The Weld Repair I DIDN'T Do..... Yet..... Maybe.....

this is a crankcase from a 2006 kx250 and it appears to have suffered a good old-fashioned chain failure which famously takes out everything in its path when it goes now a pro tip regular chain maintenance and replacement intervals will help avoid such problems resulting in costly repairs remember that oil and chains are cheaper than downtime for weld repairs but you already knew that now while i break apart this mess of two-part metallic poo i'll explain why i took this repair on i received a phone call a couple days ago from really nice guy who explained he found the shoddy repair done by the previous owner lurking underneath the chain guard now having discovered that he got a fast when pulled on him when he bought the bike he just wanted to get the repair done right and didn't care how much it costs because he just wants to get back out on the trails and ride so of course i encouraged him to drop it off here and nowhere else and said i'll have a look at it now these types of repairs are extremely common around here and i like doing them so it's not something that's usually terribly difficult to get done chipping away at gb weld is a little time consuming but it's not all that difficult i usually like to go after the big chunks first a screwdriver and a hammer does the trick portions of the jb weld that are bonded to the base metal are best tackled with some form of wire brush on this part a heavy knotted wire wheel on my grinder reached the more open areas while a wire cup on my drawer got into the hard to reach places now for those areas like bores and crevices and stuff like that they usually get removed chemically usually some brake parts cleaner will break it down however and caution if you do chemically remove epoxy with things like brake parts cleaner or anything of the like there are certain chemicals inside of them that will cause asphyxiation when they become heated up in other words they can quite literally kill you so make sure that you clean your part thoroughly before you actually go welding on it or find an alternative chemical solution to clean up the epoxy with or to chemically dissolve it so with everything cleaned up we can assess the damage and come up with a repair strategy if you look into this giant hole in the clutch release housing you'll see a pair of needle bearings if you look closely the bearing races are already damaged and they need to be removed anyway for the repair so we'll just replace them there is a seal on the back side of this not shown in the video but seals are relatively cheap it's probably not damaged or anything else like that it's probably not worn out but at the same time if you're taking all of this stuff apart you replace it anyway it only costs a couple of bucks the clutch release lever itself did get damaged when the chain snapped and it's sitting kind of tight with some pretty rough action it actually almost kind of looks bent but it's one of those things that we definitely have to look into replacing because it is in fact messed up my process to repair all of it will be similar to the r1 exhaust repair i did a while back where i machined a steel slug that matched the internal bore and build up the metal around the slug it's quick it's easy and it's accurate enough for these parts the area next to the clutch release housing can be built up in about 10 minutes now the trick i intend to use to keep the threads intact and properly located is by threading a stainless steel bolt into the existing hole and building up the metal around it i also used this trick in a transmission bolt hole video a while back so based on my experience this will probably be about 10 minutes worth of machining a slug roughly 20 minutes or so of welding and about 30 minutes for me to refinish it put it all back together grind it you know put the seals back in the bearings in all the rest of that good stuff so when you add all that up plus the 20 minutes of chipping away the farmer's glue we come to 1.35 hours worth of billable labor on this very honest very realistic now the total parts cost that we have here is 100.86 that's without markup so uh you can you can put markup on it but the way i see it on this one at least is i mean you're already getting a you know a bunch in labor the parts unless you've got a deal at the park shop you know you're i mean you're gonna pay the same price they do so just forward that cost on to there with tax with shipping with everything else like that this came out to 100.86 the total repair now is 235.86 this is a very realistic repair cost for something like this part but here's the problem and why this video is about a repair that i didn't do yet maybe this clutch release lever is back ordered everywhere which usually means discontinued after a lot of searching calling all the parts places i know and even a few buddies that own used parts yards a clutch release could not be found the option to remake the part or the pin from scratch did come up but we're facing two problems or at least i am the first one is admitting that i'm not a very good machinist so this is kind of out of the scope of ability that i have personally at least within my skill set right i would have to send that one out and of course that cost would just be forwarded off to the customer because i wouldn't mark that up i didn't do anything so you know not going to put any more money on it that's just kind of silly the second problem that we're running into this is a hardened pin as in a hardened surface it has to be heat treated or whatever the case is that is also way out of the scope of my ability so that would have to also be tacked on in order to get this job done so remaking the pin yeah it's possible but you know we're trying not to drive this cost too high we can look into other options here option b is to find a new or used crankcase sadly this is also discontinued and very hard to find used one could pop up today or a year from now so it's pretty much out of the question and also why it's here attempting to get a repair done on it so what do we do well here's how i chose to deal with this situation and i'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot of people in the comments who voiced their opinion about how they run their business and you know how everybody should have done it this way this is what i would have done and all this others i've see i see so much crap like this it's like you know screw the customer that kind of mentality i don't do that and i'll tell you exactly why i got 20 minutes into chipping away that jb weld and i have about an hour to an hour and a half we'll just call it an hour and a half or so of looking up part numbers and chasing this stuff down only to find out that we can't really get a hold of all of it right a lot of back and forth with the customer whatever the case is i could easily bill two hours of my time because it's compensatory right i could have been doing something else but this is what i was doing instead i chose to give the customer all of the part numbers he would like to see if he can source them himself and the customer went back with the part how much did i build for that nothing and why is that well here's the thing all of this is just a little bit of labor out of my time yeah i could have been doing something else i could have been sitting around watching tv i could have been doing a lot of things right but i was helping this guy out and this is still a potential repair if the repair comes back i'll get the money because i did the repair right we'll bill it for then but if it doesn't come back or whatever the case is there's something good that comes out of this one he's gonna know where he can take something in the future which is very honest and he'll get the job done exactly the way he needs to two he might tell some friends and you know what i'm okay with that because that's more money in the future that's stuff that will keep my business afloat for only a couple hours of my time i could have spent a lot more money in advertising just to take the same chance so in the meantime that's all i've got for this episode hopefully i'll actually get to be able to make this repair and if it does come back and i get to knock it out or whatever the case is then off we go i'll show you how it was done i want to thank you guys for watching as always see you guys on the next episode you

Channel: The Fabrication Series

Views: 150,045

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Id: BJf8F44HMu8

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021