Sweetness

Sunday Tony did in fact come up.

We looked at each other for a while, talked with Kathy and Anna for a whle, then Tony went out in the garage for a smoke. I followed and we sorta just stood around for a while and then I walked over and picked up a wrench and Tony says what are you thinking about and I says lets get this Jeep out of the garage so we have some room to work...so we do and we get that engine pulled out and onto the work bench.

We kinda study on it for a while, then we take turns looking at the shop manual and looking at the engine, trying to figure out exactly what we are going to have to do to get down to that kick-start shaft.

We finally start taking some things apart to see what lies beneath. We get to the point where we have to take off the oil pump in order to get the clutch housing off and it so happens that removing the oil pump takes a special tool we don't have and we aren't having much luck improvising. So we try another angle.

We take the valve covers off to access the cam chain and we find the book says to separate the chain with a chain breaker and we don't have one of those either. So we study some more and realize we're accumulating a nice sized pile of bolts and screws and miscellaneous parts. We realize that as of now we know what everything is and where it goes but if the pile gets very much bigger it could start to get confusing....so we prudently stop and get organized, bagging and tagging all the parts we have so far. then we decide it's getting late and dark and we're a little tired. Not exactly the best condidtions.

Time to jump in the pool and cool off. Tomorrow will be another day.

Monday we kinda laze around for a while in the morning and decide to ride over to Advance Auto to see if maybe we get lucky and they happen to have what we need in the way of specialty tools...not likely but it's something to do and it's close.

They don't have anything I need and say I should try a motorcycle shop but that they think most of them for some reason are closed on Mondays. Kathy's taking off a 1/2 day so we decide to forget it and just hang with her.

Today is Tueday and Tony's plan is to leave around noon. We're drinking coffee and watching the news and I say "Wanna ride over to Tractor Supply and see what kind of tools they may have." Tony says that sounds great.

All they have that might be of use is a chain breaker, which looks way too big for the job but I decide to try it anyway cause the gal tending the rabbits said I could bring it back if it wasn't what I needed. (It wasn't and I did) We also went by the local Yamaha dealer to see if they might have any tools and they weren't encouaging and I didn't feel like driving to the Honda dealer in Rock Hill, so we just went back home to study some more.


Anyway we start in again and things seem so much clearer after stepping back sometimes. Things we read in the book Sunday were making much better sense today and we dug in, somehow circumvented the 'needed' specialty tools, and had things pretty well torn down with all the parts "bagged and tagged" by lunch time.

We had some lunch, patted ourselves on the baack a little and Tony split for home.



After Tony left I was only going to finish getting the parts organized and the put the tools away...but I got to looking at that engine and couldn't help myself. I really wanted to see what that shaft looked like on the inside so I went back to work....got out the manual and the baggies and the sharpy and finished busting that thing open. I had to remove a couple of things that I missed on the earlier readings but no big deal. Once it was opened up, changing out the shaft was pretty simple. I did resist the urge to start putting it back to gether beyond that because logic tells me this is the best opportunity I will have to clean things up and take some measurments to see if the engine needs any machine work or internal parts, and it just wouldn't make any sense to not do it right at this point....although I won't deny I was tempted.