How did a paper towel get in my crank case?
August 19, 2010 5:29 PM   Subscribe

My motorcycle died recently. Eight miles after picking it up the shop where I had the carburetors serviced. They had it for over a month and presumable had the carbs off for a while. I took off the engine cover today and found paper towel chunks everywhere. The brown public restroom kind. Any idea how it got in there?

It's a 85 Yamaha Virago XV1000.

I've already ruled out them stuffing a paper towels into the carb boot, because there is no way a paper towel could have made it into the crank case that way.

Prior to the service I had driven the bike for a full season with no problems. I would think that if there was a paper towel in the crank case it would have become evident rather quickly...

I would like not to accuse the shop of breaking my bike if it was genuinely not their fault.
posted by BishopFistwick to Travel & Transportation (13 answers total)
 
When they take components off that leave open areas which really shouldn't have dust in them, people usually stuff rags or paper towels into the hole. Maybe they took something else off and plugged it, then forgot.

I can sort of imagine how it'd be vaguely possible for the paper to make it from the carb, but it seems less likely than any other scenario I can think of.
posted by cmoj at 5:34 PM on August 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


If they had the carbs off, it's possible they were stuffed down into the intake. The idea is to keep debris from making its way into the cylinders.

Of course, as you have found, if it doesn't get removed, it's made a mess.

I was taught to do this when I went to diesel mechanic school, and nearly every mechanic I have worked with has done this. It's been almost 2 decades since I've done that kind of work, so I don't know that it is current practice, but there it is.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 5:36 PM on August 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: except that there is no way for the paper towel to enter the crank case via the cylinder.
posted by BishopFistwick at 5:43 PM on August 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Which "engine cover" are you talking about? (i'm not familiar with the Virago)

I have heard of mice making nests in the exhaust and other (extremely) inconvenient places on vehicles.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 5:45 PM on August 19, 2010


Did they change the oil? Seems like the oil filter intake hole (don't know its proper name) might be a plausible avenue of entry...
posted by jon1270 at 6:08 PM on August 19, 2010


Response by poster: it's the left hand side crank case cover. There really isn't any way for anything to make it's way in there as far as animals are concerned.

They did not change the oil. I initially suspected that the oil filter fell apart, but it is completely intact.
posted by BishopFistwick at 6:12 PM on August 19, 2010


Have you asked the repair shop about this.

given that you've only put 8 miles on it since picking it up, the logical next move is to return it to them. It may not have been a good idea to pull the case cover off prior to doing that..but, what's done is done.
posted by HuronBob at 6:26 PM on August 19, 2010


Response by poster: I brought it back there the next morning and they told me that it would cost more to fix it than the bike is worth. I'm going back there tomorrow with some pictures and the chunks of paper towel I pulled out of the engine, I just wanted to make sure that it was their fault before I start flinging accusations around.
posted by BishopFistwick at 6:57 PM on August 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Seems pretty obvious it is the shop's fault irregardless of knowing the mechanism. Paper towels don't spontaneously appear in crank cases and I assume you'd remember stuffing some in there so excluding aliens and the worlds craziest vandal the shop put those towels there.
posted by Mitheral at 8:16 PM on August 19, 2010 [4 favorites]


True, there's no way for paper towels to travel from the carb to the crank case, but it shouldn't take a month to rebuild a 25 year old carb either. Is carb work all they were supposed to do? Maybe parts were temporarily taken from yours to get something else moving.
posted by gally99 at 9:19 PM on August 19, 2010


When you say your motorcycle died, how did it die? What are the symptoms?

I have never ever ever had any shop tell me it would cost more to fix than the bike/car/truck is worth. That's the sort of answer you give when you don't want to do the work.

The paper towels didn't magically appear there. If you didn't put them in, then the shop did.
posted by MonsieurBon at 9:19 PM on August 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: They couldn't find a replacement float. The XV1000 was only made for two years and Yamaha went with Hitachi carbs for that specific model. So I had to do the legwork and track down a replacement float which was ridiculously expensive, but I just wanted my bike back. What killed me was that they said they had the carbs off and on a dozen times trying different combinations of parts. It seems to me that if something isn't working, moving it to another location isn't going to make it work.

Before they determined a float was bad, they claimed to have taken care of the backfiring only to have made it way the hell worse.

They told me that it spun a rod bearing. I heard a chirping sound that I thought was rather odd and didn't strike me as an engine sound. So I pulled the clutch in to downshift and pull over and the bike stalled out on me. After that it ran really hard and wanted to die. So I put it in neutral and coasted to a garden center and left it there over night. The next day I came back to pick it up with my truck and it wouldn't start. After I brought it to the shop to have it checked out it started up and had a vicious knock.
posted by BishopFistwick at 10:07 PM on August 19, 2010


Definitely seems like the shop is at fault but it also seems like the shop is kind of shoddy. Which sucks because they're the only ones that might undo the damage for low or no cost.

But yeah, they are almost certainly responsible for the paper towels getting into the crank case. Convincing them of that is a whole other thing though.
posted by fenriq at 11:00 PM on August 19, 2010


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