Well, I'm glad you asked, 'cause I was fairly bursting with wanting to tell the story.
For whatever reason, I have been getting a real case of the nerves lately over that little tensioner doodad. I could fairly hear it planning to leap apart, drop its spring between two critical gears, seize the engine and dump me on my nose, most likely at highway speed. So, today I decided I was going to pull off the clutch cover and at least see how close it was getting to that fateful day when I would hear a loud bang and then silence.
Here's what I saw once the cover was off...
I measured the distance from the housing to the plunger and found that the plunger was out 11/16 inch, which translates to about .685 inch as I recall. I think that is around 17.4 mm, but I'm still not willing to bet my life on the accuracy of my metric conversions.
These numbers are within tolerance, but just barely. I reviewed Verslagen1's excellent write-up, as well as other articles and information in the tech section. Still not convinced that I should button it back up, I PM'd Verslagen1 and asked him his opinion. Then, I noticed that he was offline. So, I went back outside and pondered some more. The cover gasket came apart in about a million pieces, and I didn't want to open it again too soon if it wasn't necessary, so I decided to try to finish the project now. I have a friend who is a welder by trade. I gave him a call and he agreed to extend the tab on the tensioner. I borrowed "Pearl," Kay's new friend, and rode over there. I'll tell you, watching a good welder is fun. He just started cutting and sparking and pounding and pretty soon he was done.
When I got home, it took Kay and I both to get the plunger back in the housing. I did not remove the housing from the bike, just the plunger. I didn't have enough fingers to hold everything where it needed to go and still start the bolt. Between us, we got it in place and bolted down.
As I said, the gasket was a mess. I considered pulling the cover off the parts bike and using that gasket, which I know is intact. It just didn't sound like a good idea though, so I carefully scraped all the old gasket off with a very sharp wood chisel, wiped the mating surfaces off with a little lacquer thinner, and made a seal using gray goop designed for the purpose.
I bolted everything back together, wrestled for awhile with the header connection, topped off the oil, and started her up. Nothing sounded too dangerous, so I rode it down the highway a piece.
I have two concerns: It seems that my clutch may be slipping on acceleration, and the engine doesn't seem to wind down as quickly as it should when I let off the throttle. It is really warm here today. Somewhere around a hundred, I think. I fooled with the idle a little, and that may have been the solution to the revving problem. But the clutch concerns me. Could anything I did today have goofed that up?
If I were to rate the difficulty of this project on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it about a 2 on the technical issues and maybe a 6 on the physical aspect. I think if I had removed the whole assembly, that 6 would be a 3. It really is pretty straightforward. The most time was spent cleaning the mating surfaces of old gasket material. As for the welding, I'm glad I had someone else do it. I can mend a broken sickle bar on an old swather if I have to, but sticking two tiny bits of metal together and making a strong bond is not my specialty.
With the exception of the welding, the entire task was done with a cheap set of Walmart tools. Nothing special was required.
By the way, after I was done I saw that Verslagen1 had indeed responded to my query. He felt that I had about 1/8 inch of travel left before I had trouble. I'm glad I went ahead. That doesn't seem like much. I'll be sending the spare tensioner to him soon for his Verslavy modification. I like the idea of that pin and slot keeping the thing together.
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