Repairing broken aluminium, a brief how-to.

[Suzuki mad]

Didn't think about time certing the whole?

[mike-s]

Looked into it, couldn't find anyone with the kit to do it at the cost of time & materials and the cost of buying a kit was frankly obscene.

[mike-s]

Redone. This time i jiggled the sparkplug about to get more alloy in between it and the pan and amazingly it worked. However it was a right bastard to remove it and i had to resort to using a rattle gun to do so. But the mating surface has been made totally level (another reason i put a lot of extra metal on the surface so i had enough wiggleroom to be able to adjust the surface with a file), tested as oilproof and the pan is back on and everything is working again. Now begins the process of putting all the crap back on, pesky fairings .

[mike-s]

Does accidentally dropping the sump plug in used oil and only making a half hearted effort at wiping the oil off before putting a few practice runs of the thread in & out of the new threads count? oh wait, yes, yes it does

But the oil did come out of the thread closer to black than brown now you mention it. I also made sure i washed out the threads and then used compressed air to clean out any of the remaining fragments from the bedding in.

And as a note of amusement i accidentally tightened the oil pan up while forgetting to make 100% sure that there weren't any obstructions between the pan and the sump. I got one of those soft metal wire retaining doodads caught between the two and only noticed it where when i saw about 50ml (2 ounces) of oil on the driptray. I undid the pan but unfortunately not enough, before pulling the doodad out and pulled out part of the gasket .

Fortunately the gasket has some extra paper inside the metal edge to help the gasket retain it's shape and i was able to tidy up the broken bit of gasket and then cut a bit of the extra gasket to the same exact shape and use some permatex form-a-gasket (that stuff is fantastic!) to seal any remaining gap and hold it in-place while the pan was tightened up. This beats using a piece of gasket paper i have sitting here to try and redo the entire gasket (not possible as there are some metal inserts where the high pressure overflow goes) or buy a new one & have to wait as waiting sucks and a partial replacement with different paper has no guarantee that it will tighten down to a uniform thickness with the removed segment of gasket, and potentially leave another point for leaks to happen.

[mike-s]

yes, yes, lets stick with that.