Bleedin' amateur restorers

TOG@Toil wrote:
> On Feb 20, 10:34 pm, totallydeadmail...@yahoo.co.uk (The Older
> Gentleman) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> It got worse. The guy who'd won the engine on eBay turned up to hear
> and see it run before handing over the cash and helping me get it out
> of the frame. I always sell engines this way -it's the only way to do
> it, because otherwise you discover that while they're inevitably
> described as 'really good', they're anything but.
>
> The casting around the clutch lever was actually broken off and had
> carefully been replaced so it looked fine. So the lever was held on by
> a tiny bit of metal. That effectively wrote off the entire left-hand
> switch cluster. The deeper we got into it, the more useless fasteners
> we found: bolts the wrong length, wrong size or just missing
> altogether.
>
> The bolt that holds on the rear brake torque arm was literally hanging
> on by a thread. Obviously the split pin designed to stop it coming off
> was absent.
>
> One of the top fork clamp bolts was under-size (looked like 4mm intead
> of 6mm: the heads were 8mm, anyway, instead of 10mm).
>
> Two engine mounting bolts were just loose. The others were little more
> than finger-tight, and he's used 15mm nuts on some. The only bike I've
> ever owned that made liberal use of 15mm nuts was an old airhead BMW,
> and I had to go out and buy a 15mm socket for it. It saw plenty of use
> this weekend.
>
> "It's just as well he was such crap," said the engine buyer, cheerily,
> "because it's making it very easy to get this engine out."
>
> Anyway, we got the lump out double quick. The buyer had been very
> impressed at how sweet it was - it had actually done fewer than 8,000
> miles and was the best 400F engine I've come across in years. When
> we'd got it out, we pored over it, and you could tell it had never
> been touched. All the bolt and screw heads were pristine. Except for
> the ones on the alternator and points coveres, where matey had stuck
> in a couple of slot-head screws because he'd lost one or two.
>
> The buyer was as delighted as a dog with two dicks - his own engine
> had done 59,000 miles and was tired, and he had been steeling himself
> for a £1000 or so rebuild. And here was a perfect low-mileage engine
> for a third of that. Or, to put it another way, for the same price as
> a brand new OE set of 400 Four coils, sold two weeks before. He'd
> expected, as had I, that it would go for £450-500. Funny old world.

You may recall my RD400.
It nipped up with Loz on board heading to WUNderland. The plugs were finger
tight.
Most of the other fasteners were either finger tight or over tight.

--
Hog