Fixing the Clutch Rattle
Well, with the fairing painted and the bike looking a little more presentable it is time to tackle that annoying clutch rattle. Put the bike up on the center stand, drained the oil, and pulled the clutch cover. All that's pretty straight forward but the previous owner had scuffed up the cover, probably when he laid it down, and I wanted to paint it. The cover itself is actually powder coated which is pretty tough but I have neither the time or money to have it re-powder coated so the first thing I needed to do was clean off all the old gasket material before I painted it.
Believe me now when I say that removing the old gasket was the hardest part of this whole project. It seems that the factory used a spray adhesive when they installed the original gasket and it was a true S.O.B. To get off. I tried soaking it in carburetor cleaner for a couple of hours but to no avail, then I soaked it over night in the PineSol solution left over from cleaning the carbs. That didn't do much good either and finally just ended up scraping it off, very tediously, with a sharp knife and razor blade. Fortunately most of the gasket was stuck to the cover and not to the inner case but some was and that was even harder and more tedious to get off.
When I finally got the cover cleaned up and the pivot shaft out, I mixed up a blend of aluminum caliper paint, black caliper paint and a touch of gold engine paint to come up with a reasonable match to the original color.
That done, it was time to pull the clutch itself. The springs and pressure plate came off with no problem. To take off the clutch housing I made up a tool like the one shown it the Haynes manual on page 2-24. The tool worked like a champ and cost maybe $5 to make. And, by the way, since none of the manuals tell you, the clutch hub nut is 30mm.
With the clutch housing off, flip it over to get at the root of this whole exercise, the oil pump drive gear. It's held on with a simple snap ring.
The gear is held in place, rotationally, by a small dowel pin which sits in a hole in clutch housing and in a notch in the oil pump drive gear. Over time the pin oblongs the hole it sits in allowing some slop in the gear and the rattle we hear. The fix is to replace the dowel pin with something with a tighter fit, most commonly a 3/16 spring steel roll pin.
On my first attempt, I first cut a roll pin down to the size of the original dowel pin but it was difficult to hold and drive in with a punch. I scrapped that idea and used a 3/16 x 1 inch roll pin which was much easier to hold and drove it in with the punch. I then trimmed it to size with the Dremel diamond cut-off wheel. Now I needed to drive something down the center of the roll pin to tighten everything up but I didn't have any pop rivet nails as recommended by cedestech, or any other nail of the appropriate size for that matter. What I did have was an extra set of Allen wrenches and the 3mm wrench was the perfect size. I put a slight taper on the long end by rounding off the points to be able to get it started and cut off about what I needed. I drove this down into the roll pin and trimmed off the excess. It was now a tight and stout. Those little Allen wrenches are pretty tough. And I still had a usable 3mm Allen wrench, it was just a little shorter. Very Happy
That done I was ready to put it all back together but I still had to clean off the old gasket pieces from the case side. That took several more hours of tedious scraping. If anyone here has any good ideas for removing old gaskets, feel free to contribute some of your thoughts.
Putting it all back together was pretty straight forward and since I had it all apart anyway I took the opportunity to install a new set of Ferodo friction plates and heavy duty Vesrah clutch springs, by way of 95secaStreetfighter, thank you. And to make a point, I put the new clutch cover gasket on naked.
Fired it up and took it out for a spin. The new clutch feels great. I was somewhat worried about having a heavy clutch pull, which I've experienced on other bikes in the past, but this was just fine. There is still some rattle coming from the crankcase, not that much, which I suspect might be the starter chain. Will have to investigate that issue.