Oh, boy! Telling all the messy details of yesterday's work on my bike to get ready for DGR would be an even more tedious story than the one I will tell now. I have to say, I borrowed the form of the topic title from GB, but about halfway through the work I thought I was being downright Greybeardian in my determination to get to the bottom of this and get the bike back together.
It all started because I wanted to change fork oil and adjust drive chain tension. After doing that in the early afternoon, I wanted to test the forks and top off fuel, so rode up to the gas station. That"s when I heard the annoying noise.
A lot of this has already been said here, but the first mistake (I must now call it) was thinking the noise was coming from a dynamo bearing. Result: timing side cover off; dynamo out; disassembled; greased; tightened loose long screws (for a second, I thought the loose assembly of the dynamo was causing the armature to rub inside, but no). The upshot of all this dynamo tinkering is that it is no longer charging, as I discovered once out for the ride. [I think the question has come up before if you can remove the dynamo with the belt-drive pulley attached. You cannot, because the pulley hits the inner timing side cover before you can wind out the dynamo. I have no puller to fit the pulley. I managed to span an Allen key behind the pulley with its ends landed on the cover, then whacked the end of the armature with a hammer (nut on, of course). In retrospect, this was probably dumb and inviting a broken primary cover, but desperation does tricks with the brain. Yes, next time the cover is off I'll inspect for damage. IDIOT!]
After all this, I figured I should check out Erling's thought that my drive chain problem was due to a bent gearbox shaft, so off with the primary-side cover. Clutch was running true with no apparent rubbing, but primary chain needed tightening. Like a dipsh*t, I forgot that the sliding plate bolts are designed to allow the sliding plate to, uhhh?, "slide" when adjusting the chain tension. So, I went through the hand contortions and acrobatics of loosening them (the bolts, not the hands) before adjusting chain tension (let's call that about 1/2-hour). Also, gave the clutch nuts 1/4-turn, for good measure.)
Now, all the covers (including the dynamo cover) back on, pedals back in place, ATF back in the primary (cool it, that's a different topic), a quick surface cleanup of the bike and pick up all-the-tools-in-the-world spread around the garage. (By the way, have you ever noticed how tools disappear in plain sight after 1:00 AM?) OK, so now it's 2:30 AM, how am I going to listen to the resulting work without the neighbors calling the police? Rode the bike back up to the gas station (it's just a little more than a mile and open 24/7). I let the bike idle as before and, sure as hell, the noise was still there. I pulled in the clutch and the noise went away. This is when I rode home and looked for help from the awake side of the world.
Stayed up until about 4:00 AM paying my overdue insurance premium and vehicle registration online, just in case I ended up going to the DGR. Went to bed figuring I wasn't going. Woke about 9:00 AM, depressed over the situation. Laid in bed watching TV and trying to figure out what was going on (on the bike, not the Ryder Cup). At 9:30 AM, 1-1/2 hours before the ride that's 45 minutes from home, a light in my head went on. Only those who have bothered reading this far get the payoff of "The Story of the Village Idiot."
Turn back the clock six days. Atoll asks about the primary cover lug not working with the frame flange. I go out to check mine for confirmation and discover that my bolt is loose. Now, here's something I intentionally didn't say earlier in this story, because it fits my mindset of forgetting this point when undertaking the big disassembly. Before replacing the fork oil, I decided to tighten up that bolt. It was such a minor detail. The spacers as I had stacked them some time ago were still there, so what could go wrong. A lot, if the spacers aren't right. This was the thing I remembered at 9:30 this morning. "Do I have time to loosen the bolt, test the result, get dressed, yard and feed the dogs and tell the wife I'm going, all in time to be in Chicago by 11:00 AM." Well, I did make it there. and back.
Funny thing about this is this thing that was told to Atoll on 9/24:
I wonder, really not sure, if adding spacer thickness between crankcase and inner primary won't cause inner primary to interfere with the clutch basket (the inner primary may already be unusually close to the clutch basket). I guess I'm saying that a dose of diagnostics would inform the decision on the cure.
Richard L.
So, it seems the noise was the clutch basket hitting a sliding plate bolt (no connection to my loosening and tightening those pesky bolts). This said, I am keenly aware that the limit on incorrect diagnoses is not set at "1". In any case, this diagnosis was enough to let me go to the DGR and get home without trouble except, oh did I mention that I buggered the dynamo when messing around with it?.
Finally, my story of the DGR will be saved for a DGR topic.
Richard L.
