CBX250RS-E Engine Rebuild 15/12/2011

On Tuesday me and my Dad went to a place called Charnwood Restorations which mostly deals with fixing Royal Enfields - who better to have a look at the main bearings of a single cylinder engine eh? The very helpful mechanic said that lateral play (side to side) is not a big deal and it's only radial play (uppy downy) that I should be worried about, and basically the bearings were new and perfectly fine. I still don't like them, I find the wobbliness of it all to be terrible for new parts but with such a weird size (32x76x17.5mm) I have no choice and must use the correct Honda part 91001-KE5-018. Oh well, onwards and upwards! Today the house was empty so I laid down some newspaper and snuck it inside.. This is what I have:

Yes the connecting rod is now bright orange, no I don't know why. You can also see that SEP dutifully fitted the new rubber mounts and apparently didn't charge me for the pleasure, although they DID clean the gasket off the cases and charge me for that - I was never asked if I wanted this service, in fact it was never mentioned, but I'll go along with it as cleaning gasket off is a right 'mare. I've also decided to keep a record of just how large a money pit this turns out to be, to give others an idea of how much such a project will cost. The bill from SEP was £277.73 for a new "Big End" and rod kit, supplying a couple of new main bearings and cleaning the cases. The four rubber mounts cost almost exactly £70 including VAT but not delivery from CMSNL, so we're already up to £347.73 before we even start!

Anyway, first off is the gearbox. Happily this all seems fine and I kept it all together so it was simply a matter of slotting it all back together. This took quite a lot of faffing and head scratching but I finally ended up with this:

It looks a lot like it did when it came out, and all the slidey bits seem to slide like they should! It only took about 45 minutes to get to that stage..

A couple of things about this picture. For a start, the bobble on the star at the end of the drum operates the neutral light which I find a neat solution but it's little wonder they can't be trusted. But secondly is the state of the splines on the gear change shaft - a new shaft is at least £80 if I can get one at all. I could always weld it all together again like it used to be but the linkage also isn't in great condition with a large amount of play on its rose joint. The same item looks very similar on the newer CBF250 though..?

The other problem I have is bolts - the originals are mostly well on their way to being rounded, but the size of the flange is different to that of the "normal" M6 hex bolts with 8mm heads. A quote from Silvers suggests a price of around £70 just for new bolts! Oh what to do..