Articles & photos

Sometime you need a little luck with your Buell XB9 or XB12.

One of our customers with a Buell  XB9 with +/- 38000 km was in our workshop because he had a nasty sound in his gearbox.

We agreed to make it a winter job for him, as it was already the end of the riding season here in Europe.

Because opening the gearbox means for the Buell XB  a complete engine strip down, and he also wanted to perform some customizing and paint work,

we started working on the bike and took the Buell engine out.

 

We stripped the engine to get to the gear box, when we pulled the flywheels out the crank case we already noticed a failure waiting to happen,

the sprocket shaft bearing races where damaged and where starting to chew up the Sprocket shaft bearing.

 

outer bearing race

 

There was no indication that this was happening, no debris in the oil, and no strange sounds.

Sprocket shaft bearing

 

So our customer is lucky here, we needed to take the engine apart for the gearbox,  no further damage was done to the mechanical parts  

we replaced the inner race and outer race, and line lapped these to fit the new bearing.

 

sprocket shaft bearing inner race

 

We replaced the gearbox bearings, re-assembled the engine and it is waiting for the coated parts to get it back in the bike

We have seen this bearing failure more often latly, and would recommend you if you have the change to examine this bearing closely, when

the engine is opend. When you don't give this the right attention and when this is not noticed, the failure that could occure could become a catastrophic engine failure,and most off the engine parts would need replacement  when that happend.