Chains

[3potjohn]

What you all need is a nice drive shaft motorcycle with a nice clunky gearbox............

[penman]

Gosh, I certainly seem to have woken up the "chain gang"! All I wanted was to know if I'd got the right size chain! A lot of useful information here though. I think I'm going to stick with chain saw oil for now, it seems to work for me, though I do like the idea of working some grease into the links. And yes, I do remember that big round tin you had to put on the cooker when your Mum was out - and I can't remember the name of it to save my life. Haven't seen it for years. The other thing guaranteed to upset domestic harmony was putting engine parts in the oven - usually part of some dubious cleaning process or for differential expansion to help reassembly. My mother was never really "into" that for some reason...

[MickeyMoto]

Used to boil up Linklyfe on a camping stove in the garage. Don't think the oven ever recovered from having a BMW gearbox in it and the bearings in the freezer.....

[penman]

Sorry, not quite finished with the chain saga! The Blue Book says adjust it for 25mm free play in the middle, and that's what I've been adjusting it to. However, my under-seat label gives a figure of 40mm, which is very slack indeed. If I set it to 40mm, the bottom run of the chain touches the swing arm pivot. At 25mm there's not a lot of clearance, but it's not actually touching. Tight chains are bad news but an inch or so works for most bikes I've come across, but 40mm? Is this another error on the under-seat label? I've tried the chain with the bike both on and off the stand and it makes very little difference - it's not easy to measure the chain slackness while sitting on the bike, but you can just about reach down and check it by feel and again, it doesn't feel a lot different.

[3potjohn]

I use around 1 inch or a finger joint.I think 40 mm is slack.Otherwise it'll likely touch the top of th swing arm as you have found.. OK I'll swap a clunky BMW drive shaft for a fully enclosed chaincase.Honda CD175 anyone?

John

[72degrees]

Used to boil up Linklyfe on a camping stove in the garage. Don't think the oven ever recovered from having a BMW gearbox in it and the bearings in the freezer.....

I once knocked the camping gas stove and Linklyfe over in the garage. It sets really quickly on a cold concrete surface. I seem to have got away with doing the Morini crankcase halves in the oven - but I had to wait until the coast was clear for a day.

I use Silkolene Titanium chain gel these days. Seems to do what it says on the tin.

I always check final chain tension off the stand and sitting on it if possible - but that's after a few modern MX based bikes where it can make a big difference.

[pedro]

Nothing to do with chains, but there has been a fair bit of talk about using the oven when the coast was clear, (which I'm sure we have all done) When I was a teenager a mate went to get his girlfriend on his bike, her Mum was just going out of the door and said "don't forget, you have got to clean the oven before you go out" Well, she searched and couldn't find the oven cleaner so they used Gunk instead, it seemed to do a fair job and so they went out, Mum returned, put the oven on and the kitchen was filled with foul smelling fumes, as I'm sure you can imagine. The girlfriend got grounded and the romance floundered, life's a bitch sometimes!

[Steve Brown]

Agree 40 mm would be too slack. I think it's best to sit on the bike applying as much of your body weight as you can, and then get the mate you asked round earlier to check the chain slack. Or better still, when feeling really anally retentive I find the tightest part of the chain run and remove the rear shock bottom bolts, then raise the swing arm till max tension is reached. This will be when all three centres are inline. i.e. Wheel spindle, swing arm spindle, and rear sprocket.

I spend a lot of time in the garage, me.

I even recently bought a Zanussi electric oven off ebay for a fiver and installed it in the garage. It turned out to be better nick than the one in our kitchen. So in place of complaints about strange smells in the kitchen after shopping trips I now have to fend off suggestions we have a complete new kitchen. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Or something like that, Karma maybe??

Oh yes, and O-ring chains are brill, X-ring even better. They do have a drag to them but amazingly it disappears when it gets warm. A decent make, racing 520 O-ring item can be lighter and less friction than a standard 530 chain. Scottoilers are luvverly too, my Camel project should be getting one once I know what space is left after the battery carrier is made-bigger battery needed for the electric start.