Poll - Torque limiter failures on 449/511

[Dangermouse449]

Yes, but it's rather entertaining.

And in parts, very helpful.
Granted in other parts, no so much, but there is some very useful information there for us all.

 

[Tinken]

Increasing the torque resistance on the stock TL will transfer a dangerous level of force to your transmission. And it WILL cost you lots of $$ if that fails. The price of TL is not much compared to that. And any good mechanic knows never to use a cheater bar with a torque wrench. The accuracy is adversely affected. So the sheared inner spine torque limit test, broken at 350NM will have to be retested more than once.

We were able to measure up to 280ftlbs of torque on our TLs. However, everyone I know who has actually added shims to the TL stack, SpeedBrain included, has either broken a transmission or spun their TL apart. I'm sure you could do it if you were easy on it, but if you ride hard/race it will fail. I'm pretty sure has something to do with beveled spring washer not having room to flex.

 

[9880sts]

We were able to measure up to 280ftlbs of torque on our TLs. However, everyone I know who has actually added shims to the TL stack, SpeedBrain included, has either broken a transmission or spun their TL apart. I sure you could do it if you were easy on it, but if you ride hard/race it will fail.

I managed to get the TL to 280Nm and installed it . I hope not to break the Transmission with the 280nm. The Tl will bed in and come down in its Nm reading and hopefully stay for a while in the 200-240nm.

i might pull it out after a couple rides.. just want to know how it goes.

 

[Motosportz]

Some people just don't like being told what to do Kelly. By you or anyone else. What right do you have to tell us that, whether its for the good of the forum or not in your personal opinion. Now just chill out and hear me out.

What you may perceive as doing good for the forum may actually be bad and in it self may be enough cause to run many of us off and how is that acceptable?? This use of personal quotes seems to be continuing. This is personal bashing to us and attacks plain and simple. There is no obligation for you to keep doing this either.

We have a right to our opinions and to post what ever we like and to ignore whomever we want also, let us make that decision by ourselves please. We are capable of doing so.

You are telling us to continue providing our info in your own words but you will cause us to stop, by your own actions. With this kind of welcome why would anyone want to stay. As you pick apart line for line each post. This keeps on happening and is at this point predicted and expected when someone posts anything you personally don't like. Its getting way worse. Think about it. I am also guilty of trying to get in the last word but I am doing this in the most friendly way as I can at this point here and now.

I have respect for your experience too and information. Sure you have close to 20,000 posts and nearly 10,000 likes since 2008.. Some of us actually have a higher " Liked Percentage" of massages and posts than that. So more people may appreciate our contributions than you may think and I'm speaking for several of us. Maybe we should all step back, Yes. Including you. Now that's a friendly suggestion. Maybe we should all re-evaluate the way we go about things in our own ways. We all have a different approach but as you said, there all kinds of personalities on any forum. I know all of us mean well but we don't need an in house volunteer policeman. If this gets dissected and quoted I will likely drift off into the proverbial ether but that would be too easy. I have predicted worse.

"Personal Messages" back and forth will be the only option for us to communicate amongst each other if this activity doesn't stop with the personal Quotes being referenced and the Dissecting of all the posts. This will be the only way for us to avoid the dissecting and interference.....

Trust me. It has already begun. Maybe this should have been a PM itself. PMs can be perceived as personal attacks also. That's not my intension at all.

Enjoy the day!

All noted over and over and over. Now can we actually talk about the TL?

 

[9880sts]

i am awaiting some TL from Speedbrain... who would have thought ... used ones. They never waited actually until they failed. TL have been replaced on a Service Schedule .
After every single race and / or by the end of the Race day. TL was part of daily Maintenance .
Just have to wait until the Guys are back from Marokko .

Cant wait for it and the extra goodies .....

 

[Dangermouse449]

i am awaiting some TL from Speedbrain... who would have thought ... used ones. They never waited actually until they failed. TL have been replaced on a Service Schedule .
After every single race and / or by the end of the Race day. TL was part of daily Maintenance .
Just have to wait until the Guys are back from Marokko .

Cant wait for it and the extra goodies .....

Love parcels in the post....

 

[9880sts]

Love parcels in the post....

The Speedbrain guys are pretty helpfull actually. I am also waiting on reply regards breather.. Just interested to see how they do it.

 

[Motosportz]

i am awaiting some TL from Speedbrain... who would have thought ... used ones. They never waited actually until they failed. TL have been replaced on a Service Schedule .
After every single race and / or by the end of the Race day. TL was part of daily Maintenance .
Just have to wait until the Guys are back from Marokko .

Cant wait for it and the extra goodies .....

Nice work. I would ask them about maximum shimming specs because if you shim them to far the belleville washer / spring does not have room to do its thing and they fail sometimes catastrophically. I'm sure you can shim them as they have parts for that but you need to stay in tolerance. Might be why you had the one shear the splines on your test bench.

As for venting it looks like they vented in the stock location as seen here by the hose behind the cam tensioner. But also note the oil lines exiting the back of the motor for what must be a oil cooler so they changed a bunch of stuff regarding the oiling system. Also note they DNF many races some in part do to failing TLs. The picture also shows the sight glass completely filled so they were using much more that stock level I'm sure. Thier info will be interesting but a lot of changes from our motors makes it not as relative as it could be to our situations.

 

[Dangermouse449]

Thier info will be interesting but a lot of changes from our motors makes it not as relative as it could be to our situations.

This might also be said of the other raceteam in that regard.
All the porting, the big torque increases & flat-out desert racing isn't what most guys do to their bikes.
For sure, we can all learn from their heavy duty treatment, but for the little guy the failure rates will be a lot less.
Good to know how they got more life from them, or how deal with it.

 

[Big Timmy]

We were able to measure up to 280ftlbs of torque on our TLs. However, everyone I know who has actually added shims to the TL stack, SpeedBrain included, has either broken a transmission or spun their TL apart. I'm sure you could do it if you were easy on it, but if you ride hard/race it will fail. I'm pretty sure has something to do with beveled spring washer not having room to flex.

Nice work. I would ask them about maximum shimming specs because if you shim them to far the belleville washer / spring does not have room to do its thing and they fail sometimes catastrophically.

We got the info on the Belleville washer once already from Tinken, Good info though, Thanks.

I wonder why this particular Husqvarna used the Cable/wire rope activated clutch? I've seen this on many of the Rallye bikes just like this example shown? Then again I have seen the earlier BMW G450 based Speedbrain and Touratech rallye bikes using the Husqvarna hydraulic actuator cover as well? I also wonder if they use the deeper BMW Clutch basket as well with the mechanical activated clutch for some reason? Maybe because the BMW had thicker clutch plates than the Husky's did stock by about .015 to .020 or so each. The BMW clutch basket uses the same amount of plates, they are a just a bit thicker? Could this just be for the individual riders preference? It took me some time to get used to the Hydraulic clutch actuation mechanism on my TC engine after running the cable set up.

 

[Motosportz]

This might also be said of the other raceteam in that regard.
All the porting, the big torque increases & flat-out desert racing isn't what most guys do to their bikes.
For sure, we can all learn from their heavy duty treatment, but for the little guy the failure rates will be a lot less.
Good to know how they got more life from them, or deal with it.

Speedbrain does not do customer work as far as I know. The "other race team" does and sees a lot of stock and semi stock bikes as well as race bikes and built bikes so a good cross section of potential TL failures.

Speedbrain builds huge heavy highly modified bikes for going wide open across sand for days on end.

 

[Motosportz]

We got the info on the Belleville washer once already from Tinken, Good info

yes, very good info.

My point was there seems to be some dialogue going with speedbrain and it might be good to see what they feels is maximum shimming before failure. I do believe they have a lot of time messing with TLs and might have some useful feedback gleaned from successes and failures. Seems relevant to this discussion.

 

[Dangermouse449]

Speedbrain does not do customer work as far as I know. The "other race team" does and sees a lot of stock and semi stock bikes as well as race bikes and built bikes so a good cross section of potential TL failures.

Speedbrain builds huge heavy highly modified bikes for going wide open across sand for days on end.

Just to be clear to all, my comment wasn't a swipe at anyone. What I tried to say is that raceteams like ZT & SpBr put big loads on race bikes & this will accelerate wear on parts like limiters.
We can learn from that, but the wear on an un-modified private bike will obviously be at a slower pace.
Sorry for any confusion. DM

 

[9880sts]

Nice work. I would ask them about maximum shimming specs because if you shim them to far the belleville washer / spring does not have room to do its thing and they fail sometimes catastrophically. I'm sure you can shim them as they have parts for that but you need to stay in tolerance. Might be why you had the one shear the splines on your test bench.

As for venting it looks like they vented in the stock location as seen here by the hose behind the cam tensioner. But also note the oil lines exiting the back of the motor for what must be a oil cooler so they changed a bunch of stuff regarding the oiling system. Also note they DNF many races some in part do to failing TLs. The picture also shows the sight glass completely filled so they were using much more that stock level I'm sure. Thier info will be interesting but a lot of changes from our motors makes it not as relative as it could be to our situations.

Did they ever say that the TL was the Reason for DNF... i never saw any message about that.

 

[Motosportz]

Did they ever say that the TL was the Reason for DNF... i never saw any message about that.

I don't believe they advertised it as most race teams are pretty closed lip about stuff. But I have heard this from more than one source. So lets call it unsubstantiated rumors. But you have to ask yourself two things. If we normal guys are smoking them with trail riding and there is no solution to lock them due to then breaking transmissions you would have to think the same TL, in a bike weighing twice as much, making as much HP as possible, ridden as hard as possible, through deep sand for days, might put stress on them. The second thing is if they were not having issues with them why would they replace them "After every single race and / or by the end of the Race day. TL was part of daily Maintenance". Even at cost that would probably be a couple hundred dollars every ride and several man hours. Would that not seem highly excessive? Look at that bike, it would be a major deal to get that highly packaged motor out of there at the end of every day to replace the TL if there were no failures. I'm just speculating based on my own common sense in thinking about the bike.

In the end it does not matter if they DNF or smoked some or not. It is an obvious issue and the reason we are here discussing it. My point in all this was you seemed to be having dialogue with them and maybe you can gather info from them to help your interest. Thats all.

 

[Big Timmy]

OK. We have established then that shimming the torque limiter is relative to an increase in breakaway NM numbers and doing this will cause these numbers to clearly be increased.

Shimming or re-shimming to the point of staying within tolerance also seems clear and the safe thing to do to avoid them from coming apart and causing a catastrophic event.

Once reassembled and ready for reinstallation after testing. If a TL has been "too tightly" re-shimmed to an out of tolerance specification (excessive) it can cause the Belleville washer to not have enough room to do its thing which could lead to it coming apart and cause a possible catastrophic failure. As mentioned above. Excessive shimming = no room for the Belleville spring washer.

Then I would suspect that at least a few of these (or maybe more) Torque Limiters mentioned and tested, one at 280ft lbs. that was sold that way or possibly others with similar excessively high readings upwards of 320 to 380 NMs would be at a release breakaway point that wouldn't allow that same Belleville Washer to have room to do its thing either?

Which is to say these would likely be the first to let go or fail first. Or at least be the ones considered to fail first during hard use and service. These should be used an example for this discussion, as this would happen first to the ones with excessively high or beyond normal tolerance if we all follow what's being said here through all this. Even much more so than ones re-assembled within breakaway tolerance and specifications which we are being told we shouldn't exceed.

If this is not the case or in fact these high rated breakaway TLs are the exception to what's being said here. Than could we get an explanation why this phenomenon as being discussed here doesn't apply to these high rated over tolerance TLs. Both of which apparently haven't yet failed or don't fall into this rule of thumb and neither has caused any transmission failures at this point as well.

I'm not really confused but some may be.

Just a thought. Its all relative. Thanks

 

[Motosportz]

Just thinking out loud here. All things have an operation tolerance. I'm guessing the TL pack does. 9880 broke one catastrophically on his bench tester. If you look at a belleville washer / spring it is a shallow cone. I would imagine over stressing this would collapse the cone and fail just as overloading a coil spring can induce failure possibly even more so as it has a much more limited range of function (short throw). So held within whatever spec within tolerance that other factor would be friction coefficient. The TL pack pressure is not the only factor. Polished friction plates within the TL would give far easier than rough ones I suspect. This is proven when one starts to go then gets worse quickly just as a slipping clutch pack does. Never slips until the plates get glazed then it is all over quickly. My TL did this, was fine till it started slipping then I could make it slip just putting it under load. This assembly is much like a clutch pack with a stack of plates held together with a spring. Seems to me that the they fail because the spring (belleville washer in this assembly) looses its ability to hold over time. So it is loosing tension over time and heat cycles. It would be interesting to test the tension of a new belleville washer and old one in these units. As the friction plates so not slip but under massive load and only move slightly it would seem they are not the issue. Pure speculation on my part in my engineering mind thats how it seems to me.

 

[Big Timmy]

I have a total grasp of what a Belleville washer is. Thanks for the explanation for the rest of us though because some probably don't. I probably wouldn't have been referring to it as such if I didn't know what it was. The newer 2000 and up Harley clutches use a Belleville washer spring or as they call it a diaphragm spring and have some heavy duty ones available. Stock if I remember is like .075 thick and the Screaming Eagle heavy duty one is like .085 thick or something like that. It increases the lever pull quite a bit. I've installed them myself when the bike is new to keep the clutch from going south on my Baggers.

What if a heavier and thicker Belleville washer could be sourced, BMW/Kymco had to have sourced the one that's in there now.

I am sure the coefficient of friction amongst the mating surfaces is going to bed itself upon the first few good rides and become worn in pretty quickly as the rough plates appear to have a sintered metallic rough coating. My Old Maico's have clutch plates like this, with no fiber, just sintered metallic.

Like it or not the TL would also wear in the direction of deceleration against one another too whether or not it ever establishes or reaches a point of this slippage under excessive power application going forward or being abused. It could happen either way.

Still would like to know why the tested super high numbers on the TLs aren't going to be doing this themselves to the Belleville spring though. 380 NMs is a hell of a lot.

9880sts test destroyed one and it completely shelled itself at approximately 350NM. No doubt about it. May have been a one time thing on the bench but its just as possible to do this in the engine too or it would shell the transmission gears first then under load. Makes sense to me.

What say you?

 

[Huskinator]

Sorry for interrupting the flow, but I can't stop thinking about why we are in this position in the first place. By adding a clutch or "TL" to the transfer gear, the impact on the transmission was softened to keep it from breaking on jumps, in the whoops and whatever else. So why was the transmission breaking anyway? Thin gears? Forces from a transfer gear on a backwards spinning engine too great? Am I missing something here or is there a design flaw in the transmission itself, and the TL is just a band aid for a bigger problem that nobody wanted to deal with? I know obviously the only thing we can do now is keep the stock TL from heating up, or create a better one. But has anybody thought about stronger transmission gears or is that impossible?

 

[Dangermouse449]

Sorry for interrupting the flow, but I can't stop thinking about why we are in this position in the first place. By adding a clutch or "TL" to the transfer gear, the impact on the transmission was softened to keep it from breaking on jumps, in the whoops and whatever else. So why was the transmission breaking anyway? Thin gears? Forces from a transfer gear on a backwards spinning engine too great? Am I missing something here or is there a design flaw in the transmission itself, and the TL is just a band aid for a bigger problem that nobody wanted to deal with? I know obviously the only thing we can do now is keep the stock TL from heating up, or create a better one. But has anybody thought about stronger transmission gears or is that impossible?

I don't know how far down the road with the gearbox design BMW/Husky were, I wasn't there,
but it does seem pretty clear from what Tinken has said that they started breaking gearboxes.

The limiter seems to me to be a patch repair instead of a having to redo the gears (gearbox v2.0)
However, it isn't too expensive to do & as a fuse it works pretty well & they are currently available.
My own concern is getting one in a few years time if it fails then.....it will be a real PITA.

You could build bigger gears, but the cost would be crazy. Better to buy a new bike