• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

The Italian Red Head that's going to lose it's head thread.

My experience with lean-ness causing pinging is that you are likely to see the effects on the sparkplug, typically very white and sometimes melting the anode and in extreme cases melting a hole in the piston. Changing to a colder sparkplug will help prevent pinging but go too cold and it will become harder to start. I have not seen de-lamination of the head gasket caused by a lean mixture and think that more likely caused by water expanding into steam. (Technology and materials have changed over the years since I messed around modifying engines so I may be wrong here) Without any doubt, bubbles in the radiator before it reaches boiling point are a sure sign of compressed air being pumped into the water jacket, this would cause rapid and excessive pressure in the radiator when the cap is on.

A compression test might reveal low compression, confirming the leak. An exhaust gas analyzer would reveal any lean-ness.

I had the typical stumbling issue on my Strada and tried the eruption mod which eliminated the stalling but still had some surging at 3000 revs. I have since fitted a Powercommander and for the first time felt it is almost 100%. I think the PCV is absolutely the answer because I can fine tune it at any rev for pod mod, aftermarket exhaust or anything else. Of course the Autotune would be ideal and it would be very interesting to see if a PCV eliminated Quirky's pinging. Of course, if the head gasket is blown the only fix is a new gasket.
 
glitch_oz said:
That certainly sounds like a good idea!!
A liter of concentrate and another liter of de-mineralized/distilled water mixed 50/50 will give the liter and a bit needed to re-fill after flushing plus enough left to use for small top-ups along the way.
Until not too long ago coolant was coolant.
Now we seem to have an infinite variety....and many of them on a war-footing with each other.
Flush, flush again with water, then blow out as much of that as possible, refill ....and massage the bubbles out for a final burp.

I'm not too sold on the miraculous waterless stuff and at some exorbitant sum of $150 or so for a fill, I'm not going to "just try it out".

If there's any time left tomorrow after the locals have done the PodMods and some other bits, I'll swap my blue juice for some new stuff, got it all sitting there on the bench.
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced on the waterless either, although it sounds wonderful.

I'm not convinced lean caused the issue with Quirky either. If anything, I think carbon build did it. Our engines are high compression, high performance engines, they do not tolerate carbon build as well as the lower performance engines.

https://www.hastingsmfg.com/ServiceTips/detonation_and_preignition.htm
 
Hopefully next week, workshop was booked solid for 2 weeks. We were hopeful of at least one job being cancelled, but not to be. Dealer has a possible source for an air box if I end up needing one. Fingers crossed!
 
Quirky, I have a spare new top and my original lower, air box if you get stuck. I bought a complete air box to do the 3 D printed mod.
M
 
Slowflyer said:
Quirky, I have a spare new top and my original lower, air box if you get stuck. I bought a complete air box to do the 3 D printed mod.
M
Click to expand...


The crank case breather nipple broke off my airbox lower half, and I had my local shop get me a replacement under warranty. I didn't need to put it in, because I have (a few hours ago) done the pod-mod and rerouted that hose to a breather pod filter. The lower half of the airbox is sitting on a shelf at the dealership in Melbourne waiting for me to go and take it or do something with it. If you need it let me know.
 
Thanks for your offers and help with the air box. This waiting game is no good. I can only hope all will become obvious soon.
What's it going to be?
Head gasket
Cracked head
Casting issue

Cheers,

Q
 
No new information yet. If I don't hear from them tomorrow, I'll give them a call on Friday.

Cheers,

Q
 
+1 with what Glitch said. I'll be surprised based on your description of what happened that it isn't head gasket. Badrapp is right ya know, regardless of what has actually gone wrong, the rep must have reasoned that the air filter of choice wasn't the cause or tear down would not have been approved.
 
Quirky said:
No new information yet. If I don't hear from them tomorrow, I'll give them a call on Friday.

Cheers,

Q
Click to expand...

I hope they get it back together before your summer hits. Got pictures? As some wise person said, "it didn't happen if there are no pictures".
 
What a week. I had freaky close call on Thursday night. I was doing inspection checks on a Bucyrus 1570w dragline, in the machinery house, looked over swing box #1 and #2 then had a good look at the drag rope tray, rollers and the rope itself. Yeah all looks good here, I turned around took 2 maybe 3 steps away and heard a fair amount of noise, sounding like tearing rope, a bang and a jolt went right through the near 4000 tonne machine. 5 more giant quick steps had me barging through the operators cab door loudly asking WTF was that? "snapped a drag rope, are you ok? sure your ok?" All good. Then to find my work mate very much pale looking like he was going to vomit, (going into shock) but obviously relieved I was ok. 10 minutes later he's still shaken but fine. Turns out the drag rope I was just 3 feet away from 2-3sec earlier failed somewhere near the fair leads. Be careful out there people.

Ok, sorry had to share that, but that very event has high lighted to me the insignificance of my bikes drama's.

Phoned the dealer this morning as promised. Turns out the approval for the work from the importer (PFG) was for a head gasket only.
The good news- Bonus was they also had the new gasket ready to go straight in.
The Bad news- the piston and bore is totally stuffed. Parts alone in excess of $2000. We will need to re-apply for a new work order from PFG and I was told they may not cover it at all. Also this damage was further proof that the "pod mod" caused the issue.

1 hour later I received a call from the dealer with information from PFG.
Good news- they'll cover it this one time.
Bad news- no one has a clue how long it will take to get the parts. This may take while!

They tell me the head and valves look perfectly fine and thought that my request for a loan of a FE501 for the mean time was really pushing my luck well beyond it's limits. Damage is piston and barrel only.



Cheers,

Q
 
20140814_121203.jpg 20140814_121213.jpg

So if we have people that are able to read plugs then surely there's a few guru's who can decipher this whole story?
What does all this tell you?
Does this look like a lean running engine?
I am still being told that it's still likely to be all the Air filter modifications fault.

I don't know stuff all about engines, but the way those marks are would it not be possible that the head gasket failure has caused this pre-detonation issue. If it wasn't related wouldn't there be scouring in other places, I dunno?

Cheers,

Q
 
So how is the problem due to the pod mod? What is there claim here? too much air? Not enough air? Air too clean? I don't get it.
 
Making sure I get this entirely right:
The head gasket is rooted, so is the piston and barrel...but no damage to the head/ valves/ seats etc. at all?

"Stuffed" meaning exactly what?
What are the rings like (broken? one/ all?)
If broken or fractured, any chafing/"re-surfacing" of the lip?
Any debris in the bore?
Filings/ debris in oil?
Burn-marks/pitting or hole in piston/crack or split in the barrel?

Was the airbox dirty BEFORE the PodMod was done?


Good article here re: detonation damage.
http://www.contactmagazine.com/Issue54/EngineBasics.html
 
drzcharlie said:
So how is the problem due to the pod mod? What is there claim here? too much air? Not enough air? Air too clean? I don't get it.
Click to expand...


Too much air. Causing a lean running engine. The TPS that was set at 70% for the Aussie LAM's approval also had nothing to do with the problem on my so called de-restricted bike because the ECU is clever enough that it can adapt this problem out.

I still think it's BS. But hey, they are going to fix it one day.................... right!


Cheers,

Q
 
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