Dave Is Great

Thursday evening, five days to the start of the LDU.

After posting on the LDU WhatsApp group one of the other of this years challengers Dave, who co-owns the Redruth MoT Centre (the premier MoT garage in the Redruth/Pool/Cambourne area) suggested I visit the next day so we can pull apart the cooling system and see what's going on. I very gratefully accept and happily ride up there then next morning.

We take the bike apart, remove the radiator and thermostat. The radiator does allow water to pass through at a decent-ish flow rate, but you can see there is scale inside and many of the fins are caked in mud and other road debris.

The thermostat however is covered in this weird goo that seems to be made partly from silicone sealant, partly from sand and partly from bits of scale. Boiling it in a mug of water doesn't make it open either so it's obviously borked which will cause the overheating.

 

Getting to the thermostat was a challenge and required prising the twenty year old hoses off the unions without damaging anything. That was never going to happen but fortunately I'd bough some Chinese silicone hoses earlier in the year so after I'd checked that they were exactly the right hoses I chopped off the hoses so I didn't damage any of the metal fittings. I blanked off the carb heating circuit as it's of no use this time of year and I'll be dammed if I'm riding this bike around in the winter.

 

I put everything back together whilst leaving the thermostat out. I've ordered another one but will probably run the bike without one even if it turns up on time. Hopefully that should cure the problem with the coolant being able to make it's way around to the radiator now and lose heat, even at a standstill by the fan. After bidding many thanks to Dave and the other lovely people at the Redruth MoT Centre I headed home via Lanner and popped into Cornwall Kawasaki to tell the owner that I think I'd found the problem.

Which brings up back to the start of the previous post where I'm getting my shoes covered in coolant as the engine overheats again.


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