Crankshaft Small End Bushing Replacement for Puch, Vespa, Tomos, etc.

So, I've had the puch factory tools for bushing replacement for quite some time now, but I haven't had an excuse to use them yet. I finally did. I personally don't mind brass bushings too much. They're cheap, and when they blow up, it's not catastrophic. If this setup was identical with a needle roller bearing, I'm sure team vespa wouldn't have finished last year.

Last year, I thought by reseating a super leaky decomp in the middle of day 4, I caused my compression to go dangerously high. It turns out the knocking noise I attributed to this, was an ovalled out piston and subsequently damaged connecting rod.

There was no blowby, the stock rings were in great shape, and no material degredation to the piston crown or head indicating any type of detonation or preignition (it went on for 1.5 days, so if that was it, there'd be evidence! ). In addition, cylinder head temperatures were normal if not low and resulted in "detonation" at varying and inconsistent RPM's despite 4 stroking in the midrange. I didn't find this until after having ridden the bike on several rides in Nashville after pinball. I took it apart for a last inspection before I solely focused on my other engine, and noticed this. This was a pretty high mileage stock engine.... probably 5k miles on the stock crankshaft and bearings (yes, still the stock crank and bearings from when I bought it on craigslist). I rebuilt it with the DR65 in Fall 2012 and have had this engine running since.

The big end still feels great, and so do the bearings, so I finally had the perfect candidate to replace a bushing on a bushing crank. First step, remove the stock bushing!!!! Simply insert the puller, tighten the nut and out pops the bushing (press fit).

Next, you want to press in the new bushing. There's another cup that comes with the tool to do this. The threads stop at the perfect depth (I guess, puch and vespa were on the same page small end wise).

Before you ream out the bushing, make sure to drill oil holes if your conrod has them. This bushing has fancy oiling grooves cut in the inner face in addition to the holes I added for the stock oil holes.

Next, install/clamp the reamer guide onto the crankshaft. The factory tools are left hand thread for the clamp.

The non-cutting end of the reamer serves as an alignment feature.

The taper is pressed into the non reamed bushing while the clamp is tightened so that the bore of the clamp that guides the cutting end of the reamer is centered.

Once you have the clamp installed, you can begin reaming the bushing. The reamer is adjustable to ream whatever clearance you might need for your pin. Believe it or not, pistons and wrist pins are not all clearanced the same! Puch has like 6 different size wrist pins! Each graduation on the reamer is .01mm as far as I can tell. I jumped up by .02mm each pass till I got close to the size I wanted and then dialed it in with calipers.

You wouldn't believe how much better a fresh bushing feels... It's like it's new again! We aren't done yet though... Now it's time to check and make sure your bushing is perpendicular to your cronrod. To do this, you'll need two equal height machined pieces of some sort to place below the conrod on the mating surface for the cylinder of the case. I used 8mm precision ground linear bearing rod (left over from 3D printing shenanigans).

I did a good job I guess! Didn't have to adjust the alignment of the conrod. Couldn't get any of my feeler gauge thicknesses under there.

I'll be sure to report back if it blows up.... but everything is as it should be... Obviously, I also installed a new piston and honed the cylinder for the new rings to seat on. The old piston is done, but I think I need to make a little shrine for it... hmmmmmm

Mid January Stuff

So, it's mid January. I've come back the past two weekends to work on stuff. Most of my time was consumed with my sister's car, during which time all the family's Volvos were in the driveway of my Dad's house on a rare occasion... Last time this happened it was dark and photo opportunity was terrible. Got some great shots this time.

When I got back to my own things, I reassembled the CB125 with new rings and fixed the old tach cable with a junkyard speedo cable. The tach works, but the 125 still hits a wall at 55mph. It runs better, but still like crap. New cylinder is in order this summer (or maybe an overbore piston?). I just drilled out the old fitting that went in the case, and soldered the "new" cable in. I pulled it out of some 70's muscle car.

 

Then before I left last weekend, I welded a new bung on the maxi!!! Woooo! Doesn't leak either! This weekend, I got to finish it up and take it for a ride. It was glorious. Check out the top speed... I've got 4mph left to find... 55 was my old all time top speed and I even touched 60 (indicated) once. That was with my homoet 6p though and I'm running an estoril chamber now. I also almost got hit in my dad's neighborhood because some idiot was not paying attention and almost hit me head on while I was sitting still at a stop sign...

Not pictured, is finalized baffle mounting for the Derbi, time spent building a failed concept design I've been working on and some aluminum welding I did with my lincoln pro-mig 135 (it's pretty horrible, but usable). Took forever playing with the settings to get it to feed without jamming and I'm welding with ArCO2 AND it's filthy aluminum (I did scrub it with a wire brush at least) but it's promising... the spraying thing really was weird... because there's no puddle and HOLY ballz batman, turn the wire feed speed up to 11!

Currently contemplating getting a second bottle for aluminum shielding and a second hose/gun/etc so I can swap quickly between steel and aluminum. I have a feeling I'll be wanting to swap often enough I won't be wanting to change liners.