Hoony and the 85 Honda 500

[STW996]

Hoony old mate, had the thought pop into my head about you and that 500 of your's, well mate how is it going? more so, is it going? and if not when will it be going??

I don't like Days of our Lives on TV but this my friend is the closes us on the forum will get to it

I must admit with the problems I have had with the gear box on my 5hundy I am starting to know how you feel

Over to you old mate.

Shane

[Hoony]

Hey Shane , sorry to hear you have G/box problems, is this on you 500RE? what happened?

i am slowly getting all the bits i need for my bike, it made a shocking mess when the can let loose taking out the following, Barrell, both crancase halves, piston, crank, rod etc. i managed to get both cases & another crank from Ebay, i had a spare barrell, and i had to  get a new piston kit, rod kit bearings seals etc, lots of money and it scares me to think what its cost (bear in mind that it had a full rebuild before this).

it looks like i may have it back in the dirt in approx 3 weeks time as i am not really in the right mindset to spent some decent hours working on it yet as it still pisses me off when i go in the garage.

one good thing has been that Mrs Hoony has not given me any grief over the financial end of things at all, so that really helps!


Fill me in on your 5Hundy woes?

[Hoony]

Poor old Hoony. I'm feelin' ya pain Brother!
It's all a bit weird at the moment as apart from the H7 I'm doing (or therefore lack of doing), I don't have any engine intestines spread out over numerous benches which has been the 'norm in the past. It's all a bit surreal.
Put this one back together, park her up and get yaself a big European Evo 500 Hoonster!

You are probably right there Rossco, i should be riding Evo 45+ with the  guys, looks like a lot of fun, problem is i don't know which bike i would like to ride and i cannot justify another in the shed as i have 4 now that i don't ride enough. it could be worse i could be like Hilly i suppose, if he rode only one different bike every weekend by years end he would have ridden only each one twice maybe 3 times  every time i see him the collection has grown, i wish i had his passion these days.

[STW996]

Hoony, well mate you are a little worse off than me, but we put the 500 RE back together after it lunched a gearbox and sent brother Brett over the bars then pull down again and replaced selector that had been lunched only to have the thing not shift (would shift up ok but not down past 2nd without hitting netural, have bought 2 boxes from states to have as spares but in the mean time a hole engine come up for 600 buck Aussie so I jumped at it

Now have had a few problems with it outside all looked good but removed the barrel and the thing has been cold seized, have cleaned up piston and put back together ready to run but the electrics are RS so am pulling stator off my engine tonight to fit onto new donk and see if I can't breath some life into it.

Getting back to the 600 buck engine the guy used airfreight to sent it to me door to door ok little extra but still good buying   until it turned up and Australian agent screwed me for another 350 big ones to get it out of customs Well the old saying goes we all have one bad import story so hope this is mine

Talk soon old mate

Shane

[zorroz]

What happened with you motor Hoony? They are usually reliable the old 500's. My 500RE never had the motor apart in its 1st 20 years, but had low hours and finally put a new piston finally still runs strong. I've read alot of CR500riders with guys that have 20 year old motors that have never been apart. Win some lose some. (not like some modern 4 strokes!)

[Hoony]

G'day Shane,

sorry to hear the 500RE has been a problem mate. if you have electrics problems check the CDI as well as i went through lots of drama's to eventially find an intermittant CDI fault (ended up with an Ebay sourced one) bike was getting hard to start at first when cold, when it started it would then would run fine. this slowly became worse to the point it would not fire under compression (spark ok with plug out).

the gearbox woes sound expensive, what did it cost for spare gear clusters? hope you get it back in action soon.


Hi Frank,

problem with my 85' model was the tin can came loose and fractured on one crank half causing a a big mess taking out the crankcases with a hole the size of a fist at the bottom as well as another smaller hole between gearbox and crankshaft. also took out barrell skirt, piston etc.  yes they are usually very robust i agree. i think my crank shroud was damaged when the rod kit was replaced and this caused the damage.

[STW996]

Hey Hoony, well had the 5hundy out for a run at Tambo on the week end and it ran a treat. I bought a complete engine from the states and that is what I ran, the electrical was the stator on the engine I bought in (well we know why the engine was sold now!) but apart from that all is good.

Shane

[utsman]

Holy cow!!!

That sounds not nice indeed. Just curious, what do you mean by tin can Hoony?
That's about as bad as it gets eh.

I bet you were saying ,

Why meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Hoony]

heres a few shots of the "tin cans" on mid 80's CR Cranks.
1st shot is how they "should be" 2nd shot is when they fail and break away

[Hoony]

heres a shot of crank without the "tin can" and then the cans after i cut it off the crank.

[paul]

what are the cans for and are they the only bikes with them

[Hoony]

G'day Paul,

the cans are there to "take up the volume" without adding to the mass of the crankshaft.

[runutz698]

Also just to add to that I pulled a bike down the other day and any whole i.e. the gugen pin and a few other spots all had epoxy in them to take up space and make the bike go better. This is apperntly an old racing trick and use to make hell of a diffrence in power output. Just got to make sure it is something that if it was to fall out it would just get burnt up and spat out.

Tom

[Lozza]

That's a difficult one to explain Hoony,I've rebuild a few 'tin can' cranks and there is nothing special to them.As you can see the crankpin bore isn't close to the cover.I think a nylon block and a steel ring shrink fitted on the circumference would work a treat without upsetting the balance factor.
Case stuffing is a thing of the 70's all it does is lead to razor thin powerbands.

[runutz698]

If it is a 70's thing the bike in question is a watercooled twin 2-stroke Scott of much earlier vintage. So case stuffing must of been an old thing as of most the tricks much older than people know.

Tom