3/05 – It’ll Be All Right In The End … 23-26 Jan 2025

Unable to do anything until the head had settled into place I used the morning to do a few chores. Chief amongst these was to have a zipper fitted to my tent bag, made out of on an old Zim BMX bike box cover. 

With the waiting over I got the top end finished, and in no time at all was calling Darryll to come and help put the engine back in the frame. Darryl thought that a spacer was needed on the top rear engine mounting bolt. It did indeed look as if one was missing, but a check of the parts catalogue revealed that this was not the case. However he insisted, and who was I to argue.

All the bits and pieces were replaced …

and then it was time to push the button…

Always an anxious moment after a rebuild, for me anyway case, this was a particularly anxious moment. There was no reason why the engine shouldn’t start, the question uppermost in my mind was whether it would be oil tight. It started as if it had only stopped yesterday. It ran smoothly and responded promptly to the throttle. But it was making a strange noise!

 Various possibilities were considered and we listened to each area in the engine using a screwdriver as a stethoscope trying to, at least, identify where the noise was coming from. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that the noise must be the valves hitting the rising pistons, due to the excessive amount taken of the head by the machine shop. 

This was confirmed when, on Sunday morning, the valve clearances had to be adjusted to an unacceptable extent to clear the “blockage” as the pistons reached the top of their stroke. 

The bike was unusable, so it seemed my odyssey was at an end. I could ship the bike home and visit the remaining Belfasts on hired bikes, or I could persevere and try to find a new head and fix it. Cylinder heads for this bike are not easy to come by and even if I did find one, it would probably need considerable work to get it fit to fit, so to speak. And given my recent experience with machine shops …..

Not one to give in easily, other solutions were considered; these essentially required increasing the thickness or number of the gaskets. None seemed practically feasible.

My next thought was to call on my friends on the SOHC4 forum, and on Mark Parrish in particular. Some of you may remember that Mark had helped me out on a couple of occasions during my America trip, and was always a font of knowledge. He had already offered to make me up a head;  If anyone could suggest a way forward it was Mark.

True to form, this walking encyclopaedia of all things SOHC4 gave me a solution. He just happened to have a cylinder head sitting on a shelf! This belonged to someone who had sent it in to be worked on and had then disappeared. He proved unreachable by phone, email or regular mail over a long period, so the head was looking for a new home.

The head was complete, had had any necessary machining done and was ready to be fitted. Mark offered to send it to me with a few parts required for the fitting.  His estimate was that I would arrived in 3-5 days. What a man! What a saviour!

Now it turns out that Helenna works for a courier company that handles a lot of the international shipments coming into NZ. If it came by the right shipper, she would be able to identify it as it came into the system, retrieve it and bring it home. What could be better?

So all I have to do now is get the engine out again, remove the offending head and wait for the replacement.

The moral of this story?  …… and if it’s not all right, it’s not the end!