Good Luck, Darryl!

[iagins]

And anyone else on the list riding in the Motorcycle Cannonball starting next Friday!

Be safe and have a great ride! We'll be rooting for you all!

Ira Agins
Santa Fe, NM

[ScottA]

How would I go about buying some petrol for Darryl?

Scott
in San Diego

[schrader7032]

Scott -

I haven't seen anything specific about this year, but this was what people could use to donate during the 2012 Cannonball.

http://www.vintagebmw.org/v7/node/8402

[ScottA]

Darryl's R52 DNF yesterday after 70 miles.

Any further news?

-Scott

[schrader7032]

No info from questions asked on several other forums. Darryl's blogs aren't being updated either.

[schrader7032]

Someone posted this info:

He said that between the clutch and tranny there is gear that’s held on by several small screws. Those screws sheared and put Darryl out after 70 miles for yesterday and none today. There is a work around in place and they expect to be on the road again tomorrow and to finish.

[ScottA]

thanks for the update, Kurt.

happy to hear the setback was temporary.

-Scott

[schrader7032]

Darryl posted this yesterday on the Yahoo /2 list:

The gear (not really a gear, but looks like one – the Germans call it a Kupplungsklaue, a clutch claw) that is on the transmission input shaft and meshes with the teeth in the middle of the clutch plate is a problem on my bike. It’s shallower than stock. I actually came home from Germany this summer with 5 of them, in three different widths, but they all stick forward more than the one that came with my bike.

After the last Cannonball, this “gear” was highly worn and needed to be replaced. A machinist I know cut off the teeth and machined a ring with new teeth that is attached with 8 set screws. It worked for about 3500 miles (including break in/test miles), but the screws sheered on yesterday’s leg and left me stuck.

Last night we installed the thinnest of the gears I got in Europe. The clutch teeth are 4mm thick, and this gear meshes on about 2-3mm of that. We tried it out last night and it seemed to be ok, but this morning, very shortly after the start, it was clear that it wouldn’t work – the gear managed to get in front of the clutch plate and out of mesh. So I rode in the truck to Lewiston today.

The machinist had given me a second ring and another set of screws, so we’ve installed that now. The bike shifts fine again and, based on the previous experience, we believe it will get me to Tacoma. But clearly this is not a long term fix. That will have to wait until after the CB.

[Darryl.Richman]

I'm really sorry that I wasn't able to keep up the blog this time around. The combination of longer riding days (last time the longest legs were just over 250 miles, but we had several this time that were near or over 300 miles, which represents at least an additional hour of riding for me), a lot more hosted dinners (which require the motorcycle to be on display until generally 6:30, which means we're always late getting to do the maintenance and any repairs) and a few hotels with bad or nonexistent internet connections, meant that I just never found the time to write anything.

For those of you who are club members, we will have a big article about the Cannonball coming up in the magazine, with some really excellent photos.

My friend Brent Hansen, who is a club board member and has provided a lot of tech articles for the magazine, was my chief mechanic. In talking things over, we feel that there are (at least) two problems with my bike in the area of the clutch. We're both still puzzled by the variety of clutch gears out there, but have come to the conclusion that the R52 can be fixed correctly by first reshimming the transmission input shaft and taking the play out of it at the front. This will move the shaft back in the case a bit and pull the clutch gear back. With this fix alone, the shallowest gear I found might have worked.

The clutch pressure plate and backing plate, which sandwich the clutch plate itself, are positioned by six dowels that are pressed into the back of the flywheel. These could be pressed forward a further 2 mm or so, and that would center the clutch plate teeth in one or several of the clutch gears I brought back from Germany. This should be a permanent solution, and we will be looking into this in the next several weeks.