Oh lustrous golden-brown ooze
Oh wondrous copper goop,
That plates the parts that mate
Inside this motorcycle,
Especially those that vibrate.
I paint them all
With the brush inside the can
Then put them back together
And see? How well it ran!
I knew I was in trouble when I first put a socket on the
exhaust header flange bolt on the front cylinder of the ’99 Sportster that
recently showed up in my garage. One
clue was the 92,000 miles showing on the odometer when it arrived. The other was how it lived in a carport its
entire life, and those pipes had never been off.
On an EVO Sportster, the two studs holding each head pipe
in place are 5/16” diameter, and every time this bike was ridden to work, rain
or shine, those studs would warm up to cylinder head temperature, then cool
back down, while the vibrations introduced by the 45-degree V-twin engine rigidly
mounted to the frame helped to gall the threads on the studs or the nuts enough
to freeze them in place. So when I put
the socket to the first one and loaded the 3/8” Snap-on breaker bar with enough
torque to feel the stud begin to flex under the load I was well aware that the
force needed to break that nut loose might well exceed the force needed to
twist that stud in half, or strip the fine threads at that spot. That is known as testing to destruction.
In a mess like that, you have several choices, of which I
had the good fortune to learn about by way of working for some 25 years with Bob
Bentler, one of the true metal magicians, in the Machine Shop at the City of
Seattle. Bob raced in the SCCA Class C
Sports Car leagues, and owns several Lotus cars, including a 7 and a 23, just
for fun. He taught me how to braze, and
silver solder, and how to straighten a drive-shaft with a torch, and how to
rebuild engines, and many other things over the years, but, mostly, I learned
from him how to take things apart.
The first of the old tricks I learned was a process called “upsetting
the metal”. That involves a precise
blow, or series of blows, delivered to exactly the right spot on the frozen
fastener at exactly the right angle with exactly the right punch in such a way
as to deliver a shock load through the threads, so as to break the
rust that had formed as the two metals bound themselves together with oxides of
iron formed at the point of contact.
After the initial blow, a generous portion of penetrating oil is a good
thing to introduce to the joint. The
smell makes it seem like you’re working again. GM X-88 is the shit here, though some swear by Kroil, but any light oil works, really, even Hoppe's Gun Oil. In the case of a nut on a stud, a tap with a bit of hollow tubing or a
hole punch along the axis of the stud will sometimes help. Then you work the socket back and forth, each
time hopefully going a little bit farther until you achieve one whole turn,
which is usually enough to spin the nut free.
If that doesn’t work, you need heat, or time, or both. I knew one old guy who, about trying to remove
the cylinder block from a 650 Triumph engine that had laid in the grass behind
someone’s barn for a few years, told me this one: “I built a wooden frame that clamped to the
cylinder block in such a way as to hold the engine in the air about one inch,
with all the base nuts removed and all the weight of the bottom end on those
piston rings. Then I poured about a
half-cup of penetrating oil in each bore, and went away. Every few weeks, I would check on it, and add
a little oil if it looked dry, and maybe tap on the top of the pistons with a
block of two by two. Then one day, about
six months later, I checked on it and found the crankcase on the floor. It just took patience, of which I had plenty
in this case.”
If you must resort to the hot wrench or the nut breaker, I
consider that a failure. It really
depends on the situation. In the case of
the Sportster, I used a propane torch to heat up the nut, then sprayed more oil
on it as it cooled, then worked it back and forth with the breaker bar until it
finally came loose. I bet I spent 6
hours on those 4 nuts over two days.
Good thing I didn’t charge myself anything to do it, I couldn’t afford
me.
Part of the reason why that Sportster was a good buy for
the guy who came and got it was the fact that, as I went through that bike and
replaced every bearing in the wheels, swingarm and steering head, I coated
every nut and bolt that went back on that bike, other than the ones for which
Loctite is called out in the Service Manual, with a good thick coat of Permatex
Copper Hi-temp Anti-Seize Lubricant. As
I have learned, that means he can park the thing in his carport and ride it
back and forth to work for the next ten years, and those nuts and bolts will
stay right where I put them, and still come back off with ease. That’s the beauty of that stuff.
Both Honda Shadows that I am currently working on exhibit
the same neglect brought on by exposure to weather and lack of maintenance that
is experienced by all too many motorcycles when they get to the point where
their storage cost exceeds their value and they get abandoned to the weeds and
the weather. This is especially true
when you have steel cap screws torqued into aluminum castings. I’m finding every screw is coated with yuck
as it comes out, requiring a visit to the wire brush wheel before the
application of the anti-seize, and another one is saved for posterity.
So that’s the point of this story. If you want what you put together to come
back apart someday, goop it up! That
stuff works up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, because of the colloidal copper
suspended in the solution, and it works on stainless and high-carbon steel,
cast iron, aluminum, Monel (that’s the metal, not the painter), brass, copper,
nickel, just about anything you want to spread it on that is not toast. It’s enough to make a guy wax poetic, or something... :-{)}
