What a pig!

The timing side is really not that difficult anymore, apart from the stupid (duh) mistake that I made with the kickstart… The bane of my life. Why can’t I just leave well alone?? Ah well, better get on with it then. Always a struggle for me, the kickstart quadrant remained a mystery for some time and I wondered how I seemed to need three hands and all my teeth to get one of these fitted satisfactorily UNTIL one day, nearly exasperated, I sat down with one of these in one hand, a glass of ‘works’ lubricant (red) in the other and wallowed in my sorrow! By some stroke of luck, the lighting was such that it showed up something that I had probably seen many times before but not previously ‘perceived’ for what it was. Two small holes in the face of the ratchet gear, usually all gummed up with sh*t and not really that obvious. The curtain before my eyes dropped and now I understood how this was so simple that I had never noticed it before! (BIG ‘duh’)…

VeloK-S-Pawl

This is what it looks like when properly cleaned up. The holes in the face are usually pretty much invisible when caked up with gunge.

OK, so here’s the plan. The idea is to be able to hold the quadrant housing in one hand and be able to turn it while the gear inside remains in the same position (or the other way round – but that needs three hands again…), to enable the milled slot to line up with the hole in the kickstart lever/pedal so that the cotter-pin can be dropped in place…

2013-08-25 15.50.29

In this case I use my lens-ring-removal-tool-thingy held in a ‘Workmate’, as my workbench as such is far away and I don’t have a proper vice up here… BUT, you could use two sturdy nails with their heads ground off and held in a vice at the right distance apart (or even make up a special tool for the job) Actually, a kickstart spring is one of the things that goes in my my long-distance spares bag and with my versatile lens tool, is something that can easily be swapped out, should the damned thing break… Here this is a picture of the GTP parts, which are remarkably clean (yes, I did give it a wipe first, I must concede)

So, the ‘pins’ go in the holes (! I bet you never thought of that!)…

2013-08-25 15.51.01

and it then looks like this. The position of the slot for the cotter is facing towards us running SW to NE on the shaft and will not change in the next pic, as the pins are holding that bit from the back, remember?

2013-08-25 15.51.11

(Oops, I turned the camera angle a bit…) Rotate my hand about 45˚ in a clockwise direction and what HAS changed, if you look carefully, is the position of Smaug’s mountain on the quadrant in relation to the ‘slot’ in the shaft. The ramp has now moved ‘out of the way’…

2013-08-25 15.53.04

… allowing the kickstart lever and cotter pin to be popped on with the other hand without any cuts, bruises, swearing or chipped teeth! EASY! (sorry about the blurry photo)

Next up, the finishing off the bike and then a demonstration of a gearbox complete ‘field-strip’ (about ten minutes) and the trick with the chainguard…

© peter gouws 2013

Made on a mac