DragBikeMike
Serious Thumper
Offline
SuzukiSavage.com Rocks!
Posts: 4162
Honolulu
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The next day I started the break-in. I break-in my engines by lightly accelerating and then chopping the throttle completely, then repeat. It’s a constant cycle, accelerate, chop, accelerate, chop… I’m sure it drives anyone behind me nuts, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. The plan was a solid 500 miles of that nonsense. The hobby-lathe bore-job would need to be handled with kid gloves. The cylinder is flimsy, and I probably didn’t have the best surface finish. I didn’t want it seizing.
Right away things seemed on the warm side. The oil temp and CHT came up rapidly, much faster than the 94mm. I stuck close to home and kept the speeds low, constantly workin the throttle. I would put about 10 miles on it and then come home and let it cool. Everything seemed to be working well. It was quiet. The vibration seemed lower than the 94mm. Then I noticed a little oil around the right rear corner of the cylinder head.
I wiped it off and took it for another short ride. It wasn’t a fluke. It had a leak. Observing it running in the garage it looked like it was coming out of the area adjacent to the oil feed slot in the cylinder.
I continued to wipe it up and go for short rides. Once I was confident that it wasn’t going to melt-down I took it on the freeway. What a mess. By the time I got back home oil was all over the right side.
I tried doing an air test. I used a bicycle pump attached to the breather. I could pump it up to 3 or 4 psi and it would remain pressurized above 2 psi for at least 15 seconds or so. It just wouldn’t make bubbles when I applied soap solution. Even when I continuously pumped, I couldn’t make bubbles. Only thing I could figure was that the oil passage was full of oil, so no air was gonna bubble out.
The engine would have to come out to fix that leak, but I wanted to get it broken-in and also wanted to do some acceleration tests. I didn’t want to drag that engine back out until I knew there weren’t other problems that needed correction. Situations like this always bring out the stone-axe in me. I figured I could patch the leak good enough to finish the break-in and testing. JB Weld to the rescue. It took several iterations and I ended up with the entire right side of the head epoxied to the cylinder, but it held good enough to start doing some serious riding.
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