Ciao FAIL

On wednesday, i was bored, and still frustrated with not having fixed the leakage issue on the ciao, so Alex, Joel, Jimmy and I tore it apart again (I can get the whole engine out in about 7 minutes now, most of that is removing the pipe) And I was finally able to figure out what was going on. In addition to the Decomp valve still leaking quite a bit, It appeared that when I used the face mill on the cylinder, It cut unevenly where it caught on the edge of the broken off fin. I should have broken or ground that fin off to start with, but you live and learn, eh.

Back in the machine shop, I took the cylinder and lined it up in the lathe, clamping the cylinder skirt. I was in a bit of a hurry to finish it up, and forgot my rule about doing this sort of thing... you have to run a piston inside the skirt or it will break the skirt off. I just had to take a few .001's off, so i wasn't too concerned, but when i started up the mill, some boner had left the feed engaged and right away the tool ground into the face of the cylinder and did this:


What a buzzkill.

I also went ahead and took the head down a couple .001's, which was probably a bad idea because now the extra tall piston i made is hitting, so i'll have to machine that stupid thing down again.


Yeesh, look at that nasty decomp, no wonder it was leaking, carbon and gunk all over...


Oh well, thats mopeds, should have left well enough alone when I had the chance. It looks like the cylinder will be fine with the skirt broken off, but if it eats it, I'm on the lookout for a new stock vespa cylinder. Anybody got one they'd like to get rid of? I've got a parts grande lined up, but i'm pretty sure thats a 10mm pin bike, so i'd rather not back track and rebuild another whole engine.

The good news is, break-in appears to be going well. I was concerned about re-using the old rings, but i cleaned them up with a little sand paper, and re-honed, and it looks like they are sealing really well. Given the wierd compression issues, i was worried they hadn't sealed, but this pic says it all:


The transfers also seem to be pretty well matched, the burn pattern on the piston is a little bit dark, but i'm 99% sure thats because of the wicked air leak causing things to run a bit hot.


You can see on the piston the hot spot from the decomp valve leaking (also perhaps because of the wierd head shape around the decomp) and there is a big black mark where the head wasn't sealing that well. Hopefully cleaning the decomp again and fixing the sealing issue will take care of my shitty low-end and maybe even 'fix' the misfire situation.