To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t looking forward to working
on the bike. Previous experience has taught me you can never be completely
certain of the repercussions of one broken part on many others. One such experience was at
Cadwell Park in 2011. My Dad’s inner clutch basket disintegrated at the brazing and
caused the springs to shoot all over the engine, mashing up in the gearbox...
on the starting line.
This left me thinking I wouldn’t feel completely satisfied
until I had fixed the issue and had also made sure that it couldn’t happen again.
As you could see from the damage, a little elbow grease was required. As it
happened, repairing the issue in this instance is also the solution. Using
some coarse and then fine grinding paste, the two affected parts were mated to solve the issue.
Part of the initial problem anyway was that the parts had
not matched correctly allowing the keyway and nut to be under more strain than intended. Matching the two parts resulted in the tapers having much more surface area in
contact with each other, allowing a better fit under the correct torque, hopefully eradicating the issue. After, performing
this work, which took quite a while, the bike was assembled and then tested.
The good news was that the fix had worked and I felt
comfortable that it would stay fixed. As such, quite to my disbelief, I appear
to be ready for Mallory Park already. (I am missing Croft due to a holiday to Spain). The
not-so-good news is that there are a few things that I would like to do before
that meeting, all small things but they all add up and I have a limited
amount of time. A spare stator is on the cards for the next meeting but plans
for beyond are up in the air. Mind you, if past experience is anything to go by, there will still be plenty of things to blog about.
Race Scooter: All events occurred 25th March 2012
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