Racing Diary – Part 8
Well where do I start with this one, it’s been a very interesting couple of weeks. Lets start back at the last meeting, as you know my race was cut short by some kind of failure in the transmission. The day after the race I had the car back in the garage and the diagnosis started. The suspicion is that the clutch has failed in some way, this is good news as this can be removed with out having to extract the engine from the chassis. I start by removing the clutch cover, remove the clutch plates looking for any form of damage but there was nothing obvious. Once the plates were out of the clutch basket I noticed that the basket had some play in it. Looked like the main bearing on the clutch basket was worn, this was a problem but it’s not the major problem. So next move is to remove the engine from the chassis and drop the sump of the engine to see what is going on. Justin and I had the engine out of the chassis within a couple of hours and on the floor of the garage. Once I removed the sump it was obvious what the problem was as I was greeted with a pile of swarf and 3 parts of a gear in the bottom of it. Further inspection of the gears revealed that 4th gear had broken and also damaged one other cog. Gutted wasn’t the word, knowing how much gears cost I knew this was going to cost a few quid to fix. I figured the easiest way to fix this would be to source a second hand bottom end and swap the parts over. This is when Ebay came to the rescue, as luck would have it someone was selling a freshly rebuilt bottom end. It was however from an earlier model Kawasaki but as far as we knew there wasn’t any major changes between this one and my engine. A quick trip to Colchester and I had a spare engine. I dropped both engines off to Joe at Peter Hammonds Motorcycles to get the gearbox swapped over. At this stage we have 14 days until the next meeting. As Joe was doing this in his spare time he managed to get it back together by the weekend. Less than seven days to go and we hit a problem, it turns out there is one small difference between the two revisions of engines, this is the length of the output shafts which the sprocket bolts to. The older engine is about an inch shorter thus my sprocket won’t fit anymore. Some frantic hunting through parts books at Hammonds and we manage to find a sprocket that’ll fit the engine and has the same number of teeth. The downside is that it’ll take a couple of days to arrive, add to this that I forgot to order a gasket means we have to wait until after the weekend to get the engine back into the chassis. With 3 days to go Justin and I lift the engine back into the chassis and get it bolted in. I spend the next couple of hours fitting all the hoses etc. Just as things were starting to look positive I manage to sheer off a cam cover bolt. Completely my fault and you could hear me swear several towns away! The only good thing is the bolt is in a cam bracket so it can be replaced, assuming I can get a new one. With 2 days to go this is going to be a real challenge. As suspected no one had a new one in stock. I turn to Powertec (Radical engine builders) and ask if they have one, same story, they don’t have stock. However they do have a second hand one, this was purchased and they sent it out that day. Friday 15th and we have one day left. I am working all day so I don’t get a chance to fit the new bracket until the evening. Which also means that if I break anything else we are in the poo. I get everything back together and ready for starting. I prime the oil pressure first by disconnecting the coil packs, once the pressure was upto around 20psi I reconnected them and touched the starter button. The engine barks into life, excellent. I run the engine for a couple of mins then recheck all fluids to make sure they are ok. I start the engine again and I notice a potential problem, the oil pressure is around 60psi at tickover. Usually this is around 25-30psi, I hope it is down to the oil not being upto temp so I let the engine tick over. The pressure remains at 60psi even when the oil starts to get warmer. A couple of small blips of the throttle saw the pressure rise to 110psi! This isn’t good…its 8pm now on the Friday evening and being the car is kept in a residential estate I have to stop before the neighbours lynch me! Not really knowing what to do now I give Neil Cox a call to see if he has any suggestions. After a long chat with Neil I decide to risk it and run the engine in qualifying to see what happens. At this point I was feeling pretty low knowing that we could be on the way home again before lunch on the Saturday.
Continued in the race report…….
