Jonny's Senior Project!

As most of you know I am about done with this silly school nonsense and I am working on a senior project. I would like to build an electric motorcycle and to do so I need some help. I am in serious need of some sponsors. If you are interested, just leave a comment or get a hold of me. All donations big or small are greatly appreciated and are 100% tax deductible!

Insperation



Friday, June 26, 2009

Oh thank heavens for the machine shop!

So I ran into a snag with the project, as I as taking off the rear wheel so I could change out the sprocket I figured I would take off the rotor as wheel to clean it up since it is pretty rusty. Well the previous owner decided it would be a great idea to put gobs and gobs and then even a little gob more of loc-tite on all the bolts. So by the time I had figured that out I broke one of the bolts off so now I had 1 broken bolt and 4 more that were stuck.

Luckily there is a machine shop where I work and they were willing to help me out so I brought it in and got some help. At first the problem only began to get worse because even they were having a hard time with it. What I ended up doing was to heat up the other four bolts real hot and loosen up the loc-tite and luckily I was able to get them out with out breaking them, but they definitely need to be replaced now.

Now for the fun part getting out the broken one. We drilled it out and tried to use an easy out which is basically a left-handed thread drill bit so as you turn it into the bolt it threads itself while unthreading the bolt. Well that did not go to well as the easy out tool broke off inside as well. That bolt is practically welded in there. This created another problem because it can't be redrilled because of how hard it is.

I ended up drilling a small hole in the other side of the rim and slipped a punch down in there and was able to get the easy-out out of there.

So back to the machine shop for more drilling, after few different sizes of bits and a tap we got it out of there cleanly so now everything is fine. This is what was left of the bolt I thought it was pretty cool how thin it was just goes to show how good the guys in the machine shop are! Thanks again!

1 comment:

ZoomSmith said...

Probably red loctite? Red is meant to never come off, usually applied by the mechanically ignorant. Blue LocTite is the only thing that should ever be used on a motorcycle, since all parts are meant to be serviceable.