So one fine day my bike's front piston suffered a burn-through.
The twit that sold it to me had put on a very high performance air cleaner. I asked him if the (obviously stock) carb had been re-jetted for the new intake. "Sure has!"
Yeah, right.
It burned itself out at high speed. Pipe was too loud to hear the pinging.
Sigh.
So I ordered a whole set of go-fast bits: new ceramic-lined barrels, new forged race pistons, high-perf heads, even a new and better Mikuni carb.
Well swapping all that out without pulling the motor from the Buell frame was easy. The only real pain on a Buell is the rear motor mount and it's a REAL bear to deal with. I didn't want to go there, it would mean pulling the whole rear suspension first, I'd basically have pieces everywhere.
But with the old barrels and pistons off, I realized I had a problem: there were still bits of old piston in the bottom of the crank. Aluminum piston, so using a magnet was out of the question. So it looked like I had to tear it all apart anyways to shake the motor upside down.
But then I had an idea.
A sick, twisted, warped idea.
Yup.
Hung the whole bike upside down, blew the crank out with an air hose and extension tube
.
It worked
.
As a bonus, it made swapping the oil pump underneath dead easy.
BTW: this was done in the rear bed of my motorhome before it was converted to a rear garage instead of an open racecar hauler rear. I braced the roof cross-beams with a couple of 2x4s and then used winch straps to raise it. Oh, and the 5,000lb steel winch that was used to haul racecars up was still present and was part of what I used to lift the bike.
