First things first, you'll need to drain the coolant before you pull the rad. The earth is also round (that's another obvious statement, btw). I drain the coolant into a empty distilled water jug. Here's a trick. If you open the rad cap, the coolant will flow better. That's a normal trick. The ST3 trick is if you pop open the rad cap, the coolant in the overflow tank dribbles down the tube and out the top of the open rad cap. Neat, huh? Drain the overflow tank first. I pull the overflow tube at the radiator, spill a little and point the whizzing hose into the water jug....
Not wanting a big mess on my lift or garage floor, I also put a 5 gallon bucket under the drain plug.
Oh, the reason I use a distilled water jug is to reuse the coolant. I just flushed the rad and replaced the coolant last fall. There's a whole 200 miles on this batch. Hey, I'm kind of frugal which is one of the many reasons why I'm going through all this routine maintenance crap. So, the drain plug is on the water pump cover on the left side of the bike. Grab a funnel and a water jug, put funnel in jug, jug in bucket and open the drain. Look close, my drain plug isn't standard. I stripped the bolt hole last year because I didn't notice it was cross threaded and commenced to torquing it down. Ugggh, it happens. I have a friend who has a CNC machine in his garage who re-bored and threaded the hole. It's a standard (non-metric) bolt. My Duc is custom now.
With the coolant mostly drained, time to start unleashing the hoses. This is where the mostly statement comes into play. The bottom hose on the left side will still have coolant in it. Use your catch bucket when you pull that loose. I find it easier to pull the hoses from the radiator side rather than the other end. Simply loosen the hose clamps and twist/pull on the hose. They may adhere a bit, so quite a bit of effort may be needed. It's not really a finesse move, just go after it gradually. After I pop the hoses off, I "cap" them with sandwich bags and zip-ties. This is to keep bats, dust, small rocks, crayons and the like from finding their way in and doing evil upon the motor.
The only other thing to "unhook" is the connector to the fan. It's also on the left side, the connector on mine was tucked under the frame. There's a tab you need to lift before pulling the two sides apart.
From there, you're just 3 bolts away from radiator freedom. Two are on the top left and right side. The third is on the bottom left on a bracket that ties into the motor. Pop those loose and wriggle the radiator free. I turned the freed radiator over on the bucket to drain a bit more, then bagged it in a kitchen garbage bag... you know, bats and crayons and all that running loose... and put it under one of my workbenches where it'll stay safe.
There, now that we have free access to the horizontal cylinder and belt cover, let's deal with those fuel lines that have the vertical belt cover pinned. I don't know about you guys, but sometimes when you run up against a particularly vexing problem, it pays to walk away. It's not to give up, it's to allow your head to clear and work on it in the background. My 'a-ha' moment came on my commute to work. NPR, Mike and Mike and the local modern rock station were particularly suckish that morn, so I shut the radio down and let my mind wander in between fantasizing about hood mounted bazookas on my cage that would make the commute more efficient. Anyway, it's then that I figured I didn't have to remove the fuel lines, I just needed to move them out of the way. There's plenty of slack in the lines and with the breather hose completely disconnected, plenty of free space to wriggle out between the frame tube and belt covver. Voila... see below.
No comments:
Post a Comment