Gettin Started

Hello, thought I would report on my progress todate on the R50/2 that I found back in December. I finally found some time to play with it over the holidays.
The engine was stuck when I got it home, so I had filled the cylinders with Marvel Mystery through the spark plug holes and left it to sit for about two weeks.
I found water had gone in through the carbs, ( the P/O had left it out in the weather for a while) so the inside of those did not look to cool, so they are off to the Carb Doctor at Bing. The water had gone into the heads, so the valves have a little rust on them and the intake ports are a little corroded, so they are on the way to Ed Korn at Cycle Works. The valves had all been closed so very little water had made it into the cylinders, but the rings had rusted to the walls but thankfuly not to bad. They let go with very little effort and the cylinders honed up pretty nice. I was able to find some manuals from Vech and a $$$$$$$shopping list is on order from him. So I'm just cleaning rusty stuff and waiting for things to come back. So Far So Good!!!

Thanks for all the help to date.
Ride Safe
Graham

Join the club....

I, too, started working on my "new" R50/2 in late November/December. I'm lucky in that it was always stored inside and never left out. It still had problems with stuck rings and cylinder corrosion. Be careful as any rust pits left in the cylinders will cause rapid wear of new rings and lessen the compression. With much corrosion at all a bore job with new pistons and rings is probably the best route. Many bucks, though. I also ran across the problem of the the oil scraper ring groove having "collapsed" and rendering the oil scraper ring immovable. There's a long slot cut in the back of the oil scraper ring groove to allow oil to go back to the inside of the piston. Seems these slots cause the piston to be weak at that point and allow the collapsing to occur. This happened on both sides of my engine. A little "shade tree" manipulation of the ring groove fixed the problem but I wonder for how long. By the way, Ed Korn sold out in early January. I hope the new folks are as good as he.....

Lee

1966 R50/2
1976 R75/6
1980 R100RT

Lee, Thanks for the heads-up on the pistons, I'll double check the oil scraper slot, but the old rings slid out easy. I learned that Ed sold out a couple of days after I mailed my heads. I've spoken to the new owner Dan Neiner on the phone,
and he sounds knowledgable, I don't have the heads back yet but I'll let you know how they turned out when I do.
Regards
Graham

I got my top ends put back together yesterday. Another curious issue arose. On the same piston that had a tight oil scraper ring one of the wrist pin circlip grooves was mushed outwards towards the piston wall. This had pushed up the aluminum material ringing the groove to the point that the wrist pin could not be inserted or removed from that end. I fear I have a piston with bad metallurgy or some other weird process going on. I'm going to post a separate question and see if anybody else knows something about it. Meantime, I guess I'll shop for a new piston $$$$$.