Broken Bikes
I had a very nice ride from Pusan to Donghae with my Club (Rotten Dead MC) and some new friends last weekend. The trip is about 7 hours one way from Pusan at a leisurely pace. The first day and a half of the ride were great. It was the last couple of hours that sucked.
As we were coming back from Donghae along Highway 7, we were only a few kilometers north of Pohang when my bike suddenly died. It just died. It stopped working. The engine would turn over, but it wouldn’t start. Nothing I could do on site could change that.
I had to call my bike shop and have them drive two hours to come and pick me up and bring me back to Pusan. As it was beginning to rain a little, I sent the other guys on home ahead of me. No sense in getting everyone else miserable and wet.
I eventually got back to Pusan at around midnight on Sunday night. They began working on my bike first thing Monday morning.
If your motorcycle ever looks like this, chances are that there are big, BIG problems. This is the guts of my bike as people desperately try to get to the bottom of the problems.
They folks at the shop searched for the problem for three days. They checked everything including oil, bad gas, fuel injection sensor, the entire electrical system, the heads, the valves, the cylinders, and just about everything else they could think of, but nothing seemed to be wrong. So, half out of desparation and half out of nothing else to look at, they opened the cam cover. That’s when they noticed a problem.
A healthy cam will have two dots in perfect alignment, on the gear and one on the shaft. Look at this cam here. Nice and pretty, with those dots so nicely aligned. Couldn’t be prettier.
On the other hand, a cam should never, EVER look like this. Notice the two dots out of alignment and about 90 degrees apart.
This should so never happen that I had no idea that it was even possible to look like this. I thought the gear and the shaft were a single piece of steel. Not only have I never heard of this happening, I have never heard of anyone who has heard of this happening. Even the Harley-Davidson Korea parts manager did not believe that this could happen.
This little 90 degree turn is bad. It does bad things to to your cam chain operation, which does bad things to the pressure in the cylinders, which does bad things to valves, which does bad things to cylinders, which does bad things to heat sensors, which causes a LOT of money to be spent fixing the aforementioned problems.
The guys at the shop re-aligned the gear and shaft and immobilized them with a pin so that they can never again rotate like that. They spent the next two days putting my bike back together.
I got my bike back late Friday night, with a bill for a fixed cam, replaced heat sensor, oil change, all new fluids, a new tank of gas, pickup costs, and labor for five full days. The total bill was KRW 1,100,000 (approximately USD 1,000).
I rode home, parked it and began packing for another ride tomorrow.
Epilogue: I think the Donghae ride is cursed. Almost one year ago to the day, we were riding back from Donghae when my belt drive snapped, leaving my bike dead and me stranded…Belts are not SUPPOSED to break. It is extremely difficult to break a drive belt. The belt snapped only a few kilometers from where my cam gave out this year. We had to wait for the truck in the dark and rain. The circumstances were so similar that I have cancelled the Donghae rides forever and ever. I’m never riding there again.