TKO

I left off with a spark starved dnepr. I went to ebay for a points plate made with easily replaceable Chevrolet V8 points mounted on a dnepr friendly plate. $60 later, the parts were on their way.

Eventually I made my way out to the garage and installed the points plate, which fits nicely in place of the stock Russian piece of shit. So nicely that I again forgot to take pictures I guess. I was too excited to wait for the new coil to ship so I was hoping the old coil would work for a few days. I will never know if the plate would have worked with the old coil because when I tried to muscle the kick start, I realized the motor was siezed. Ahhhhhhhh!!!!

Next chapter, I partially remove the heads to break loose the pistons and see what happens. The engine spins but no life whatsoever. I remove the heads, cylinders, pistons. Uh oh. I can hardly believe this thing was running at all. The carbon and whatever else build up is pretty substantial. I did the kerosene test on the heads and both leaked like a sieve. I thought about cleaning them and hoping for a couple more months but decided I'll bite the bullet on the heads and build them to put on my new engine later.

Why is the front of my sidecar on the ground you ask???? Well, to remove the right head/cylinder, the sidecar has to be at least partially removed. Anyway, I take the heads to my friendly local machinist and ask him to do what he has to do with the valves/seats to give me some compression and see what he can do to clean up the ports on the flow bench. A day later I get the call to come see what he has found. He shows me the nicely cleaned heads, sticks a valve in it's guide, and asks me to feel guide/valve stem play. Not good. I need new valves, stems, seats, and seals. I did find a source online for valves with oversized stems that would allow me to save the guides but am awaiting a response to see if they have both the exhaust and intake available.

So there it is. I'll be installing the new coil soon, most likely under the gas tank since it won't fit under the front cover. I'm going to try honing the cylinders and replacing the rings since I'm building another engine soon enough that will be more reliable. I think the cylinder/piston clearances will still be tight enough to allow such step skipping. Judging by the condition it was in when previously running, it should purr like a kitten with clean, mildly out of tolerance parts. That is me, hoping.

Speaking of hoping, I hope to have some parts to the machinist in a week or two and maybe the dnepr will see the streets again mid to late September. Or October.

I will detail the rebuild process with words and pictures in my DNEPR how to blog when the time comes.