When the DPO was.... you :-)

Haggis

Haggis

Hero member
Location
UK
Domenico just joined and he has owned his bike from new, for 40 years now.

It got me wondering. We all love a 'DPO' story about the bloody-idiot guy before who did something really stupid to our beloved bike.

But what if the fuck-up was our own? When, with 30 years or so of education and hindsight we look at something and say, 'what the bloody hell was I thinking?'.

The confessional is open...
 
Threw a big end on my first bike. Nobody told me to warm it up before thrashing it.
Took it to bits. One piston had shattered on one of the crank webs.
Got the crank rebuilt locally, put the engine back together and was so proud when it started first push on the button. It ran for two minutes, then seized.
I took it to bits again. The cam was seized in the head. A Honda twin. The oil strainer was blocked by aluminium swarf from the exploded piston.

Lesson n°1

Paul
 
Bless me father for I have sinned. Oh there are so many from my youth ! My T140V Bonnie blew its fuse a couple of miles from home which I repaired ? with silver chewing gum paper found in the hedge. Not far down the road heard a crack and smelt burning.. battery had exploded with acid everywhere and my wiring was toasted. Snapped end off the camshaft on my Honda CB200 whilst over tightening the points plate mounted on it. Snapped various studs through ham fisted tightening. I set above CB200 on fire returning from camping trip whilst parked up in Welshpool early one morning in the dark. Moral of this one was... don’t open petrol cap and check fuel level with lit match ! This bike also nearly saw me off balancing the carbs one cold winters night. Engine running with garage door left almost shut and adjustments taking longer than I thought.. collapsed onto floor but managed to crawl to small opening in door to suck in air ! Serious point that one. There were more. However within a few years of trial and error I was the man to go to for repairing and rebuilding my younger brothers group of friends bikes. I have reached 60 with all my digits and relatively unscathed after 44 years of fiddling with and riding bikes.
I feel so much better now and am off to recite 20 Hail Mary’s and 10 Our Fathers.
Cheers
Steve.
 
last month, after 42 years of owning TOG, I dropped the timing chain down the tunnel two days before a very long continental trip, got it fixed in time, but the bruises on the back of my hand from fishing inside the sump strainer and pedestal holes have not yet healed.
CLEM
 
rebuilt an Aston Martin straight six for my DBS (1969) and decided to run a 'cheaper' straight oil to bed the new rings / bearings etc.and flush any foreign debris .... then was given a chance to run around Lakeside (QLD) race track for a day.

I didn't blow anything up but will never do that again! The best oil from the start next time.

No damage done but I've not confessed to that type of stupidity before.
 
I chased oil blowing out of the A-series engine in my Lotus 11 replica off and on for weeks until I realized that the dipstick was not fully seated and the sump was over filled. Drained the excess and the leaks stopped! Dopey me……
 
I was helping a university mate James put oversized pistons and rings in his Honda CB350 in around the early 1970s. The cam chain tensioner was pretty much at its limit, so we pulled the chain out and found it to be pretty worn. So he borrowed money from his mum to buy a new cam chain and we proceeded to reassemble the engine. Had just finished torquing down the head in the early hours of the morning, feeling quite chuffed that we'd finished the job, when we noticed the new unopened cam chain packet on the bench. We'd assembled the engine with no cam chain in it at all. It's just the kind of thing you do late at night when you're tired.

But that's not the end of the saga with that engine build. The next night, when we should have been studying for exams, we stripped it down again, fed the new cam chain around the crank sprocket, built the top end of the engine back up, timed the camshaft according to the workshop manual and connected the chain. closed up the engine and turned it over by hand. Valves were sucking and blowing - all good so far. Put the engine back in the bike. It fired up OK, so James took it for a test run. I heard him ride off down the road for maybe a kilometre, then it all went quiet. A while later he returned pushing the bike. It had seized. There's an oil gallery that sends oil up to the camshaft. It's off to one side of the engine centreline, so the (otherwise symmetrical) base gasket and head gasket have to be installed the right way around for the hole in the gaskets to align with the oil gallery. We'd got one of them wrong, blocking oil to the top end, so the camshaft had seized in its plain aluminium bearings. I remember thinking at the time that perhaps Honda should have made the gaskets symmetrical by punching the oil hole in both sides. Just to avoid that amateur fuckup. When all else fails, blame the manufacturer.

We did eventually get that engine assembled properly and it ran well until he decided to chopperise it and extended the forks. In those days you could buy fork extension plugs that screwed into the top thread in the fork legs. But they were only about 3" long and James wanted to go more radical. So he took the forks to an engineering shop who machined up extensions about 6" long and welded them to the top of each fork. The welds were ground back flush and the forks re-chromed. It looked like a nice job when they came back from the shop. Once fitted to the bike it looked pretty cool (to Jim anyway - I was never a fan of choppers). However, there was an unseen problem lurking in the fork modification. That problem eventually revealed itself when he was travelling along a highway and hit a bump at highway speed. The front end collapsed and broke clean off the bike, sending him somersaulting down the road. On later examination, it turned out that the welds in the fork legs were just below the bottom triple clamp, at point of maximum bending load. Furthermore, they weren't full penetration welds, so that when ground back flush, there was only a thin skin of metal and chrome holding the forks together. I don't remember what became of the bike after that. It was a bit of a broken mess so probably got sold for parts.
 
Classic. Gasket wrong way round. What an amateur….
I was helping a mate take the head off his little suzuki… after removing the bolts I said “the gasket will stick a bit, give it a tap with a hammer. After smacking the thing for 10 minutes and swearing, his mum leaned out the window and said “you’ve missed a bolt”.
“Bullshit” we thought, and carried on, breaking fins and swearing some more. His mum called out “Oi! Derek! Stop that fucking swearing and check if you’ve missed any bolts!”

I’ve changed my mind… I don’t want to share this story after all…
🤦‍♂️
Needless to say, I was a teenager then and I’ve learnt a lot since!
 
who is going to tell the Laverda story of the triple base gaskets that were missing an oil hole?
CLEM
I am keeping mum, I mean even the very best can make a mistake,(I did make one myself a long time ago) its not that error, but what you do immediatley afterwards that makes the difference
 
A flying stone once took a chunk out of my super-shiny series 1 generator cover. The dent sat there like an ugly wart on Claudia Schiffer's nose and it had to go. I thought I would fill it with one of those low temperature alu rods. I had a succesful practice on some scrap and took the plunge.

The material needs pre-heating, so in the oven the cover went. When I opened the oven door I was greeted by the sight of the cover now covered in hundreds of small bumps, like the face of a teenage pizza hut worker. So I went from a nice cover with an honourable war-wound, to a totally buggered cover with a surface finish akin to the moon.

The inclusions in the alu didn't like the heat and bubbled up. Bugger.
 
Brand new set of pistons for the Jota after holing the centre one while ringing its fucken head off. 😬

A couple of mates brought lots of beers and a bag of 🌿 and we had a fat old night slapping those babies in.

Buttoned everything up whilst a little (very) beery. 🤭 Woke the neighbours while firing her up in the dead of night, ran crisp and sweet.

The next morning, after the hangover settled, took it for its maiden voyage. 😎

Nicely run in over a few days and upped the revs to where it loved, then….

:oops: Lots of blue smoke, and the occasional bits of red hot shrapnel soon bellowed from the 3/1 exhaust.

Ripped it apart, another centre piston truely fucked, freshly honed bore fucked from the gudgen pin wearing a groove in the side of the sleeve.

Now I’m ‘not a mechanic’, but you know how those gudgen pin clip thingies should only go in one way, and somehow managing to fit one of them with the opening to the front or rear could end in disaster…… 😩

But credit should go where credit is duly deserved ….. one out of six is pretty good when everything in front of you looks blurry


Signed
DPO
 
Back when I first got my Norton ,I rode around for weeks wondering why it wouldn't go faster than 60mph.
Tried all sorts of stufff, until an old bloke {I was a lot younger then}, explained to me that when the chokes are off they are actually on.
Fukin'anals.
Now have one large Mikuni been running fine with bugga all hassle.
 
I almost got fired for something similar. As a teenager I was a real sleepy-head and always late for work. My boss blew a fuse when I excused yet another late turn-up by telling him my new bike had a fuel tap the 'other way round' to what I was used to and so had run it down to dry on the way to work, rather than to reserve. It was the truth, and I did push the bike for a mile, but he wasn't chuffed and gave me the hard verbal kicking I needed. I wasn't late again.
 
When adjusting the valve clearance on my Corsa I put some rags around the cam chain so there was no chance for the clip to fall down. I also explained this to my 7yo son who was with me. Good practice and all that, right? Well....I should have done the same thing when putting the new clip back on. Getting it out there was a bit difficult.....
But wait, there's more stupidity: One wonderful sunny Sunday morning I went for a ride with my Mike Hailwood Replica. Before leaving I topped up the oil just a little while having a chat with a neighbor. After 10km I stopped at a gas station to fill up. Almost dropped the bike because I slipped. Swearing about these bloody idiots who spill Diesel. Turns out it was my own oil on my boots because I forgot to put the filler cover back on. My right boot and leg of the leather was well covered in oil. So was the bike and particularly the right side of the rear tire. Could have ended pretty badly if I wouldn't have to fill up on gas.....
 
I got halfway through an oil change once before I discovered I hadn't replaced the drain plug. 50 wt everywhere. Haven't done that again.
 
Mentioned this before I think but replaced triple cam blocks in a hurry , next valve check several thousand miles later found a couple of the exhaust ones were not positioned properly in their grooves and had chewed up the seating in the head....
It was one of those moments where you just stare at it for a few moments before the reality of the situation kicks in .
Wasn`t quite as bad as it looked ( although still bad enough ) and 85 % sorted it with some needle files....it was still a previously pristine head buggered up though .

Whilst I`m in the confessional box...

Once had a Lexmoto Street 125 ( Chinese copy of a Suzuki GS125 ) which I picked up as a cheap runaround...
It was absolutely bloody awful to ride...poor engine performance , grabby brakes , unstable in corners so I thought I would start to work on it to try to improve things , afterall the GS125 on which it was based wasn`t a bad little bike so it shouldn`t be too difficult ...

Took it to bits to have a good look at it , decided it really was as bad as it first appeared , but then couldn`t be bothered to put it back together again . Realised no one it their right mind would want to buy this pile of scrap so decided to dispose of it , bit by bit , by taking it down to the local recycling centre , sawing the frame in half for easier transport , which eventually left me with just the engine which I decided to take apart just to see how it worked .....
So this one current owner managed to transform one badly functioning motorcycle into one that didn`t function at all...

Doesn`t really worry me though...I was probably doing the world ( or any possible subsequent owner ) a favour by consigning it to history...
 
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