I'm in the dunes and earlier in the week my bike ate the corner off the counter balancer woodruff key. I pulled the cover, and clutch. Replaced the key. Now a couple days later I've got another sheared key. Anyone have a permanent mod/fix. I searched the forum and found one guy who welded the gear to the balancer weight. Another said something about making sure it fits tight. I'm kinda leaning towards cutting a square key way in the shaft when I get home.
Iceracer or some of the other pros on here can probably tell you more than I can. I’ve never heard of this problem before.
I searched the forum and found a couple other people with the same problem. One guy welded the gear to the counter balancer weight. That seemed a rather incorrect way to solve the issue. I think the shaft has some wear but a new one is unavailable. If cutting the keyway won't work I'll have to try to find one on ebay or dig through my parts and try to find a better one. There could also be an underlying issue I haven't yet identified.
I would love to hear from Carl or Jerry but I'm sure they are both pretty busy this time of year.
Just tore it apart tonight. Same as when it happened before. Any ideas?
What torque was on the nut that holds it together. The majority of the problems with the counter balancer, ignition flywheel and nut on the right side end of the crank coming off is the nuts were not torque to spec and or the wrong washers were used under the nuts. Using an air wrench or one of the battery powered impact wrenches are not usually strong enough up to the torque spec.
The nut was torqued to 60lb-ft, the factory manual spec of 50.5 - 65.0
I'm inquiring about the balancer drive gear. Not the flywheel/Stator side.
It's on the clutch side and I have to take the clutch out just to access it.
Page 3-45 in a factory 87-92 manual and page 115 in Clymer.
I was digging around looking for another shaft and seems not to be an uncommon problem. Two parts motors I got off ebay, both show signs of having this problem.
On one, the counter balancer is spinning free. The other, someone turned the key around and put back together.
I put it back together with Loctite Retaining compound. Applied it to the mating surfaces of the gear and weight, as well as the shaft and key. Hopefully the extra retention strength will hold it enough that it won't shear another key.
I would have like the use Loctite 660 but didn't have any on hand; so I used the bearing retaining compound I had.
I will update if it fails but it won't get run hard enough to fail until I go back to the dunes.
Update for posterity:
Two years, two trips to the dunes and lots of hard riding, and the fix has worked.
It will suck to take apart but in the future I will be using Loctite on the shaft, key, and gear to help retain it better.
The extra hold I believe is helping the key not to become sheared off.