Todays update from Bodgers Lodge

Hi All

Back to Loctite I have had a bottle of 603 for ever but suddenly it has just stopped working it will not go off no matter how clean I make the job. Its still liquid flows as well as usual but will not go off. My workshop temp is held around 50 f. I bought another bottle and no problem on the same job. I was down at the club the other day loctite came up and another member has exactly the same problem.

Peter

I'd calculated in me 'ead that it was 23.473595 microns [ approx ] but then again it's 46mm not 42mm

Nice work, John

I note you used that swing-up threading tool that I have seen you mention elsewhere.

MichaelG.

John

How many miles has the bike done? If it is anything over 80,000 I trust the valve guides have been replaced. The BMW boxers of 30 or so years ago had a reputation of loosing their valve heads when the guides were worn. The guides were too short. A loose valve head makes an awful mess of a cylinder head. Hamrax Motors in west London used to have such a damaged head on display in their shop. It was frightening.

Excuse me if I am telling you how to suck eggs.

JA

Anyone might think that you knew what you`re doing, John!

JA,

No idea, not my brief to work on the engine, all I get is a cylinder head and told, thread is stripped.

I do the head and send back out.

I love onesey twosey jobs that fly out the door, If you get a good run you can weld a couple up and be doing something else whilst the weld dries but that job is still on the clock, then go back machine them up and stack them up again until you have them all done and shift to the mill for keyways all done at one go.

Very easy to to be able to book 18 + hours for a 10 hour day and no one moans as they still get a cheap job compared to replacement costs, if they can be replaced.

John

OK.

JA

Hi JA, so you are one of our former customers, glad that some still remember the old shop. From memory we only had problems with BMW valve head dropping on the 450/650 range, my own 75/5 has 150+Kmiles and the heads have never been off. You might remember the bike as the one parked out front on Ladbroke Grove.

chriStephens

Well done Sir John, that's exactly like an inside out version of a Norton twin exhaust repair!!

cheers

Bill

Nice work yet once again John. I've a BMW fanatic mate who does so many of these he made a jig to mount the head on his large lathe faceplate and cut the new thread after getting the ally welded up. I like the idea of a bronze thread though. Much more durable.

If you are doing a bit of old BM work, one thing to look out for on the other thread that commonly goes: the cylinder/head stud holes in the crankcase. There is a tiny oil way for oil feed to the top end that runs runs right there, so if you install a threaded insert etc it is real easy to block off that oil supply. My mate had one come into his shop that some non-BMW bike shop had done and the result was one trashed engine.

Keep on bodgin' -- always a good read.

Chris

I did have an R65 but I only ever used Chopper's side of the shop.

JA

.

I did a couple like this early on but was not impressed by the job quality at the end of the day, even with decent TiG rods the finished thread was gummy and the alloy to alloy fit of head and nut didn't appeal to the 7% engineer in me hence the move to bronze.

That angle plate on the mill, first pic is a jig. It's an old plate I picked up from somewhere and the vertical face was made blank. Some one had drilled tapped a few holes in it so I drilled and tapped a few more.

In fact in the first picture you can see a hole top left and what looks to be another at the side of it? That is actually white marker paint saying "XXXXXX Pump Jig" so I can bolt a weird shaped pump on and bore the seal housing out for a bronze sleeve when they corrode, as they do.

Underneath that are two more sets of holes for the BMW heads, one RH, one LH, both paint marked.

Before I did this I probably took 20 minutes setting the heads up on normal angle plates and trying to get bolt positions to fit slots. Today I can have one on the machine in minutes.

I actually have a book here, one of those with the clear covers inside, fixed not loose and I'm now in the habit of taking pictures of set-ups with my phone then at night print them out, make any notes on the back as regards setup, sizes tooling etc and file it away in this folder. This is because at times I have come across a repeat job only to spend ages scratching my head how I did it in the first place.

Anyway thank you all for taking part in this thread. I was not sure how this basically, an industrial thread would be taken on this site but then realised that many methods can be scaled and transposed to smaller jobs and machines.

[edit] some spelling

Edited By John Stevenson on 05/03/2015 12:30:42

Hello John,

Speaking for myself, but hopefully many others, I have found these insights into your activities illuminating and very interesteing, showing as they do some ingenious solutions to problems that most of us will hopefully never face.

What is paricularly interesting is the 'thinking outside the box' which is refreshing; thank you for sharing all this knowledge with us, many wouldn't.

I think it is very wise to make a proper record of these repairs as you describe, memory is a fickle thing and hours can be wasted in trying to reproduce something obscure, I have been doing something similar to record my own activities which may be of use in the future.

So, please add to the list as they come in, the scaling down to smaller sizes is a very valid argument.

Kind regards

Brian

Edited By Brian Wood on 05/03/2015 11:03:02

Hi John, would second what Brian has just written, love the "outside the box" thinking, that used to be more common before Nanny told us what we must think and do, but it's rare nowadays!

Cheers,

Chris

An observation.

We have an apprentice in our electronics workshop who when faced with a system that compiles a drawn circuit into code to program a chip having the same function said he thought that seemed like cheating.

It got me to thinking that when in education the we seemed to have been rewarded for complication. The more difficult the thing you did the bigger the pat on the head.

In an industrial environment there are no point awarded by doing things in the most difficult way, in fact just the reverse, but it still leaves us with the nagging feeling that somehow we cheated.

Similarly as model engineers we can learn the 'proper' way of doing something and spend ages longer than the more experienced bloke who just wants to get the job done well and with the least effort.

Martin

Years ago I remember being told 'now after you have been told how it should be done, we are now going to show how it will be done'. The difference. Time honoured approved short-cuts.

Jim

Exactly my point. You have to take the intuitive leap such as if you you want to get to there you don't have to start from here. The beginner will see that part on the drawing with a morse taper on it and immediately think he has to machine a morse taper. The old hand would possibly say to himself what can I start from that has a morse taper already on it and is scrap. Bit like the how do I machine a blind hole with a flat on one side. If you check out the answers they are all pretty much how can I convert what I can machine into what I want.

Martin

Hi JS,

Always good to get a glimpse of the real world. Please continue to post.

I'm still chuckling with regard to the Blidgeport.

Regards, Bear..