Bleedin' amateur restorers

Another one. Another 400 Four, that is.

Just about every bolt that I laid a spanner on turned out to be
finger-tight. Including one of the three caliper mounting bolts. And one
of the other two was missing entirely.

The loom had been cut in half and then every single wire re-joined using
those nasty cheap red crimped connectors.

Wrong fasteners used, bodged mounts, the list went on and on.
Fortunately, it's got plenty of bits In The Want, which is why it's
being torn apart. But had I bought this thing as a runner (and it had a
recent MoT!), I'd have been pulling it apart as well. Angry.

Rare Component Of The Week award: the original metal plug caps. Removed
and stashed away. Some anorak somewhere is going to want them,
Hopefully, two or more such anoraks and then they can push the bidding
up.

 

On 20/02/2011 22:34, The Older Gentleman wrote:

Those are rare? I must have a look in my boxes-o-bits. Hateful things.
My 400/4 often became a 3, 2, 1, 0 in the rain.

 

They're amazingly rare. I've got 20 watchers but no bids yet....

 

Prace bets now.

Opening bet in the sweepstake is £75 as the selling price

Boxerboy

 

Item number?

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

£35 - £40 ..

 

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/260740153670

 

I started the bidding at 99p, and there were no takers, so I revised the
item start to £9.99. Another couple of days, no takers, so I revised it
again to £19.99 and it just got the first bid.

 

On Feb 20, 10:34 pm, (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.