Yesterday while finishing up the maintenance a couple of issues surfaced on my bike. One new and the other a re-occurrence of a previous issue that we thought was addressed and somewhat stabilized in April. The re-occurrence was a small crack in the case where the kickstand bracket attaches. The crack apparently developed due to the kickstand bracket working its way loose during the cross country shake down trip in April. The bracket together with the weight of the bike was then putting significant pressure on the case every time the bike was on the kickstand. We took the kickstand and center stand assembly apart, put JB Weld over the crack and put it all back together with loctite on the bolts. It still leaked a bit, but much less than before and now had the bracket plate firmly pressed against the case where it should be.
In this pic you can see the crack where the bolt is supposed to screw in.
This pic shows my attempted repair.
The Welborn's - Stoney, Nichole, Cindy (Stoney's Mom) and baby Owen.
Thanks so much for the hospitality!!! It was great to see you guys!
I always had a few teaspoons of oil leaking out through the micro crack in the case behind that bracket, but noticed that after the fresh oil change the amount of oil puddling under the bike had increased. Upon closer inspection, sure enough the bracket was loose again and putting pressure on the crack and hence more oil leaking out. This was a bit baffling as we had applied loctite to the bolts during the previous repair, but the bonds had all worked loose. So we did the process all over again but this time tried silicone over the crack instead of the JB. Time will tell if this works any better. Will most definitely be keeping an eye on this area during the trip.
The new issue surfaced while adjusting the valves. A previous owner of the bike had apparently over tightened a bolt that holds the valve cover on and cracked the bolt hole. Then apparently tried to rig a fix with JB Weld and a thread insert. When I tried to screw down the bolt, it just spun in the hole as the whole job had come apart. About the only thing to do was to use the same method with the JB and thread insert - only try to do it better as it obviously did not hold up the first time. It worked for now as I was able to get a thread with the bolt by being super gentle. Will find out if this fix was any better next time I need to open the cover to adjust valves - hopefully not anytime during this trip.
Oh well, just part of the fun of owning a 20'year old bike with 95k on the clock.
1 comment:
Love the pictures on the deck!
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