For those that are interested.....as always there are two sides to every story.....and you need to be aware of the history regarding the engine if you want to bid.
As far as I can tell from the ad, given that all I have to go on is the name of Steve, a phone number and the location, this bike was owned by someone who works for a very, very well known Honda dealer in the south of England.
He sent a pair of cylinders to us for a basic replate having only just bought bike and had it seize on him almost immediately in October last year. When the cylinders arrived they showed clear signs by the serial number stamps on them of having already being replated FIVE times. This was, and still is, a record in terms of the cylinders we have ever seen.
Several of the serial numbers were recognised as being done by a well known firm we refuse to deal because of quality control issues around the fact that they have been known to machine large amounts off the deck height when the cylinders are skimmed. Sure enough, when we checked the deck height the worst cylinder had a MASSIVE 1.5mm skimmed off it from standard due to the number of times it had already been replated by them. I can't remember what the other cylinder was, but I do remember them being different.
All of this was relayed to the customer BEFORE any work was done. He was strongly advised not have the worst cylinder replated again and to either buy a new one, or find a used cylinder that had not previously been replated to such an extent.
The customer ignored our advice and requested that we proceed with the replate on both cylinders. No tuning or machining was done by us to cylinders at all as he claims in the auction description, it was just a straight replate on both cylinders.
After returning the cylinders to the customer nothing further was heard until a month or so later when he called up to say that it had been rebuilt by a "well known two-stroke specialist" whose name I can't remember now, but we'd never heard of them and that it had then seized again almost immediately. The shop were claiming it was something we must have done wrong when the cylinders were replated and it was nothing to do with their rebuild, although at this point they hadn't actually stripped the bike down I don't think.
We asked that the cylinders be returned to us for examination so that we could see if there was indeed a problem with the replate that had been done. When we got the cylinders back there were no signs of any problems with the replating process itself and this was relayed back to the customer.
A number of conversations then occurred with the customer telling us what the shop were telling him (i.e it was our fault) and us relaying an answer back to the shop through the customer. It then ended up with the shop who had done the rebuild calling us and the guy there getting extremely irate on the phone claiming we had done the work wrong and made the bike seize. He claimed to have told the customer that cylinders couldn't even been replated to start with (so much for them being a two-stroke specialist as he told me he didn't know it was possible to replate cylinders) and therefore we had caused the seizeure and should pick up the bill.
I explained to him what the history on the cylinders was and that the customer had been advised not to use them, but had requested us to do the work anyway. The customer had neglected to tell any of this to the shop.
He then told me that when they had initially tried to rebuild the engine they had actually noticed that the piston crowns were hitting the cylinder heads. He said it was worse on one cylinder, but that they didn't know why. Not knowing anything about NSR's and not thinking to investigate any further they had just decided to work round this by using THREE BASE GASKETS on each cylinder to raise the deck height and allow enough room.
Unfortunately the shop obviously didn't realise why this was happening, nor did they know what the correct original deck height should have been and by only using three gaskets all they had done was increase the deck height back to standard.
Obviously when you rebuild an engine the deck height is standard plus one gasket, so the shop should actually have used four gaskets to get the correct deck height and compression back to Honda's specifications (as an aside we would never recommend running more than one gasket).
The shop, whilst not happy, did eventually accept our explanation that the equivalent of four base gaskets would have been needed to obtain the correct deck height and therefore compression. It was left that they would sort out the issues with the customer after accepting that we had told him of the potential for problems if the cylinders were re-used, but that he had not informed the shop of any of this prior to them doing the rebuild.
The cylinders were subsequently returned to the customer as he did not want them replated and he said he was going to buy new cylinders through his work. That was nearly a year ago now so I guess the bike has sat in its present state since the start of this year.
Jo
www.apexleisure.co.uk