A month since I last updated, largely consisting of banging my head against a wall.
Our billet crank has turned into a frustration-monster!
Dave, who is making it needed to outsource rough-grind, balance, nitride and final grind. His normal place, Farndon Engineering, were overbooked. We needed somewhere with a Schou-grinder - which can do stroke-correction.
Called around, Gosnays in Essex said they could do it all in 2 weeks, so Dave took it there straight away. But a week in, they'd only done the rough-grind. They then proceeded to place as many obstacles in our path as they could think of! It became clear that they were farming-out the balancing and the nitriding. The balance was problematic, it needed about a pound of metal adding to the counterweights or a pound off the journal area.
This was going to have to be sent off to another place to get done. They wanted to drill & insert carbide slugs.
The bloke at Gosnays was a real PITA and wouldn't put us in touch with the balancer. We finally got him to pass our number on to him to call us back. Which he did. Seemed a lot more helpful. Wish I'd got his number.
I told him we could do the work over the Easter weekend and get it back to him for Tuesday. But The crank was already with this other firm, and they were shut for the weekend so we'd have to wait till Tuesday to get it back.
Tuesday came and the Gosnays-jerk called. Apparently this 3rd firm could do it by the end of the week and it'd cost us £600!!! Told him we could do it instead, (David sourced some carbide slugs) but he didn't want to know. So we arranged to pay for the rough grind and get it back.
Gosnays have proved to be totally unhelpful. Probably OK for regrinding a truck crank, but hopeless if you need someone to work with you.
Dave didn't get it back till Thursday. He's got another balancer, but we learned on Monday he was going to take 3 weeks.
Tuesday I drove & got the crank & paid Dave, and dropped it off to Basset-Down (one of the best known UK balancers) who would balance it for early next week. Then it'll be straight round to Cambridge Rebores who agreed to final-grind it the same day.
We're not bothering with the nitriding now; no time.
A complete clusterfuck. And an object lesson in the timewasting effect of outsourcing! Each time it goes to another party for work costs about 4 days extra even if they cant do it.
We have to get the bike finished, tested, dyno'd and at the shippers by May 28th. I'm not optimistic and this crap has pissed me off totally with the whole project.
But were locked into an unstoppable trainride now. A train that might well crash & burn.
