Cold sweat moments

Laverda SF said:
Laverda 1000.de - NEVER hit the rear brake when Hi-Siding all it does is stand your bike upright and you go straight ;o(
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Ron,

you read incorrectly: I was coming down the straight trying to brake hard for the next corner when the front brake completely left me. So the rear brake wouldn't have helped much but a little. No highsider imminent, just a crash into the armco. Was it Wayne Gardner who plowed straight ahead because the mechanic forgot to put the pins in the front calipers?
 
CLEMTOG said:
tried that, it wrecked the rubber in the syringe in no time, even had the seals in a vacuum brake pump bleeder get wrecked as well, very frustrating as that is what it was bought for, and yes, even more brake fluid on floor, bench, work ramp fingers and clothes, the smell doesn't wash out until several wash cycles are done.
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Use glass syringes. Very useful. Freely available over the net.

Paul
 
200 mile ride home from a party on my Commando and giving a friend a lift. Part of the route was on motorway. My pillion fell asleep and it wasn't until I cranked over on the exit slip that I felt his weight sagging on the left. Had to take the wrong exit to avoid it all going pear shaped when I should have been flicking over to enter a roundabout.
 
Haggis, brake fluid is not as bad as coolant, the devil's cordial. No water cooled machines allowed in my shed.

Couple of ideas for your next brake fluid change.
If you are using a 500mm bottle, drill a hole in the cap to suit a valve stem. Fit the valve stem, less valve, very easy to pour accurately, no mess.

My vacuum bleeder is an air boy, good quality kit. The big O ring should be nitrile, cheap one will bugger up quickly. The right angle rubber dodad will soften and fail quickly, fall off, mess. I fit a piece of clear hose that fits straight on the bleed nipple. No mess. Clear so you can see the bubbles. It will eventually split, just shorten it when it does.
 
Well I've made several of the above errors, the last one was pouring new oil into a sump with no sump plug but the most hair raising one was having the brakes fail on my Jaguar XJ6 in Switzerland. We had just come down a tremendously steep mountain road which continued into the centre of the town down below and I was turning into a gateway next to the place we were staying at (from memory the Restaurant Zoo Tropic). We then were pointing uphill, I touched the brakes, nothing happened, panic set in and the only thing left to do was crash through a gate into a field full of crops, even then it took a long way to stop a 2 ton car without brakes. The car was sat there with smoke billowing from the front in the middle of a field. At first I didn't realise how close we had come to disaster but the next day it became apparent just how much carnage there would have been if we had carried on brakeless into the town. It still makes me shudder even now.
 
Ron,
you read incorrectly: I was coming down the straight trying to brake hard for the next corner when the front brake completely left me. So the rear brake wouldn't have helped much but a little. No highsider imminent, just a crash into the armco. Was it Wayne Gardner who plowed straight ahead because the mechanic forgot to put the pins in the front calipers?
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Sorry! It was my intention NOT to discredit you considering you had a front brake failure - I was just pointing out why NEVER to use rear brakes under a Hi-Siding situation - Your situation must have been scary ;o(
 
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Actually ... applying the rear brake hard when in a slide (I think you mean a 'sliding' situation, Ron - ie the arse end is already out of line) will prevent a hi-side and give you the generally far more preferable low-side. If you are in a 'hi-siding situation' you are already in or about to be in the 'flying-W' and go over the top and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Watch countless episodes of Moto GP and the like if you don't believe me. I've had two hi-sides - one at race pace at Winton under brakes, another on a very slightly wet roundabout in 2nd gear and not fast at all. I challenge almost anyone to have the presence of mind to hit the rear brake and convert their hi into a lo once you're in that horrible moment.

You could also go full gas and try and opposite lock out of it, but I can only do that on dirt.

As for brake fluid - there's a good reason my late brother and I called it 'alien's blood'!! I hate the stuff. A lot of bicycle hydro brake systems now use mineral oil - SO much better from an application POV.
 
I don't think I've ever had a high side crash on the road (had a couple on dirt). I guess I'm not trying hard enough. Plenty of low side and other types of crash. Some of the scariest moments were watching someone else crash, have a near miss or do something stupid that they were lucky to get away with. That 'someone else' was usually my brother. He was a crazy bugger on a bike in our younger days.
 
I was thinking more of mechanical/servicing cock-ups rather than nearly kissing the tarmac but never mind,it`s still interesting stuff.
Apart from the cam block thing another moment I had was when replacing the primary chain on a T160 Trident and tried the alternative method suggested in the manual of locking the drive with a piece of flat steel bar wedged between the engine sproicket and clutch sprocket teeth.
One tap to free the engine sprocket nut resulted in one of the clutch sprocket teeth going AWOL.
In this case I quietly replaced the primary cover and pretended it never happened,out of sight out of mind and all that,but when performing the same task on the Mirage I obtained the proper factory tool-lesson learnt.
Sort of related is that I read recently that the Japanese have no swear words in their vocabulary,so that when instances of self inflicted disaster occur,instead of shouting out " How the effing bleeding p*ss*ng hell did that happen?" (as we would), a Japanese would yell out at the top of his voice "I appear to have made an error of judgement and am now suffering the consequences !".
Does anyone know if this is actually the case?
 
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File Under Carnal Knowledge -an ancient legal admin. expression relating to certain court cases (actually rubbish but I read that somewhere as well)
Just found out KUSO is the Japanese equivalent of fuck,so they are normal after all.
Cold sweat moment No.3 was damaging the clutch cable entry point lug on a Rickman Zundapp-really embarrassing as this was on display for all to see,can`t remember how I managed that but I was only 19 at the time so probably my first step taken down this path of occasional mechanical ineptitude.
 
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I had an "oh Fuck" moment with my Benelli triple. For those not familiar with Benelli triples, it'll take a bit of explanation.

I was trying to replace a little idler shaft that carries the starter clutch and alternator drive (known as the Z25 shaft in Benelli land). With the alternator and clutch removed, you can see both ends of the shaft. The drive gear is tucked in behind part of the engine casing, so you have to remove the shaft to enable the gear to be taken out. The shaft is supposed to slide out to the right through the drive gear. It's splined along its entire length but should slide easily. My shaft wouldn't move. Unbeknownst to me at the time, there was a twist in the spline in the middle portion of the shaft between the gear and sprag clutch that I couldn't see. The twist was a result of the engine kicking back against the starter, and it prevented the shaft being withdrawn the usual way though its drive gear, or the other way through the sprag clutch towards the alternator.

Not knowing it was twisted, I tried tapping it from both ends with a drift, it started moving a bit towards the left (alternator) end, so I got a bit more enthusiastic with the hammer and drift. As I was tapping, the twisted bit of the spline jammed in the sprag clutch hub, so the sprag clutch started to move with the shaft. That caused the sprag clutch hub to push against a bearing that was held in place by a circlip. Next thing I knew, the circlip popped out, taking a broken out ring of aluminium circlip groove with it. That was the "oh fuck" moment.

The whole lot only moved about a millimetre, but that was enough to bust out the circlip groove. To get the shaft out, I had to attack the gear end with an angle grinder to cut enough off the shaft so I could get the gear off the end, then withdraw the shaft out to the right.

Before reassembling with new shaft and gear, I had to re-engineer another way to retain the bearing because the circlip groove was now gone. Fortunately there was enough room and material around the bearing to make a flanged retainer ring that screwed in place with 6 x M4 countersunk screws into holes that I drilled and tapped in the case.

Photo of the hacked up shaft and and gear. You can see the twist in the spline.
Also a photo of my patented circlip alternative. There's Loctite on them there screws.
 

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My one and only almost high side was on the old Samari Park Mx track at Nowra but I did end up virtually vertical with locked hands on the bars. It's absolutely amazing how much power that flick develops. BTW I wasn't particularly going fast at the time, maybe 50kph no wonder the Moto GP blokes at their speed get launched so high and far.
 
Haggis said:
The fluid that I always spill (always - as in bloody well guaranteed) is brake fluid. No matter how hard I try, I always end up with a puddle on the floor and splashes all over the paint work. It seems to out-fox me every time.
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Totally Paul. Even with syringes. These days, I always start any brake fluid job by filling a bucket of water. Strangely, this seems to stop brake fluid going everywhere ...
 
Laverda1000.de said:
. Was it Wayne Gardner who plowed straight ahead because the mechanic forgot to put the pins in the front calipers?
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I remember that one. Eddie Lawson, turn one at Laguna SECA (gulp!), slid feet first into the haybales at 100mph or whatever. Broke something like 17 bones in his feet and ankles for my memory. Legend has it that rather than asking for the mechanic to be sacked, he insisted he fit all of his brake pads henceforth (I guess figuring he would NEVER do it again).
 
Replacing the cam chain on my Zanè Formula a few years back, doing the chain up needed a bit more effort than I expected, but hey, what do I know?

Engine totally blocked, nothing moving. WTF?

E-mail to Piet ... "try depressing the valve buckets of the valves that are being actuated at blockage. If they can move any further, it is not valve/piston contact. I have absolutely no idea how you managed to get yourself into a dead-end street like this!"

Hmmm ... Split the chain again, and as I tied the loose ends out of the way, look what dropped out of the sump.

Don't ask me.
 

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