Dre-XT-Stueck - the final re-Dre-XT-Stueckening (pt. 6)

There was still a lot to do after the first rideout almost two weeks ago and quite some had yet to go wrong. 

Now the freshly rebuilt engine ran... ok-ish, but not even remotely as powerful as I imagined. Quite frankly, it wasn't notably faster than the rather well seasoned stocker that was in there before. So I still had this 1VJ cylinder head, which after some investigation turned out not to be too bad. At least that's what I thought initially. Throw in a bit of bad luck, e.g. a brand new and slightly bent valve, where the dish was ground too deep. (The right one in the picture.)

Plus some properly ruined exhaust studs, which took me the better part of a day to sort out but ultimately fail, when redrilling for new studs.

So at some point, some rather impolite words were uttered, the head "retired" and the following day, I jacked up the old girl and got going on the swingarm chainguard as the original one was only present in the shaped some well bleached bits.

As is apparent by the pictures above, this is a proper "swingarm-out" job and honestly quite a royal pain to get done. While I had the swingarm out already, I also swapped the right grease nipple as the old one was leaky and I couldn't get any grease into the swingarm bearing. (And I mean, this place isn't called GreasyGreg's for nowt...)

After all of this lingering around it was about time to tackle the elephant in the room and find out what actually was amiss with the engine. I had all the valves out as I dreaded that one of them might run stiff in its guide or the like, but the true was a lot more profane. We all make mistakes. 

Thanks to the stupidly deep valve dishes in the piston, nothing happened except for the engine being more than just "a tad" lazy.

On the way home the old girl sounded like a big thumper should and was a lot more lively. 😎

Special thanks to my dad for lending me a hand more than once and getting the swingarm in and out in no time and lots of other good stuff. The old girl made it home from the workshop without a single hickup, except for the speedo illumination failing, so I can't really say how quick she actually is. Which in hindsight might have been a rather good thing...