Biker
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- Jan 18, 2019
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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
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
