Round and round we go...

I went for a walk on Carn Marth with my mum and on the way home popped into the rather nice people at Cornwall Kawasaki in Lanner and spoke to one of their talented mechanics Adam. He's rebuilt the ZX6R's gearbox for me a while ago and I very much respect his knowledge and experience. I asked him about the gaskets (11060) that live behind the disc on the wheels mounting face, they're £23.38 for the pair, and more importantly almost certainly No Longer Available*. As this is being done to a strict budget every penny spent has to be justified. His opinion was that the gaskets are there to retard dissimilar metal corrosion between the steel of the disc and alu of the wheel. So, as long as I got both faces of the hub and disc perfectly clean and I accepted that corrosion would start to occur, then in this instance it should be fine to bolt the discs directly to the wheel hub.

That evening I thought it would just take me half an hour to clean up the faces and get the discs bolted on.

What, you never been wrong before?

 

After a significant number of hours involving razorblades, brake cleaner, toothbrushes and finally the brass brush in a Dremel I finally got all the old gasket material and corrosion off the hubs. I had to keep going round in circles with the blade then the brass brush until finally I'd got them completely clean, the old gasket was baked on solid in some places. Unfortunately the brass brush meant that I'd also removed the anodising on the mounting face which would just invite corrosion in and give it a nice cup of tea. I gave up at that point and went to bed somewhat annoyed...

This is what it looked like before I got the Dremel involved

 

Anyway, the next morning I went back up to Redruth and bought a bottle of ACF-50 from Opie Oils who very kindly gave me a good discount on it even before I told them what the bike was going to be used for. I used a small paintbrush to put the absolute minimum amount of ACF-50 onto the mount surface. I don't want any of the product being flung out when the wheel is turning, creeping down the discs and contaminating the pads. That would be suboptimal...


With that done the disc themselves got a thorough clean then the mounting bolts were run through a die a few times to get rid of the crusty old thread-lock. I carefully mounted the discs and torqued them incrementally to 27Nm as Mr Haynes instructed me to do with a little bit of new threadlock to make sure they stay there. I popped the wheel back in and used four new M8 stainless flanged bolts to retain the calipers. Couple more turns on the bottle jack underneath the engine to lift the front wheel clear of the workbench and give the wheel a spin to see if I've completely solved the front brake problems.

 

Still binds, discs are probably warped. Cock it!

Location: Penryn, UK

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