On my commute home last week I had a mechanical failure that I can only blame myself for. The nut that holds the outer variator plate in place worked loose and allowed that plate to slide half off the crankshaft and thrash itself to death. I’m guessing I simply didn’t tighten the nut enough the last time I was in there, which was about a month ago. I don’t have a torque wrench and just go by feel, big mistake! Unfortunately, it looks like the variator plate also damaged the crankshaft which is not an easy, or cheap part to replace.
Luckily, I bought a “parts bike” about 20 months ago. It was an insurance write off after some flooding here in Auckland and I picked it up for NZ$800 at auction. The bike was in great shape with 35,000km on the clock and after cleaning and replacing all fluids etc, it actually ran really well. Given my daily driver was now pushing 82,000km I didn’t even consider trying to replace the crankshaft and set about a straight engine swap with the parts bike.
The entire process was pretty straight forward with most of the time spent stripping fairings, shocks etc. Once I had the replacement engine installed and everything hooked back up the bike fired up perfectly and I’ve been riding in the past 2 days with no issues. I’m guessing it took me between 6-8 hours over the course of the weekend to complete the swap.
I now have a torque wrench on order and will check some of the nuts are correctly torqued once it arrives!
The parts bike is on the left and my daily driver on the right in the photos.
