I am a very tolerant person, well I think I am. Anyways, if anyone disagrees they can bugger off 😉
I started work on the the third engine for the trike and almost immediately it started to fight back.
The first job was to remove the exhaust manifolds, to get it ready for swapping out with the existing engine.
That would be a total of 26 bolts, and as anyone knows at least one of the m is going to put up a fight.
Well, in my case the vast majority of them put up a fight and required a great deal of undoing slightly, doing it back up a bit, spraying with WD40, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and so on.
Unfortunately, that only worked for 10 of them; six of them sheared.
I then spent a few days, on and off, trying to find ways to get them out.
I tried spraying them with penetrating fluid
I tried applying heat, though all I had was plumbers blow torch.
I then tried welding a nut on the end to the sheared bolt.
Finally, I drilled a hole down through the centre of the sheared bolt and sprayed penetration fluid in being the bolt.
Then, yep there was no finally as I hate to give up, I tried various combinations of all the above. I even tried the recommended combination of Acetone and ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) – read about it here
I could not use a stud extractor as the protruding studs were no more than 10mm.
I also did not try a a reverse screw thingy, as I have used them in the past and they invariably shear off. You then have to go and buy a cobalt drill bit so you can drill the *&%$&!£ thing out.
I did finally, well there had to be one, decide that I was wasting my time, and also did not want to get too carried away and mess it all up.
So, I rang the crew down at Banda Engineering bemoaning my studs.
As usual, no job is too much and they told me that there was no need to remove the heads, and to just bring the whole engine down and they would deal with it.
Nigel did have a couple of choice words about the extractions when I asked him why the estimated price had gone up 🙂 However all were drilled out and heli-coiled, leaving a nice clean fix.
They then delivered the lump back to me for an extra £10.
I now need to make sure a clean out the remaining threads to insure to more problems.
The easiest way to do this is either to run a corer back down them, though I am just going to run an existing pristine bolt, covered in copper grease, up and down the threads.
As an aside, I also managed to pick a 1/2 ton engine hoist up off ebay for £56.
All in all, it looks like things may be back on track. I don’t want to sound to positive, because I would like to at least get the lumps swapped out before the next issue raises its ugly head.