in so they were most likely already stressed enough to stretch and that's the closest cylinder to the hole.

After this experience I'm going to make sure any bikes I have in the future have belly pans that can hold 3-4 litres of oil. These sorts of belly pans are mandatory overseas and after this experience I think they should be here. If it wasn't for the belly pan things at Paeroa could've been really bad. That engine took 4 litres of oil and that much escaping all over a track and stopping a meeting is not something I'd like to be responsible for. Especially if someone crashed on it and got hurt.