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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 11:35 am 
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DoubleJ wrote:
What is the US price from Honda dealer. I am heading south during the summer and could have a few sent to my buds house to pick up. Looks like early to mid July.
A search only turns up overseas suppliers though.

I have no idea but I've seen prices from $30 to $90 on the 'net. I was told that there was stock in the US by Honda HQ but that's about it. No dealer will have it in stock because they will never sell one (it's only used in the 125 & 150) so if you order one up it will be a short wait before they get it in.

If you're going there, and you want to 'future proof' yourself it might be an idea to pick one up. I suspect it's going to be a slow moving item though - only one other user on the Internet seems to have come across this issue so I'm guessing not too many people have been re-building their 125 engines, or, if they are, they are located in areas where they can get the bearing. It seems to be readily available in the UK and AUS so that might be one reason why the issue hasn't reared it's ugly head too much. For those people it's probably just a case of, 'aw shucks, now I have to go to the dealer' :laugh: as opposed to, 'aw shucks, now I have to buy a new crankshaft' :rolleyes:

I've ordered up two case bearings and I'll put one on the crank. I can see no difference between the two and for all I know whatever difference there might be could well be irrelevant. One thing's for sure, it's going to be a hell of a lot better then the bearings that were in there and all the Nachi bearings that Honda used have been replaced with NTN's :top:

For me, this job has taken two weeks too long already :biggrin: But, all this stuff is a learning experience. Now I know in the future exactly what bearings to get in ahead of time, including the problematic crank side bearing (if desired). Besides, the only way I'm going to find out if there's an issue with using the case side bearing on the crank is by trying it. It's either that or special order up a bearing and wait several weeks which I really don't want to do. I need my desk back and I really want to test out the new camshaft asap. I don't want to let too much time go by in case it needs to go back for re-working.

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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 6:07 pm 
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A friend of mine recently completed a 30-year rebuild of a Jawa....

"A what?", I hear you ask.

Jawa is an old and revered bike builder from central Europe in what eventually became Czechoslovakia - now simply the Czech Republic.
They are most famous for building Speedway bikes (that's real Speedway, not that watered-down mamby-pamby Nascar crud!), demon-fast two-stroke MX bikes and hordes of smokey 250 and 350cc two-stroke twins that become Eastern Europe's family minivan in the Communist era - when fitted with a sidecar. :blink:
In the 1950s, they were building GP-winning race bikes: 500 four-stroke twins. When the competition got faster, they added a second camshaft into the head, and won a bit more. :wacko:
Trouble is, they only built 9 of them; they were effectively the equal of today's CRT MotoGP bikes and each bike came with a spare engine. They had some features that other factories would miraculously "invent" decades later: square-section frame tubing, 16" front wheel, etc, etc.

(I'll get back on topic soon, promise!)

My friend Lofty saw one of these bikes being raced when he was a kid - (at age eight, he was already nearly 6 ft tall!) - in SOUTH AFRICA. One of a handful of men to win World championships on two wheels and four was a guy called Paddy Driver (great name for a racer!), who had one of these Jawas on the world (ie, European) championship series; because of the seasonal differences a lot of Euro bike (and car) racers came to compete in either Australia/New Zealand or South African racing series during the Euro winter with their machines, which had by now done a year's hard racing; they often sold the machines to cashed-up locals so that they had the money to buy the next year's machine in Europe for the following season.
A car or bike which had done well in the Euro summer would often be worth more than it had cost new, as 'modifications' were almost always needed to even ex-works machinery to keep them competitive, so a winner was likely to keep on winning. Thus there are still a lot of very interesting race cars & bikes in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
Paddy's Jawa was sold a few times and ended up with a young guy who was killed racing it in Cape Town; his heartbroken father dictated that the bike be broken up and buried in his garden....
Somehow, one of the engines (probably the "spare") turned up in a Norton frame; my friend Lofty acquired it as part-payment of a debt over 30 years ago. I first saw it as a lump of metal under his bench, covered in filings, dirt, butts and all the crap that accumulates under the bench of a guy who has 30 bikes, three kids and a demanding, bitchy, wife.
I last saw it almost exactly 20 years ago and it was in that same state.
Well, time moved on - and Lofty worked sporadically on the Jawa around a messy divorce, the death of a newborn, parents, friends, etc. Remember, he had only an engine.
There are just two other bikes known to exist in their entirity: one is in a museum in California (http://www.motosolvang.com/bike_pages/1 ... _Racer.htm), the other is in a private collection in Europe. Lofty went to California and took hundreds of photos - then got a friend who lived nearby to return to get detailed pictures as the work progressed.
Over the years, he had many, many letters - this was before e-mail or the internet, remember! - to and from both the museum and the Italian private owner.
He tracked down the house where the family of the young deceased racer had lived decades before - and unbelievably, got the permission of the current owners to dig up their lawn! He actually found a part of the square-section frame - which gave him it's exact wall-thickness & dimensions. Tubing that size is no longer available - but he manged to get a foundry to recreate several lengths of EXACTLY the same material - chemically and dimensionally.
In stripping the engine, he found that the crank shaft was bizarrely made (his home language is not English, my command of his home language is poor and his description was clouded by rum... :blush:) in that the con-rods and weights were not parallel - until it was all torqued up to EXACTLY the specified torque. For whatever reason - and I believe it was that once used and disassembled, they were irrevocably damaged - the bearings needed to be replaced.
Of course, they were no longer available either and were VERY specialised, so he contacted a Japanese bearing company to see if they could reproduce them.
At this point you should know that all records of who had bought the original nine bikes, all plans about their design, all the engineering rawings and many special dedicated jigs and tools were lost in a fire in the 1970s.....
Work on reproducing the frame, wheels, bodywork etc continued over many years: one of the quandries about restoring a racing machine is, what stage in its evolution do you aim to reproduce? These things evolved very quickly during a season, as the riders needed to race for money nearly every weekend just to survive and they needed to stay competitive: one of the first thjings to go was the 16" wheel, as racing tyres were hard to come by and the handling was frightening.
Interestingly, the owners of the two other bikes both gradually become less and less communicative as Lofty's project progressed - as it became apparent that yes, he WAS going to recreate a third bike, they obviously saw the rarity factor of theirs going down and were less willing to share information. Funny hw the minds of rich people work, isn't it?

Back to the bearings: eventually, a couple of years after he'd entrusted his only surviving bearings to the Japanese factory representative, he had a visit from the same man, who bowed, shook his hand, and passed over two new bearings.
Of course Lofty was ecstatic, but asked after the cost, fearing the worst.
The Japanese man smiled and said, "There is no charge; if there was, you couldn't pay it." They had had anything up to 400 different engineers working on those bearings for nearly 9 months, trying to figure out how the Czechs had made them, fifty years before! Apparently they had never seen anything like them, materially or design-wise - and struggled to recreate that level of technology, with all the modern facilities at their disposal!
Anyway, the engine was built, the bike was completed - but along the way, more tragedy struck my dearest friend - his 31-year-old daughter died in her sleep; he found her dead in her bed one morning. The rebuild of the Jawa is dedicated to her memory: Beverly Pretorious.
Remarkably, he was able to get the bike's original owner and racer, Paddy Driver, reunited with his old machine: it's now in a museum outside Johannesburg. http://www.jawaczownersclub.co.uk/image ... Paddy2.jpg

Read the story here: http://www.mctrader.com.au/news-and-rev ... 77372.aspx

So, specialist engine bearings aren't new - and I suspect that there's a reason the bearings on a CBR125R are different.....


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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 6:49 pm 
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Man, that's a lot of work to bring back a bike - and a lot of time and effort! I'm really impressed that the Japs went to that effort to make custom bearings for the bike. It's also kind of weird that the other two bike owners faded away from his efforts. No doubt they asked him for some bearings! :laugh:

It's a nice looking bike with quite the history behind it. I was going to say though, you really don't want to try welding magnesium :laugh: A fella with a shop close to mine tried that some years ago (thinking it was aluminum) and he got quite the surprise....

When I was younger I used to take magnesium Volkswagen engines from beetles and drill through them with a drill press. I'd collect the shavings, put them in a good tight container, add some salt peter and have some great fun! :biggrin: :ohmy:

Any idea how much horsepower that Jawa made or what it weighed? It's a great story and thanks for telling it!

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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 7:15 pm 
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It's all about the money - two rare bikes are worth a shed-load of money each ... when a third becomes available, the rarity value - and price - drops a little. Lofty says the Jawa is his retirement plan. I would imagine that well-heeled collectors have already been in touch.
There is actually another Jawa DOHC engine in some or other non-standard frame being raced in New Zealand. I guess it got there the same way this one made it to South Africa.
No idea about specs, sorry.
I'm a fire-fighter: we really don't want people messing around with home-grown pyrotechnics! About 4 months ago we had some fool blow his hand off with a home-made bomb, in front of his young boys.


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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 9:29 pm 
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Improper fusing will do that every time! :wacko: You ever notice how it's almost always a hand when someone is doing something like that?

People get too excited about the end result and don't often think about how to get there safely. Or, perhaps more accurately, they don't take the time to think safety because that takes all the danger and excitement out of it.

Now that I think about it, it's a lot like motorcycles :biggrin:

Are you an outdoor firefighter? I see that outdoor fires are becoming a really big deal down there due to the heat & dryness. In fact, I read reports that it's actually getting hotter over the years then it is normally and that makes me wonder if it's related to the reported hole in the ozone layer?

I wonder, can it get so hot that no-one can live there or that people are forced to move? Up here the hottest we ever really see is 38c and that's on the very best days of summer. More typical temps tend to be 25c. We consider 32c to be pretty warm out...

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PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2014 10:28 pm 
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"Outdoor firefighter"???
Is there any other kind?
Hell yeah - no way I'd go into a burning building!
Actually I'm doing a structures assessment (so, dealing with burning buildings) course tomorrow....
But most of what we do is respond to grass, forest and wild-fires, by dint of where we live - on 20 acres of virgin Aussie bush (yes, we do have kangaroos on the lawn! - and wallabies, echidnas and wombats too); our summers are dry, our winters wet (good bike-building weather!).
I'm part of the CFA - Country Fire Authority; 60,000 volunteers in 1200 local brigades, with about 5000 fire-fighting vehicles, mostly 3000 litre, all-wheel drive tankers. Given that the State of Victoria only has 5.5m people, it means that more than 1% of the entire population is an operational fire-fighter. My 16 year-old daughter recently passed her basics course and will be doing two or three extra skills each year for the next several years: she will learn how to handle HazMat incidents, car crashes, respond to electric & hybrid vehicle incidents (I give that one!), radio comms training, use a chainsaw properly, search & rescue, use Breathing Apparatus and once she has a driver's licence (age 18 here) she will get tuition in off-road driving, plus Crew and Strike Team leadership, etc, etc. She's already a First Aider.
Our expertise is such that we often travel to other states to lend a hand when they have a big incident and some of the career guys have been to France, Portugal, Greece, the USA and Chile to fight fires there.
Five years ago (Feb 2009), 173 people were killed on Black Saturday, 117 of them within 15km of our house; it was a 44 deg day with 50-80km/h winds blowing in from the desert interior and humidity levels down around 5-6%; a SWER power-line snapped in the wind about 40km from us and sparked a grassfire that spread like, well, like wildfire. The wind changed and pushed the fire away from us, but onto a few isolated communities.
In fact, in 3 weeks, about half our local brigade will be receiving medals for the work we did on that day - yep, 5 years later: WW1 was started and finished in less time! Over 4500 fire-fighters will receive the National Emergency Medal; I hope it'll be the last one I get!

The hole in the ozone layer is no myth - sunscreen, hats, personal hydration are all basic rules that kids learn as soon as they can walk.

What's too hot? Well, we're at the pretty-much the southern-most edge of mainland Australia, but people live all over - 90% of us live in about a dozen cities within 50km of the coast; the middle bit is pretty-much uninhabited desert, (the Outback) but it's a great place to ride motorcycles! It's not completely arid - when the Big Wet comes in, some places are cut off by inland seas for 3-4 weeks at a time. I guess it's a bit like your interior in Winter, or a woman in her sixties: everyone knows where it is, just no-one goes there without alcohol......
It's rare that we get down to freezing here - maybe ten days of the year there will be ice on the cars (and lawn!) but by 8.30am it's all gone; that said, in winter, we can go skiing within 200km of home, or diving in the bay, about 60km away.
Daytime temps range from 9-20 in winter and 22-45 in summer. A few years ago my wife & I were on a roadtrip and at one point, our bike's ambient air temp guages were reading 47 deg (we have Caponords); with a helmet & leathers on, that is pretty warm!


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PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 3:23 am 
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Not high jacking but thought this would interest to the readers... Norton frame and a Jawa liquid cooled motor that a friend races regularly, both at Barber and Mid Ohio. Has a #1 plate from Ohio a few years ago. When he can keep pistons in this bike it is a winner. This shot is just after melting one with a spring tune up at a local track here in Cayuga Ontario a couple years ago. As a matter of fact this week end is a vintage race get together on the track here. Cheers!


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PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 11:19 am 
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Precis wrote:
"Outdoor firefighter"???
Is there any other kind?
Hell yeah - no way I'd go into a burning building!
Actually I'm doing a structures assessment (so, dealing with burning buildings) course tomorrow....
But most of what we do is respond to grass, forest and wild-fires, by dint of where we live - on 20 acres of virgin Aussie bush (yes, we do have kangaroos on the lawn! - and wallabies, echidnas and wombats too); our summers are dry, our winters wet (good bike-building weather!).
I'm part of the CFA - Country Fire Authority; 60,000 volunteers in 1200 local brigades, with about 5000 fire-fighting vehicles, mostly 3000 litre, all-wheel drive tankers. Given that the State of Victoria only has 5.5m people, it means that more than 1% of the entire population is an operational fire-fighter.


That's unreal. We're pretty luck over here. We do get forest fires but usually they are not too close. When they do get out of hand we swat 'em with one of these...


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PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 11:25 am 
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They are the world's largest water bombers and they are based on a lake in nearby town that I grew up in. I used to spend entire summers on that lake sailing and those two water bombers would fly overtop (leaking water/gel) on my deck :laugh: They'd land close by to me and often come in right over top of me at low altitude and then drop down for their landing (when I was in their way).

They drop a lot of water :top: and between the two of them can usually get a handle on any fire size provided they have a nearby lake to refill from. They put out the california (?) fires a couple years back and numerous other large and sprawling fires. (in conjunction with everyone else of course, but when these guys drop a load it it hurts - the fire.) Drop enough loads and out it goes :laugh:

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PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 2:00 pm 
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mmiller wrote:
OK, here's the official scoop from Honda on the crankshaft bearing (part # 91002-KPP-901)

This bearing is not available to Canada. If you want to buy this bearing in Canada you can buy a new crankshaft, which comes with the bearing :rolleyes: That's one way to replace a bearing :laugh: Another would be to buy a new bike. That would also replace the bearing :laugh:

However, Honda does sell that bearing through US dealers so you can buy the bearing from them and have them send it up to Canada (assuming you find a dealer willing to do so).

Of course, this decision makes perfect sense given that the CBR125r is not sold in the USA. So, of course, that's why you would chose to sell the bearing to them and not to the country where the bikes are actually sold. :rolleyes: :blink: :unsure: :wacko:

So you have to go to a country that doesn't sell the CBR125, buy the CBR125r bearing from them, and then import that bearing into the country that does sell the CBR125r.

What I'm going to do is just use two of the case side crank bearings as they are dimensionally identical and Honda Canada can get them. If anyone else is doing this job I'd recommend just buying that crankshaft side bearing ahead of time from the US and then buying the other locally and sourcing the others from the aftermarket.

This way you'll have all your bearings in a row before you do the job :top:


Update: Honda HQ mentioned that the bearing is available in the USA and that there is stock there.....so...I just called down to Everett and asked them to run the number. The response? Does not exist.....

So, it's looking like Honda HQ was incorrect. No bearing in Canada or the USA..... :angry:

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