Upside-down solution
Allen Jenkinson from Huddersfield got in touch to tell me about a neat trick his motorcycle engineer mate Paul Jackson pulled off on a Triumph T100 engine. Paul needed access to the crankshaft, but the customer, having maybe just resolved some persistent oil leaks, didn’t want the top end gaskets disturbed. Paul inverted the engine, removed the cylinder base nuts and lifted the bottom end clear with a chain hoist. After sorting the problem, he then reunited the two halves. Says Allen: “All he had to do to the top end was reset the tappets; how simple was that – and all single-handed. Others will have thought of it, but it was a new one on me...”
Clever – I once had to do something similar, decoking a 1930 Matchless Silver Arrow. It’s a V-twin, but with both bores machined in a vee inside a common casting, like a car block. The block is flat-topped, so the piston crowns are bevelled at the vee angle and fitting is nearly impossible because you have to hold a very heavy block with one hand while trying to feed in two pistons at different angles. Worse still, the block is also flat-bottomed, so one side of all three rings is well in the bore before the other side, making it impossible to use ring compressors. You can’t remove the gudgeon pins without the rings escaping one side either, so I had to remove the motor and suspend it upside-down on axle stands over the block so I could feed each ring in a bit at a time with a screwdriver blade. Still, it worked for me as it did for Allen’s mate, so it’s a god tip!