R-III-R Turbo
Mine is the biggest :)
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2010
- Messages
- 2,221
- Location
- Ireland
- Ride
- 2472cc Supercharged Carpenter Rocket III Stroker
The quest for a Monster Rocket is an expensive one. Thought the Captains on here might be interested to have a look at the 'mantelpiece artefacts' collected so far;
1. Beat up crank pulley & bearing housing
Riding down a motorway and i feel the engine hiccup. I off-ramp (felt another hiccup) and check bike. Oil all over the bottom of the engine and rear wheel, brakes too. I was lucky to escape.
The crank pulley spigot bearing housing bolts had vibrated loose (think the imbalanced throttle, #7 below, accelerated it), so the housing moved out and oil spewed out the front of the engine.
The hiccup was 2 of the bolts had backed out so far they got caught in the pulley and got torn out of the front engine cover.
The bolts got dragged around between pulley and bearing housing, reefing the things up.
Loctite on these bolts now.
2. Chewed titanium valve retainer & scored bucket
During valve clearance check I found scoring on a couple of cam lobes and then valve buckets.
My opinion on this was that the shims were the non-chamfered edge kind, and wore their way into the titanium retainers.
One ate it's way almost completely out of the retainer.
The shards of titanium released got caught between the cam lobes and the buckets, scoring them.
The shims were all replaced with chamfered edge versions.
3. Broken valve spring
Discovered the broken inner spring when replacing the worn titanium retainers and non-chamfered edge shims (#2 above).
Bike still ran fine and no loss on compression etc as the out spring carried it.
No idea what broke this but the dual spring setup has been updated since with a single spring setup so i migrated to that.
4. Busted clutch pressure plate bearing
I reckon this type of bearing is the wrong type for the application, it should be a thrust bearing like in earlier Rockets. Reckon this bearing would be ok with the OEM clutch springs though.. I haven't heard of a failure.
Possible that using clutch springs nigh on twice the strength of the OEM ones, and also shifting at up to 9000rpm, might have been too much for the little guy.
Or maybe some of the titanium flakes from #2 above got into the bearing before the filter caught them, and fcuked the bearing up.
Replaced with a needle roller thrust bearing.
5. Corrupted ECU
Bike was dead one day - no start, gauges weird, softwares wouldn't connect, heard there was a dodgy map on the loose so replaced the ECU and sent old one to Tuneboy (in exchange for a key to the new one) who said it's fine.
6. Faulty GPS
Went through several of these until Triumph fixed the issue in 2013, coinciding with the change in clocks and main harness in the Roadsters.
7. Blow-off valve, vacuum tubes and throttle imbalance that caused idle problem/stall & die
This was the hardest problem i ever had to solve. It had 3 causes working against me (so hard to nail down the cause). Got through it with the support of the good guys on here, @Penner @sleeves @warp9.9
The bike ran fine for several hundred miles since these mods but then one day started stalling and dying at idle (ran fine once you hold throttle even 1-2% open). Very long story of strange misfortune, and in the end the fix wasn't straight forward. The vacuum tubes i used were too long, uneven lengths, and shared between MAP, BOV and FPR. The BOV had an O-ring which got sheared on assembly and created vacuum leak (which was near the MAP so resulted in a low vac reading but the engine vacuum was fine).
Oh yeah and the 2 things above also masked a poorly balanced throttle, which was a contributer to the poor idling.
On the plus side, a smooth sea never made a good sailor.
I look forward to some real bad part failures (on the whole, I've been lucky and caught these before they did real damage) in my quest.
Also, I hasten to add, the GPS was the only failure I've had in the OEM state - everything else was mod related.
Also look forward to hearing fellow Captains' tales of woe.. I can't be the only unlucky sod on here
1. Beat up crank pulley & bearing housing
Riding down a motorway and i feel the engine hiccup. I off-ramp (felt another hiccup) and check bike. Oil all over the bottom of the engine and rear wheel, brakes too. I was lucky to escape.
The crank pulley spigot bearing housing bolts had vibrated loose (think the imbalanced throttle, #7 below, accelerated it), so the housing moved out and oil spewed out the front of the engine.
The hiccup was 2 of the bolts had backed out so far they got caught in the pulley and got torn out of the front engine cover.
The bolts got dragged around between pulley and bearing housing, reefing the things up.
Loctite on these bolts now.
2. Chewed titanium valve retainer & scored bucket
During valve clearance check I found scoring on a couple of cam lobes and then valve buckets.
My opinion on this was that the shims were the non-chamfered edge kind, and wore their way into the titanium retainers.
One ate it's way almost completely out of the retainer.
The shards of titanium released got caught between the cam lobes and the buckets, scoring them.
The shims were all replaced with chamfered edge versions.
3. Broken valve spring
Discovered the broken inner spring when replacing the worn titanium retainers and non-chamfered edge shims (#2 above).
Bike still ran fine and no loss on compression etc as the out spring carried it.
No idea what broke this but the dual spring setup has been updated since with a single spring setup so i migrated to that.
4. Busted clutch pressure plate bearing
I reckon this type of bearing is the wrong type for the application, it should be a thrust bearing like in earlier Rockets. Reckon this bearing would be ok with the OEM clutch springs though.. I haven't heard of a failure.
Possible that using clutch springs nigh on twice the strength of the OEM ones, and also shifting at up to 9000rpm, might have been too much for the little guy.
Or maybe some of the titanium flakes from #2 above got into the bearing before the filter caught them, and fcuked the bearing up.
Replaced with a needle roller thrust bearing.
5. Corrupted ECU
Bike was dead one day - no start, gauges weird, softwares wouldn't connect, heard there was a dodgy map on the loose so replaced the ECU and sent old one to Tuneboy (in exchange for a key to the new one) who said it's fine.
6. Faulty GPS
Went through several of these until Triumph fixed the issue in 2013, coinciding with the change in clocks and main harness in the Roadsters.
7. Blow-off valve, vacuum tubes and throttle imbalance that caused idle problem/stall & die
This was the hardest problem i ever had to solve. It had 3 causes working against me (so hard to nail down the cause). Got through it with the support of the good guys on here, @Penner @sleeves @warp9.9
The bike ran fine for several hundred miles since these mods but then one day started stalling and dying at idle (ran fine once you hold throttle even 1-2% open). Very long story of strange misfortune, and in the end the fix wasn't straight forward. The vacuum tubes i used were too long, uneven lengths, and shared between MAP, BOV and FPR. The BOV had an O-ring which got sheared on assembly and created vacuum leak (which was near the MAP so resulted in a low vac reading but the engine vacuum was fine).
Oh yeah and the 2 things above also masked a poorly balanced throttle, which was a contributer to the poor idling.
On the plus side, a smooth sea never made a good sailor.
I look forward to some real bad part failures (on the whole, I've been lucky and caught these before they did real damage) in my quest.
Also, I hasten to add, the GPS was the only failure I've had in the OEM state - everything else was mod related.
Also look forward to hearing fellow Captains' tales of woe.. I can't be the only unlucky sod on here
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