What is your craziest mechanical failure...

tdelegram

tdelegram

Control Rider
Thunderace said:
Funny Tom, I somehow remember at least one instance!
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Jim, you were pretty fast on this click bait, it was really meant for Bill, but I understand.

Bill, Glad it was that easy to lure you out.

Brad, since you sked this will be a long one with some lessons learned. End of the prior season we did a complete overhaul and rebuild of my RC8RS including scrapping the stock air box for an aftermarket replacement. The stock air box was a hard plastic sealed box with ram air (many speculate that it didn't work or provided little advantage) and on the top of the air box the crank case breather went through and terminated above the rear cylinder velocity stack. If you over filled the crank case the extra oil would get blown out into the rear cylinder (good thing with stock tune it would run hotter and this would provide a little extra cooling). The new air box replaced the entire hard plastic top with a foam filter and the crank case breather just laid on top of the foam filter. Foresight is 20/20 and this is a bad design that it took me a while to realize it. the other complicating factor is that while the street model RC8R's use 4 quarts of oil, the track only models are recommended to run 3.4 quarts. The reason is as the big twin is running much more sustained higher RPM's it tends to blow oil out of the breather. With the stock air box not much of an issue, with the aftermarket it starts to saturate the foam filter. Fast forward to endurance race #2, i just changed the oil for the 4rth time that season (including one endurance race flag to flag), and all changes were of the 4 quart variety. So as Jim rolled out for endurance race 2 with an oil saturated foam filter and 4 quarts in the crank the bike did what is was suppose to and spit out the 0.6 quarts into the foam filter which then oiled the rear cylinder and Jim's boot after his 50 minute stint. So realistically it wasn't a failure of the bike so much as the guy maintaining it. During the off season I added an oil catch can and modified the base plate of the air box so the vent terminates above the rear cylinder velocity stack so we should be up and running again for the endurance races.
 
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