Captains Log....why must everything be a test? Every job seems to be a battle of wills, who will win, who will retreat, who will throw in the towel and run home to mommy? Not me, not today buddy!
So, where was I? Oh yeah, my oil leak from hell. Not that it’s all that big , but dang is it persistent! My last entry I had found and ordered on eBay an OEM NOS spacer that I intended to install. I did my homework, I got the factory part number and made sure I ordered the right part, check , check, and double check!
Well it arrived and I was not impressed. First of all it was very rough looking, it hadn’t been stored well and had light surface rust that would have to be removed and polished, but then my eye picked up a discrepancy. It looked to be a tiny bit narrower than my original. So I measured it and it is.
Now the seal catches this spacer right at the edge and I really didn’t have any spare width to give up. So I’m not going to use it. And by this point I’m starting to get tired of this particular problem , so I look around and thought , I’ve got everything I need to do the RTV repair, I’m going in!
Here’s how I went about it. First I snuck in to my wife’s supply of Q-tips, shhhhh, and I spent a stupid amount of time cleaning oil and grease residue from the splined shaft and the bearing inner race, first with acetone then the final squeaky clean using electrical contact cleaner.
I also gave my old spacer the same cleaning. Then I applied a thin bead of Permatex black RTV right at the juncture of the splines and the inner race, I also smeared RTV in the splines , using a wooden coffee stirring stick.
I didn’t take photos of this because I was trying to move fast. Next I slid the spacer in and pushed it tight up to the inner race and squirted a tiny bit more RTV into the splines to fill that void. Then slid the sprocket onto the splines
And a thin smear of RTV on the backside of a new lock washer and spun the nut on, just all hand tight for now and called it a day. I wanted to give the RTV some time to set up before really torquing it down.
That was all yesterday. Today I went out and finished tightening everything up, reinstalled my chain, side cover back on, and Bobs your uncle!
I know that there were a lot of different opinions regarding how to go about this fix. After way too much dithering, this is what I did. For better or worse, my call, I’ll own it.
Kirk out!