The mileage king is dead - long live the king

18 months ago I bought an extremely high mileage 2014 RR for 4 grand.

It was love at first blat and, like it's previous owner, I intended to use it as a year round workhorse.

There were a few things that needed sorting but nothing expensive and all was good.

However a couple of weeks ago, at it's regular oil change... when I strained the old oil I sadly found quite a few large lumps of aliminium (the biggest was fingernail sized).

Woe is me.

So, the search for a replacement engine was on.

My experience has been that there have pretty much always since I owned an RR been loads of gen 1 and gen 3 bits floating around but not much for gen 2, and so it proved with the engine search.

The only good thing about Covid I can see is that, as most of the racing season is a scratch, lots of peeps are selling their excess spares and so the price of decent engines plummeted.

I picked up a "2011" (actually a 2010) with some nice extras (slipper clutch, GB covers) for just north of 700 quid!

When I originally bought the bike I factored the cost of a replacement engine intro the original cost so getting it for this price was a definite bonus

Anyway the plan was to rip out the dud and investigate and throw in the 2010.. easy, eh?

Not a chance!

When I got the 2010 onto the bench I opened up the thermostat housing on a hunch and found it choked with calcium deposits and rust :/

The water pump was very rusty too and I could find lots of deposits wherever I looked in the water channels.

Mechanically it looked sound.

I cleaned out as much as I could and swapped as much as I could for the pristine 2014 plumbing and bagged a new thermostat for ?20.

However gen 1 engines had unthreaded rear engine mounts (switched to threaded at some point in 2013) so I needed the long bolts to mount.

BMW had no stock, and I had several offers fall through one way or another until I thought sod it... i'm going to helicoil the rear mounts to match the gen 2 frame, with eventual success.

The next several days were spent going through what could be used from the gen 2 and what was junk so there was quite a bit of waiting for parts... so I thought i'd start stripping the gen 2 motor to find out WTF happened there.

Before the oil discovery the only sign that something was wrong was a slight rattle between 1.5 and 3k rpm, there was no smoke, no power loss, oil and coolant consumption was normal, the gearbox was fine.

Upon inspection the top end all looked fine: cams were perfect, no bent valves (valve tops were dirty and some oil seepage from the seats) cam chain was fine, pistons looked good (through the plug holes) so, without splitting the crankcases, I think the 2014 has probably spun a main bearing.

The 2010 lump needed a couple more smaller helicoils (the earth at the back of the cylinder head another small bracket connector) but other than that the build up went pretty smooth...

As of an hour ago I was ready to try a start so I switched on, checked codes with a gs-911 and.... she fired up first time and purred

Got a very mild limescale dissolver in with distilled water for the next hour then a couple of flushes before proper coolant and a road test...

Can't wait.

The beast lives!

RIP 2014 engine @72,378 miles

Nice DIY effort. Will you be fully stripping the 2014 to see what went wrong on it? And then maybe rebuilding it?

It's an option.

The Ali bits were all quite large, not the engine suicide tiny bits so yep the top end, gearbox and clutch all look to be fine so at the very least I have lots of nice engine spares

However, with the current price of engines, a rebuild doesn't make sense. I think it would be close to ?400 on crankcase bolts alone

I actually felt compelled to make a meme of the bits so feast your eyes on this

Answers on a postcard

you can actually use the main case bolts again (joining top+bottom cases together),it's only the sump+side case bolts that are stretch bolts (was very suprised when i found this out after rebuilding 1 of my engines),wouldn't recomend using them after 2 rebuilds though.cost me about ?200 in bolts/gaskets on last rebuild.

i'd be to curious not to split the motor though

Cool.

That's a lot cheaper than I thought.

However I expect to find a wrecked crankshaft and / or conrods so a rebuild is going to be pricey!

...and yes... i'm definitely going to look at the carnage hidden in the crankcases at some point

Biker said:

Cool.

That's a lot cheaper than I thought.

However I expect to find a wrecked crankshaft and / or conrods so a rebuild is going to be pricey!

...and yes... i'm definitely going to look at the carnage hidden in the crankcases at some point

Click to expand...

Intrigued.... With what you've described, I'd be surprised to find anything 'wrecked' in there if it was still running with a 'slight rattle' may well be a nice surprise lol. Was the ali find like tinfoil or chunky, maybe a cog tooth? The 2010 had a lighter flywheel, be interesting to see if you notice the difference.... Keep us updated !

@bananaman yes, the pieces were all chunky, not flakes that you might expect from wrecked shells (picture link in post #3).

The gearbox felt fine apart from the gearchange (all gears) getting a little stiff.

One of the pieces in particular looks slightly curved....

I've saved the oil from the fateful drain.... i'm tempted to send it for analysis.

As I said earlier... answers on a postcard

well theres a few easy checks you can do.

if it's magnetic,more than likely gearbox,if not then shells or pistons (not sure what shells are made from but think ally).

a slight rattle does point to shell,but would get some vibe from that aswell.

whip the sump off,gives a bit of a veiw of the gearbox+flywheel,the sump bolts are 1 use only though and shear very easily.

didn't see the pic before,but the curved look of the bits does look like "shell shaped"

Yup I agree, the bits are 100% non-metallic so that rules out a lot of things...

Motorcycle crankcase shells are layered (I think so that you can tell from oil analysis how worn they are) and consist of aluminium alloy and copper so the bits I found fit the description.