Britbike forum Forums British Motorcycle specific Brands Bsa bulletin board Still burning oil - considering parking it

That's the next step. I was hoping to run as many tests as possible without tearing into it again (or spending any more money) but I'm out of ideas.


Both the head and barrel were planed. Head gasket replaced and annealed / re-annealed multiple times. Plain copper and composite gaskets tried. With and without copper coat sealant. With and without o-rings.


You have to understand that I've been chasing this for 3 years. What may sound like "no real effort" to you becomes a chore when it's the 10th time you've pulled the head (that's 20 re-torque), including one complete teardown to check the breather disk.

Each attempt has the chance of encountering some unforeseen issue while pulling the tank, removing the carbs, etc. Small things like a broken rocker arm spring washer or stripped rocker spindle nut are minor inconveniences on the surface but become frustrating as they can delay completing the work by a week or more.

Add that to the cost of yet another head gasket, possible rocker cover gasket, cylinder base gasket, and pretty quickly the thing takes a backseat to everything else in my life. Re-use those gaskets, you say? The first thing someone will say when I finish the job and the smoking persists is "shouldn't have reused that head gasket".

Interestingly, I called my dad last night for Father's day. He was the original owner of this thing, and he told me he always thought the bike was rotten. He always had more issues with this Spitfire than with any previous or since. I think it may be doomed to spend its remaining days as a piece of art in a corner somewhere. That ironhead sporty is looking better and better.

Strip it and take copious hi res pics of everything, post them all, our eyes see better than our reading ability.

And copper head gaskets can be used numerous times as long as they are annealed each time.

I understand your frustration but the solution is not gonna happen without a tear down. You may have a crack in the barrel, you may have an uneven bore that started at the factory. You may have a re-sleeved cylinder. You may have a crack in the head at the valve guide. The list can go on and on.
Might even be something simple like a loose return spigot in the crank case.
Only a qualified individual can find some of these things. You may have to just turn it over to someone else.

Kommando has good advice: Send us photos.

I have the feeling that you are suffering from too many "experts." You don't need any more expert advice. You need someone who knows what they are doing. Seems simple, but in our current digital world, where diagnosis is done with computer and error codes, the guys that had to actually diagnose these problems using their senses are getting to be few, and far, between.

There are people on this site that KNOW what they are doing and a picture would work wonders.

If you used the machine shop in New Bedford, than you used the same shop as Don is currently using. Other wise you used the one he used to use... He didn't change shops because New Bedford was more convenient.

There is a lot of talk about doing this and doing that, but has anyone who knows what they are doing actually look at the wear pattern on the face of the rings? Has anyone advised you whether the bore was glazed? Has anyone actually looked in the port to see if there is any oil tracking by the guide? Was there oil on the top of the cylinder.

Who advised you to plane the head and cylinder? Did he have a boat payment overdue?

I'm going to derail my own thread because I think this needs to be said. I was going to post privately, but John Healy is over his private PM quota:
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Mr Healy, in a single post you managed to bring into question the abilities of one man, the integrity of another, and the intelligence of a third (myself). Posts like these make guys like me wrap the whole thing under a blanket, put it in a corner, and forget about it for 10 years.

I recently attended the British Motorcycle Meet put on by the BSA Owners Club of New England and, I have to tell you, the BSA showing was piss poor. And, while I'm nearing 40 years old, I was one of the young guys there. I started riding at the age of 23; my first bike was a 1967 Lightning cobbled from mismatched parts of differing years. I joined this forum in 2002... before that I participated in the BRIT-IRON mailing list.

I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing you relate to my 65-year-old father more than you do to me. I'm wouldn't be surprised if, in 10 years when I decide to finally roll out the BSA he passed down to me and that's been collecting dust for longer than it saw sunlight, that the vast knowledge that you hold in your head may no longer be available for my 50-year-old self to get at. And if younger guys like me, what few there are of us, don't gain that knowledge there will be even fewer 40, 30, and 20-year-olds with the ability to keep their grandfather's bikes running the way they were meant to.

Forums like these are treasure troves of valuable information, but they are also a community, and a community needs members to participate if it wants to stay vibrant and relevant. If members stop participating, as I was considering doing after reading your post, the community dies.

I hope you will consider editing the post above to be a bit more constructive, or remove it altogether. If you do, I will remove this as well.
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For those still interested, I've snapped some pictures of the valves, pistons, and cylinder bores. My camera ran out of battery before I could snap shots of the head gasket surfaces and combustion chambers, but I may add those by the time you read this. The right-side valve looks awful, and the head gasket was relatively wet with oil in a few spots (hard to see in pictures). I'm wondering if it's sucking in from there. Any chances that getting the head/barrel milled caused the head bolts to bottom out? Let me know if there's anything specific you'd like pictures of. I haven't taken the barrel off to check the rings because I know that will mean another hone plus rings.

I don't know what JH said that was so bad.

If your bike has a fault, someone did something wrong.

And although John has said some not flattering things about my judgements in the past, he is to a large extent correct.
the biggest problem with open forums is that every one has their own "pet" cure that they search for potential problems that it fits.
And in honesty I must include myself in the above criticism .

He is also correct that the only way to properly ascertain exactly what is the problem is a thorough examination of the offending engine not what the engine is doing.
Otherwise we are just like the GP ( doctor) who listens to you interpretation of your symptoms without bothering to do the basic physical examination then treats you according to past cases.
While this method will suffice most of the times, some times the patient really is chronically ill.

Just about every thing that has been said is good and reasonably correct general information, just how much is relevant to your particular engine is another matter.

If you are going to play with old Pommie iron there are a few tools that you will need which will make your life much easier and No 1 in this case is a compression tester. Wet & dry, hot and cold reading will tell you a lot about how well the rings have bedded in.
IF you can get your hands on an old OXY gauge,they make great leak down testers

I am sure that I am not the only person who has stuffed a ring by twisting it that tiny little bit too much when trying to get it on a piston but it took a long time for me to admit to myself that I was ME and NOT THE RINGS so I graduated to a converted set of external snap ring pliers ( that the tips had broken off ) for fitting rings and my success rate increased greatly. Now that I am a bit older and better educated ( as distinct from being wiser ) I have forked out for a couple of sets of real ring expanders and some real ring compressors ( which I still have not found since the move ) and since doing so ( and gone to dry fitting ) my success rate on re-ring jobs is about 99% ( I still make mistakes ) .
So while you have told us that you have fitted 3 sets of rings, you have not told us HOW you fitted the rings, which is very important.

Way back in the past I used to drop the barrels onto the rings and even with a good pair of ring compressors it was a bit of a hit & miss affair . Then an old racer showed me how to wind the piston up into the barrel, worked much, much better. You can do ( and I have done ) a lot of damage to both the rings & the groves by even the smallest amount of twisting or jambing when dropping the barrels onto the pistons.
Oddly enough there is a video around the traps shot in the BSA factory which shows the engine line and a worker doing just this, winding the piston up into the barrel.

As for casting aspersions on others, I am yet to find a BSA twin that actually needed the barrels decked but there have been a lot where even good decking has given the owners no end of grief and I am not even going to think about how meany perfectly good alloy heads I have seen totally stuffed by way too much good machining let alone those that were a tad off plumb.

Oh and Brit-iron is still around is you are interested and Mike who took over from Falco has started the transition from the listserver to Facebook. And I have been on that list since the late 90's.

"Winding the piston into the barrel." New one on me. Can you explain more fully? That factory video would be great. Maybe this should be a new thread.

I have looked carefully through this thread and see absolutely no justification for the criticism of JH.
In my view he said what he thought. If that offends you then --tough [***]--we are living here in a real Brit bike world.
Think of it as a group of motorcycle enthusiasts having a few pints in the pub---down to earth expressions, stark views but all in a friendly way.
You are fortunate in being able via this forum to access some of the world experts in Brit bikes.
One of the things you have to do is read the responses and then judge their applicability to YOUR problem with YOUR bike.
And on a footnote---from your location you live in MA--you are not too far from where John lives.
Put the bike or the relevant parts in a truck/car and take them over to him.
Talk to him nicely, take a bottle of Bushmills with you and I am sure he will look at the bike/parts and give you his honest view.
A much better way forwards than slagging off someone who is only trying to help?
HTH

Looking at the pics one inlet valve is wet, looking like the guide is leaking oil or oil leaking into the inlet tract. The cross-hatching seems shallow angled but could be the angle the pics are taken from, there are also vertical marks in the barrel bores which look to be wear marks, are you running without air filters?

That's good advice there..
I'm glad to know Mr. Healy likes the Bushmills!
Sure sign of good taste.

Don in Nipomo

Definitely running air filters... could those vertical lines be due to the dry start? I'm not sure how the walls should look after less than 100 miles of running new rings.

I agree that something looks off on that intake valve. Haven't taken the valve out but it feels tights in the guide with the spring attached (previous guides you could wiggle the valve, though barely, by pushing against the top of the spring). I'm suspecting the head gasket / surfaces because of the oil on them. Does oil typically wet the gasket while raising the head off? I'll try to get more pictures online tonight.

I can certainly see oil on the right hand inlet valve and this may explain some of the problem. Where this oil is coming from is a mystery but perhaps what you could try is filling the inlet port with petrol or similar thin fluid and see where it leaks out from. You may find it leaks past the guide head area, valve seat, valve stem or potentially a crack in the head.

Oil on the head gasket could possibly come from the oil drain holes or pushrod area. I usually seal the head gasket using high temp silicone to ensure an oil tight seal.

The bore hone looks coarse enough to help ring bedding, but as Kommando mentions, there are some small scrapes on the cylinder which wont help matters.

Those of us who still do repairs on these old motorcycle should have a sign outside our shop claiming: Small Engine, Vintage Motorcycle and Screen Door Repair. In spite of what many "experts" want to say, these bikes share little of the engineering used in modern engines. We are realy "low tech." The one thing that translates backwards to our engines is the current way valve jobs are done. But the machines that do this work cost between $200,000 and $350,000.

Our old bikes have a hard time fitting in our New Automotive World. Even modern bikes had problems with the current oil offerings. It took 6 years of in fighting between 2000 and 2006 with the Japanese Big Four and the SAE to get a change. In 2006 we got SAE and oil industry acceptance that the current oil was not appropriate for even modern motorcycles. Us old geezers with our 50 year old motorcycles were having similar, and in many cases, the exact same problems as the Big Four: Clutch slippage, ring break-in problems and heavy wear of transmission gears in motorcycles that share engine and gearbox oil (The Triumphs that breath through the primary suffered chain wear and clutch slippage). So nearly all of the major oil manufacturers offer SAE SG JASO MA2. SG oil is the standard that was in effect when most of our motorcycles were made. The JASO MA2 address issues relating to friction modifiers so the clutches won't slip and the rings have a fighting chance of seating. This has gone a long way in solving problems we have been having related to modern oil.

There was a time when every local automotive parts supplier had a machine shop in the back. It was a time when Sunnen marked the box 150 honing stones came in "Finishing". I still have one of those boxes, and copies of Sunnen catalogs listing the 150 grit stone as Finishing. This was NOT in the 1930's, but in the 1960 and 1970's when our motorcycles were being manufactured. Triumph even issued a Service Bulletin in 1970 saying the cylinders should be honed with 150 grit stones. Today, other than in vintage shops that install grey cast iron rings, the only place you are going to routinely find a 150 grit stone is in a lawn mower repair shop. It is a rare machine shop today that has stones any coarser than 280 grit and they are not going to work that consistently in our motors unless you are using steel or ductile rings. And then you need to get the bore within .0002" of being round and the same top to bottom. They do this maintaining Ra figures our grey cast iron rings will never work with!

The few automotive machine shops that still exist, that had neither the funds or training required to upgrade their shops, are struggling to get by. Modern automotive machine shops require over a million dollars of equipment and are held to the strict standards of the "check engine" light on the dash board. It is odd how little of the new engineering practices are backward compatible to old engines... All I can say is you need to "Know" you expert, and as a general statement, if he doesn't have 150, or even 180 grit stones in his shop... pick up your parts and run.

I most respectively disagree!!! A picture of the face will tell more on this subject. Those scrapes can be be from a small seizure, honing grit left over from honing the cylinder, or carbon that has come adrift from the top of the piston. Any way you slice it, it is not something you want to see!

The top of this piston clearly shows signs of detonation.
If you look carefully you can see the striations on the bore.

Surface grit seems awfully smooth for grey cast iron rings and barely cut through the previous glazing.



This plug displays indications that it was running very hot. Look at the threads as they are a witness to the amount of heat in the plug/head. You should see a couple of threads discolored from the heat. The rest should look like they came out of the box. This plug shows at least 7 threads, maybe more. Giving Marc advice to install a grade hotter plug just doesn't sound like that good of an idea. Those are at least 10 to 1 pistons, if not higher.



This is the right intake port. All that oil on the back of the intake valve need further exploration.

In regard to the head, is there a chance that the head is acceptable *except when torqued*, meaning a crack the exacerbates oil leaking to the combustion chamber once installed? Would this be detectable in any way? I've used Marvel Mystery Oil in the past to detect leaks as it's relatively thin and won't evaporate. I'll do this as a quick test, after cleaning up the intake runner.

As JH noted to me privately, there has been some serious ham-fisted work done to this motor. I may be responsible for some, but so-called experts have also done a number on internal parts in the past. That, along with 10.5:1 pistons with less than adequate fuel, and you have a perfect storm of a grenade in the making. If this means going back to basics and reevaluating the parts used, I'm going to have to consider if it's worth it. I have a good amount invested in it already, but at some point you need to cut your losses.

You owe Mr Healy an apology! I am shocked he is still trying to help!

A few more pictures posted. Pulled the valve out and I have a mix of brake cleaner and ATF (to slow evaporation and add color) sitting around the top of the guide. From the top, everything looks fine. Looking up, though, there's a decent-sized cavity at least a millimeter deep.



The head gasket, meanwhile, showed oil on both the top and bottom at the right rear stud. It doesn't really show up in pictures. On the left side, though, the gasket looks burnt compared to the right side. I supposed it may be normal for it to burn like that; the right side is simply cooled by the oil and hasn't had a chance to 'cook':





I'm not sure how/why the guy who did the guides last year, when I brought the head in, didn't offer this. I even brought the head back in after it immediately started smoking to have the mechanic take a look. He gave it the all clear.

That's the tough part for me to swallow. I can see if the work I did was shoddy. I don't do this full time and I'm "trained" by the shop manual (three of them). So, once in a while, I get in over my head and I bring it to a pro, pay extra for it, but everything they do has to be checked and re-checked? That's what is making me want to pack it in.

I considered taking the whole thing to my local shop to have them "just fix it" but chances are the guy is going to farm the work out to someone who may or may not know what they're doing, anyways. And it sounds like there's more and more of them and fewer of the guys qualified to do it right. So what do I do when I get the bike home? Strip it down and check that the guides are good, check that the right stone was used to hone the cylinders, check that he put the right oil in.

On a related note, back in the 90's I brought my bike in and the mechanic scolded me for putting too much fluid in the primary. He said it had to be a specific measured amount (I'm sure it does). When I said I always just filled it until it came out the level he reminded me that this is why he was the professional. Then, he proceeded to strip the left-handed nut holding the footpeg while trying to remove it.

That side has been Helicoil'd, and the threads don't go all the way down. That's why it's sooty black except for the five or so that catch. As I mentioned before, ham-fisted. The shop that installed my guides offered to fix that. What do you guys think?

I think you need to apologise to John Healy.
After that, consider taking the motor to a BSA specialist, not some local auto shop.
Have the troublesome RHS inlet guide checked and replaced if needed. Get a full length plug helicoil to help heat transfer and combat detonation.
Have the bores rehoned to the correct spec and consider fitting lower compression fittings.
If Mr Healy is convenient why not have his shop do the work,he knows what he is talking about and after the slagging you gave him its the least you could do.

The easiest to access is the You Tube version but they are all over the place on various video Hosting sites.<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll2gBdB3AHU>

Winding the piston requires you to put some supports on the cylinder bolts to hold the barrel up off the crank cases , and true to the cankcase mouth.
On the singles you use some U shaped channel or slit hose.

Ring compressor on piston, barrels lowered onto stops, large spanner on the end of the crank shaft, rotate crank & pistons go into barrel.

On twins you will need some hex bar with threaded holes in one end to bolt onto studs and holes in the other to take a short bolt . Same drift, pistons near BDC, ring compressors on, spacers on, barrels onto spacers, big spanner on crank and rotate.
I use a 24" stilsons, sitting vertical, a little tap and most times it will push the piston up under it's own weight.

On the U tube video it is on part no 2.
Run it through a few times and see just how quick & easy the rings go in.
If you want to spend some money have a close look at the jig and get a tool maker to fabricate a couple. If you could not unload a 100 or so on evilbay I would be very surprised . Failing the factory assembly tool which would be different for each engine type & piston size the above with a standard ring compressor is the best alternative I know.

Also , with regards to Johns post above about the some what primitive nature of our engines go through the engine assembly section many times chanting to yourself , "not a NASSA moon mission".

There are better versions around the original posting many years ago ( predated this site ) was on a site called Webzeum or something similar, it can still be accessed via some of the web archiving applications like "flashback" it is a bit tedious but worthwhile as the quality is so much better, there is a similar Triumph one as well.

To understand why BSA died, compare the 1958 BSA factory with the 1960 Honda factory tour

I think remove the helicoil and fit a new one.Only have one thread of the head covering the helicoil at each end,so the coil almost reaches the full length of the thread in the head.


The shape of the port around the end of that guide looks perfectly normal to me.If the guides have correct stem clearance,just seal them at the top and remove any chamfer at the top of the guide bores.

I don't think you guys understand, and maybe I haven't been specific enough in the past, the shear amount of care I've gone through while attempting to remedy this. I'm not taking parts to Joe's muffler shop and asking them to use their wheel balancer to install valve guides. All the work was done by shops that specialize in British motorcycles. Most of them in the same location for 30+ years. The only work that wasn't done by me *or* a British specialist was the last cylinder hone, and that was because I know the guy used to do machine work for the local Triumph guy.

I have ring compressors
I know about modern oils
I know to install rings dry
I know to clean everything
I use US-made rings (although I've been told the Chinese rings are better than US ones. Everyone's got an opinion)
I know how to anneal the head gasket

My point earlier was that *it doesn't matter* who you take the work to; much of it gets farmed out and, maybe it's just me or maybe shops would rather deal in whole bikes so when the guy walks in with just the head or just the jugs, they tell their machinist to f**k this guy over. I don't know. All I know is I'm dealing with reputable shops, shops that despite all this I would still continue to deal with, and this is what I have to show for it.

In the end, there are only two things that have been constant in all of this: the first is the bike I'm working on (maybe it was purchased on Friday the 13th during a full moon) and the second is the guy doing the assembly (me). Guess which one I'm going to blame.

Stick to Hastings, much better than the Taiwanese rings but their pistons are good.