I got tired of cleaning carburetors. The chemicals, the gunk, soaking and prodding with tiny wires, it’s flat wore me down, down, down, man. I left the worst parts to soak for a while and drifted off to try and remove a broken screw on the right side intake port. Starting with a near-center center punch I figured to drill the thing out and maybe get a remover deal to grab the threaded bit stuck in the head.
I drilled the screw in stages until I could try my handy-dandy left-hand drill/remover tool.
The broken screw is small, like a 4mm, maybe a 6mm and there’s not a lot of room for error. The little extractor tool had a good bite into the screw but the thing would not budge. One thing you don’t want to do is break off an easy out because they are super hard material. There’s no drilling the things and you are well and truly screwed if you manage to get the hole full of busted tool steel. I eased off. Sometimes you make more progress doing nothing rather than doing the wrong thing.
Admitting defeat today I decided to step away from the cylinder head and give the hole a few more days soaking with penetrating oil now that I can get to the backside of the situation. In addition to soaking I’ll heat-cycle the aluminum with a 1500-watt heat gun in the hopes of disrupting the steel screw/aluminum head interface. I guess the worse case would be to drill the thing all the way out and use a thread repair insert but I really don’t want to do that. That would be true hackery.
On a happier note the order from Z1 Enterprises showed up! I thought $39 for this right side throttle/switch was more than reasonable. The thing looks like factory (I assume as Zed was missing this part) complete with a cryptic Off-PO-On switch that will reveal its purpose once I get the beast powered up.
A complete Z1 Enterprises wiring harness (4 looms total) for $139 looks very nice and will eliminate chasing electrical issues with the madly cut and melted harness that came on the bike. Fresh multi pin plugs and wiring colors that match the original will make rigging the thing easy as pie. The purists or 100-point fanatics will probably bitch that the clear insulator over the connections is not the exact same shade as the 1975 original. Take my advice, those 100-point guys are obsessive-compulsive jerks and you don’t want to hang around them. In this photo the old harness is the one with blue tape indicating what connects to that point.
Included in the order was an O-ring for the re-sized drain plug and the washer that goes between the oil filter and the oil filter spring. With these parts I managed to get the bottom of the engine buttoned up. Progress has been fitful but Zed is getting closer. I’m really jonesing for concrete so I may have to pull off Zed and pour a yard to keep my soul on ice.
One more thing…if you’d like a handy index to all of the Zed’s Not Dead articles, we’ve started an index for this and future resurrections. You can get to it here, or from the links on any ExhaustNotes.us page.