I broke my Indy!

So, a couple of months ago (8th June 2008) I was out for a nice drive on a rare sunny day in the Indy when I pulled over to tweak some wiring. I set off again leaving the layby, but misjudged the height of the kerb. The next thing I know, BANG, I've hit my sump on the kerb. I immediately turn off the engine in case I'm losing oil. Guess what? I'm losing oil...

Great, so I have a smashed sump and oil all over the road. I spend the next hour waiting for recovery whilst signaling to passing bikes of oil in the road before they cover it in sand and recover me home.

When I return home, I notice it's worse than I thought. Not only has it smashed the sump (no biggie, I've got a spare), but it's also bent bits of the chassis and snapped one of the mounting lugs on the crankcase! It's going to be an engine-out job. That scares me. I'm a computer geek, I don't do engines!

Unknown Territory

So, the engine has to come out to fix the chassis and engine lug. Whilst it's out, it seems like a good time to investigate a gearshift issue I've been having. There's always been an issue with intermittently missing 4th gear when clutchless upshifting, but now I have the electronic Kliktronic shifter installed it seems to struggle with most changes clutchless. Looking at this means splitting the crankcase. Scary for me, I've never done anything even remotely engine-related before!

So, I took the engine out and took the clutch and gearshift mechanism apart. The first thing I noticed was that the selector shaft was very stiff to get out. A lot stiffer than another (practice) engine I'd dismantled. I decided I'd use the other selector shaft in this engine when I reassemble it as this was a likely cause of missing shifts with the Kliktronic. I deduced that since the shaft was hard to turn that the return spring would stand no chance. So new shaft it is, then.

Next job was to dismantle the crankcase halves so I could get at the gearbox. Handily it also meant that I'd only have to take the bottom half to a welder man to repair the lug - a lot lighter :D. Unknown territory, but it came apart okay.

The chassis now no longer has an engine in. Nice and light, should be quick :D I could see that the bottom 2 engine mounts had moved, the top lugs had been bent and the cradle itself was a little worse for wear!

I got the crankcase welded by a local company. Probably not the prettiest repair in the world, but it looks and feels very solid so I'm happy enough.

Whilst the engine was out I decided to tackle a couple more tidying up jobs. The propshaft came out for a lick of paint. The seats and all internal panels came out so I could clean and paint where the powdercoat had peeled and started to rust.

I got my brother (cheers Dave!) to do my engine cradle straightening and the required welding. The bottom engine mounts had to be cut off and re-welded because the way they'd been bent it wasn't possible to straighten them to meet the engine correctly. The top mounts were straighened and stitch-welded. The cradle was straighened and stitched. We used my spare practice engine which I'd stripped as a lightweight template to make sure everything lined up.

I inspected the gearbox. 4th gear did indeed have wear in the dog grooves so that was to be replaced. The mating dog gear didn't have as much wear but I decided to replace it (another 90 quid!) at the same time to be thorough. To make it seem more worthwhile, they were replaced with the parts from th 1995 model not my 1993. Those 2 gears were changed on the 1995 to improve 1st-2nd - slightly different sized dog grooves. They were the only 2 part numbers that changed in the gearbox for 1995 so I essentially now have a full 1995 gearbox - and a gearbox microfiche permanently imprinted on my retina! The rest of the gearbox seemed okay. Slight wear on some of the other countershaft dogs but not enough to worry about since I'd not had issues with those. The mainshaft looked good as new so was not dismantled further.

I cleaned and painted the interior that was looking a bit shabby due to peeling powdercoat and rust, and also the welded bits of engine bay and other bits that had peeled.

After about 4 weeks on backorder my new gears finally arrived. The moment had come...I had to put it all back together again!

The countershaft was layed out ready for assembly, with circlips and oil seals to replace.

I managed to put the engine together and gave it a good clean with gunk before putting it back in the chassis. It would have been good if I'd remembered to take an "after" picture...but I didn't!

Does it work?

Once the engine was back in the chassis I went about attaching cooling hoses, wiring, carbs etc. It started up perfectly first time, ran up to temperature nicely and ticked over fast idle for about an hour with no leaks or crunching sounds. I was well chuffed, I'd done it! So, I went for a quick test drive and within a mile there was steam from under the bonnet and it was spluttering - DOH!

At home I lifted the bonnet to investigate. No evidence of coolant escaping from hoses or the radiator. Steam coming from exhaust ports (was blowing as I'd temporarily mounted the exhaust using the old seals so not to waste them if something was amiss). Logical assumption was the head gasket and getting coolant in the cylinders. After all due to the way the engine moved and is mounted on the head and crankcase it's possible it was disturbed. Gutted :(

However, there were none of the "obvious" signs of head gasket. No "mayo" in the oil. No oil in the coolant. I borrowed a compression tester expecting to find lower compression on cylinder 1 (which was not firing now, presumably due to lack of compression from broken gasket). However compression was consistent across all four cylinders. So I investigated the reason for cylinder 1 not firing. Compression was good, so what about spark? Spark fine. What about fuel? Well, now there's a thing. When running on 3 cylinders I was getting fuel overflowing from the carbs. My initial assumption was that because the cylinder wasn't firing it was basically fuel overflowing. However a query on LocostBuilders.co.uk revealed it was probably a stuck float in the carbs. I stripped and cleaned all the carbs and re-ran the engine. It was running fine!!!! I assume that there was dirt and condensation in the carbs during storage, and this blew through when the engine was under load on the test drive

Test Drive

So on Saturday 30th August 2008, 12 weeks after I broke it I went for another test drive, taking it steady initially. All seemed good, so I ventured further. Still fine. Managed about 40 miles, using all gears and all revs. Gearbox working better (only missed a couple of gears when I set too short a cutout on the full throttle ignition cut). It was the first time I'd had consistent full-throttle upshifts - wow do they sound good in tunnels :D

I declare that a successful project! It's now better than before, and I have a little bit more knowledge and experience about of engines.