Sunday, September 1, 2013

A Philosophical Question: Is an Airhead without any heads still an Airhead?

If you're confused by the title question, it might help for me to explain that the type of BMW motorcycle I have is often referred to as an "Airhead" since it's heads are air cooled.
This is the final result.  Let's see how we got there:

The first step is to remove the rockers.  This is after the exhaust rocker is off.

 And now the intake.

Once the rockers are off, the pushrods just slide right out.

After removing a couple more nuts, the head comes right off.  You can see my spotless combustion chamber here.

The piston looks just as filthy as everything else.

Miraculously, the gaskets came off fairly easily.


The other side was more of the same.  Here's that combustion chamber.

This was shockingly easy to disassemble.  It seems this engine's reputation for simplicity is well deserved.
The next step is to remove the cylinders and replace the piston rings.  I think my disassembly will stop there.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to send the cylinders and head to a machine shop to make sure they are alright and almost certainly have them worked on.


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