Boo hoooooooooo - Betty has BANGED!

[Ms Piggy]

This time I have teken her to get fixed. They're going to put a helicoil in cos there is no thread left.

I guess I better go have some breakfast & go to work now...just when I thought I was gonna have a cruisey morning and the traffic was so good coming into town from my man's place in Tawa - it only took 15 minutes! Ah well, at least it didn't happen on the M/W...which is where I lost the newly painted side cover last night on my wat out to Tawa

Take a deep breath & think caaaaaaaalm thoughts. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

[Ms Piggy]

Yay! The world id perfect again. She is ready & it's only gonna be $57-. Cheers Boyles Kawasaki!

[Wolf]

Great to hear, Cath.

When I first got my Zundapp it had a brass spacer around the plug - someone had drilled out the hole and threaded it to accommodate a whacking great brass plug with a hole in the centre to take the sparkplug. Obviously the original thread had stripped and this had been quickly done to get the bike running again. It wasn't working properly and the bike was running like a pig.

Someone suggested "Ashford Motors" - a one-man show just out of Hamilscum - so I wandered out there. The guy, Brent (I think), was quite young but he knew his biz. The head sat round for ages until I hit upon the tactic of turning up and not leaving til it was finished. That seemed, on observation, to be the way he preferred to work - don't just drop it off and expect it done, stick around and watch as he fixes it.


As I said, he knew his biz:

He determined that when they bored out the hole they had gone off centre. Also, the brass whatsit was a "T" cross section, the top of which rested on the outside of the head when screwed in, the sparkplug then screwed on top of that, meaning that unless the plug had the longest thread on the planet, it did not reach down into the combustion chamber and fuel-air mix had to waft up into the brass thingy before it would ignite - that kind of fouled up the firing.

Brent drilled out the hole even larger, getting it properly centred, he then drilled a counter sink hole in from the top of the head and tapped the central hole. He then lathed a piece of steel into a "T" shape and had to use the lathe to cut a thread on the thinner bit. He then drilled and tapped a hole for the spark plug. When he finally applied some loc-tite and screwed the plug into the hole it was perfect - on the outside of the head was a flat circular area with a hole in it, you had to look hard at the edge to see there was a gap between the flat bit and the rest of the head - it looked like someone had merely planed off a bit of the curved surface to create a place to accommodate the sparkplug.

Similarly, the inside of the head was a curved bowl with a flat circular area with a barely discernible gap around the edge - nowhere was it recessed into, or raised up from, the original head to suggest that it was a separate piece - it looked like the head had been machined into that shape - not quite a perfectly round bowl.

When fitted, the sparkplug protruded the proper distance from the underside of the head ensuring that a spark would be delivered straight into the mix.

Cost? I can't recall exactly, but it was certainly less than $80 and he had custom machined the damned thing, corrected two glaring faults and paid a meticulous attention to his task that I would have only expected from a much older "craftsman".

Honestly, to see such a loving attention to detail from a young-un as he made the insert was remarkable.

[sels1]

Yay! The world id perfect again. She is ready !

good to hear it CSL - going riding tomorrow?

[ajturbo]

This time I have teken her to get fixed. They're going to put a helicoil in cos there is no thread left.

I guess I better go have some breakfast & go to work now...just when I thought I was gonna have a cruisey morning and the traffic was so good coming into town from my man's place in Tawa - it only took 15 minutes! Ah well, at least it didn't happen on the M/W...which is where I lost the newly painted side cover last night on my wat out to Tawa

Take a deep breath & think caaaaaaaalm thoughts. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

ahhh bugger matey..

you will have to follow where you went and look for it.....
today i lost a cover that said "650 turbo"..NOOooooooooooooooooo...
only noticed it when i got home.....

[Blakamin]

..which is where I lost the newly painted side cover last night on my wat out to Tawa

Take a deep breath & think caaaaaaaalm thoughts. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

the good one???? oh shit..... I have about 20mls of that colour and she might be a bitch to match.... I need a drink

[scumdog]

ahhh bugger matey..

you will have to follow where you went and look for it.....
today i lost a cover that said "650 turbo"..NOOooooooooooooooooo...
only noticed it when i got home.....

Man, that would so gap your axe, not like the local bike wrecker will have one, - at any price!

[Bonez]

Yay! The world id perfect again. She is ready & it's only gonna be $57-. Cheers Boyles Kawasaki!

Cath I'm glad the bang was a wee bang and not a big BANG. I may have a spare RS side cover, blue I think, laying around in the gargre if you are interested? What side?

[Ms Piggy]

the good one???? oh shit..... I have about 20mls of that colour and she might be a bitch to match.... I need a drink

Oh shit alright! Actually it fell off on the night I picked the bike up from you and we found it again but this time I was just out of the tunnel and on the M/W - not a chance of finding it. At least she's going again.