On The Pegs June 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 6 | Page 120

On The Pegs 120
In 1974 While riding the prototype Yamaha, I had some issues as can be expected
from a hand-made motorcycle. The engine cases and the hubs were sand cast
magnesium. The fuel tank was aluminum. And all nuts and bolts, as I recall, were
titanium with dished heads. Transmission parts were also made from titanium as I
recall. I got the impression from someone that the scooter was about 172 pounds
wet. I experienced an issue with the rear brake. I had arrived at a section and
parked the scooter by the entrance while I walked the section. Upon returning to
the bike, I fired it up, put it in gear and it would not move. At all. The rear wheel
had unexplainably locked up. It wouldn’t roll forward or backward. I disconnected
the brake cable from the brake arm. It still wouldn’t move. I got my tools out
and removed the rear wheel, mind you I was tearing into it di-rectly adjacent to
the begins cards of a section. Once the wheel was clear of the bike, I discovered
that the brake backing plate wouldn’t even come out of the hub. It took about 10
minutes of try-ing everything I could come up with to finally get it removed from
the hub. Upon the removal, I discovered that A rivet that held the steel liner into
the magnesium hub had broken and the head of the rivet was stuck between the
brake shoe and the steel liner. The liner still had a rivet hold-ing it in and I didn’t
have any further issues with it. I mentioned that the fuel tank was aluminum as
well. Mick had one crack on this bike in the 1973 SSDT. They couldn’t come up
with any fix but to not put a bolt in the rear mount under the front edge of the
seat. Their thinking was that if it wasn’t bolted down, it wouldn’t have stress on
it and would therefore not crack. How wrong they were. I was on a road section
and noticed that my leg was burning. The crack in the tank would not leak very
much if the engine was off, but with the engine running it would spray a small
stream onto my upper thigh. Once my Belstaff pants were soaked, the fuel made
it’s way through my jeans and onto my bare skin! And did it ever burn. I caught
up to Mick at the lunch stop and told him about the crack. He said “happened
last year too!” He told me to get a bar of soap out of the bathroom and when I
stopped at a section to rub the soap on the crack and it would seal it up temporarily.
It worked when the engine was off but soon after I started riding again so
came the leak. He told me that they would be ready when I got to the impound
area that night. And ready they were. As we had to work on our own bikes, mick
was guiding me through the removal of the tank, then we disappeared into the
back of the van and they closed the doors and guarded it from prying eyes. Once
inside, the Japanese mechanic guided me to started working on it with a rough
rasp to remove all of the paint from the alloy adjacent to the crack and give it a
rough finish. He then mixed up epoxy and we applied it over the crack. Within