Following on from my start up after a rebuild thread I was waiting for my wife to fill my jerry can at the local petrol station so decided to do a few other minor jobs on the bike.
One of them was checking all the fasteners (again) and I decided to give the exhaust nuts a final tweak and the World started to fall apart, or to me a bit more precise my bloody cylinder head did :shock:
I was using a normal C spanner with a handle about 6" long and gave it a bit of a grunt when it seemed to move a bit more freely. Hmm, maybe the seal hadn't been seated properly before so I gave it another tweak and realised that there's an insert in there and it was moving. The insert and nut are now sitting on my workshop floor next to the header after I walked off in disgust.
It looks as if there were a pair of tapped holes in there where someone had tried to repair it previously but the new insert was just pushed in then seal welded around the outer edge. There's a bit of weld down the half hole where those tapped holes had been but no real penetration to the weld. I've just raided my van and used dye penetrant to check the other side and that's got a nicely disguised but poorly welded repair which is probably exactly the same.
Does anyone know of a company in the UK who does a decent threaded repair where the head is bored out then thread milled and an insert threaded internally & externally fitted? The old insert wasn't even a press fit and turns easily by hand so I'd imagine there's about 0.002 - 003" clearance in there and it would have failed sooner rather than later but this has driven me to the fridge for a bottle of beer and I think a few more might follow before I stop swearing :x
One of them was checking all the fasteners (again) and I decided to give the exhaust nuts a final tweak and the World started to fall apart, or to me a bit more precise my bloody cylinder head did :shock:
I was using a normal C spanner with a handle about 6" long and gave it a bit of a grunt when it seemed to move a bit more freely. Hmm, maybe the seal hadn't been seated properly before so I gave it another tweak and realised that there's an insert in there and it was moving. The insert and nut are now sitting on my workshop floor next to the header after I walked off in disgust.
It looks as if there were a pair of tapped holes in there where someone had tried to repair it previously but the new insert was just pushed in then seal welded around the outer edge. There's a bit of weld down the half hole where those tapped holes had been but no real penetration to the weld. I've just raided my van and used dye penetrant to check the other side and that's got a nicely disguised but poorly welded repair which is probably exactly the same.
Does anyone know of a company in the UK who does a decent threaded repair where the head is bored out then thread milled and an insert threaded internally & externally fitted? The old insert wasn't even a press fit and turns easily by hand so I'd imagine there's about 0.002 - 003" clearance in there and it would have failed sooner rather than later but this has driven me to the fridge for a bottle of beer and I think a few more might follow before I stop swearing :x
