Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Sun, 07 Aug 2011

Regular Maintenance

"One of the advantages of regularly washing your bike is that it will give you the opportunity to go over it in detail, noting such things as loose fasteners, frayed wires, and other potential problems."

Ok, so I made that up, but it's advice I've read many times. My usual reaction is, "Yeah, whatever, blah-blah-blah." Of course I know it's true, but it's not like my bike is going to have loose fasteners or other problems.

One of the advantages of the new maintenance board (see my Nerdgasm post below) is that I'm now much more aware of pending maintenance. This is a good thing, since there are some things I haven't even thought about doing, that I should be, like lubing control cables.

My schedule has been theater-crazy up until this weekend (well, only today, really), when I finally got a break. I've known for more than a month that the Ninja 250 was in need of some work, notably a valve adjustment, cable lube, and some other stuff. I decided that today, I would tackle a big chunk of those things.

I took the fairings off, and did some cleaning as I went. There was a surprising amount of dirt built up along the leading edge of the valve cover gasket, so I cleaned the gasket off and made sure there wasn't any obvious defect leading to an oil weep. The valves themselves were in fine shape, with the right(!) valves needing adjustment on both cylinders. Kind of an odd pattern, but not anything to worry about.

As I was cleaning the engine up after finishing the adjustment, I noticed that there was a lot of dirt-caked oil on the lower right front. There wasn't a corresponding trail of oil/dirt from the valve cover, so I started trying to figure out where this oil could be coming from.

It was with a certain amount of disbelieving shock that I noticed one of the sidecover bolts on the right side, hanging with about an inch of its length exposed. That is, this 30mm bolt was showing 25.4mm of its length. This is, as we say in the industrty, Not Good. It was with slightly greater shock that I realized the bolt one ahead of it was simply missing. There are 9 bolts holding this side cover on, and two of them were gone. Not a good record there.

I was resigned to replacing the bolt later, since I didn't really want to make a store run today -- the metric selection at Lowes is spotty, and I knew I'd have better luck tomorrow at the real fastener store in Fremont. So I pulled out the calipers and measured the bolt. Surprise won out again as I realized it was an M6 bolt, which just happens to be something I have a large collection of: the CL175 is basically assembled entirely with M6 bolts, so I had bought a large supply to replace the fasteners Honda supplied with the bike, which seemed to be made of some variety of soft cheese.

I put the new bolt in place, and scraped the worst of the oily dirt off the engine. The rest of the side cover bolts got a check with the wrench, and they were all found to be soft to the point of danger -- I'm amazed this whole cover wasn't just weeping oil everywhere. They all got torqued down, and now there's one odd silver bolt among all the black-finish bolts on that cover. Hopefully that's the end of that, although I'll have to re-check them the next time I'm working on the bike.

As long as I had things taken apart, I decided to also implement a long-time plan. I installed spare cables (clutch, choke and throttle-pull) alongside the in-use cables. The idea is that when the installed cable breaks, it's an easy task to swap over to the spare. Pretty handy if you break a cable somewhere that's not, say, in the garage where you keep spare parts. I've never broken a cable, and if Murphy's law and its corollaries hold true, now I never will.

So, I'm kind of a convert on the whole "wash bike, see problems" thing (even though I wasn't strictly washing the bike today). I always knew it was true, but this was a pretty stunning demonstration. I'm also steady in thinking that the Thai factory (the 2006 model was only the second year the Thai factory had taken over EX250 production) still wasn't up to snuff. Hopefully they've got this kind of thing sorted out. With the engine mount bolts, and now this, I'm kind of wondering what's next to be inadequately fastened down. (The correct answer, waiting universe, is "none of them.")

Posted at 23:58 permanent link category: /motorcycle


Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater