Long time gone, restoring a 1988/89 Western (EZGO)

[cart around]

I got lucky. The center bolt of my steering wheel puller happened to be 3/4 fine thread.

Grab the crankshaft and try to move it up and down. That will tell you if it needs bearings.

[JoeBleaux]

Originally Posted by cart around

I got lucky. The center bolt of my steering wheel puller happened to be 3/4 fine thread.

Grab the crankshaft and try to move it up and down. That will tell you if it needs bearings.

Hey, you're just a short 27 hours away (about 3 hours actually in the air to Pittsburgh, 24 hours in 3-4 airports...) - can we borrow it? (GRIN)

Thus far, it appears the bearings are ok, but we'll know more when the flywheel and clutch are off. As the pics show, the cart seems to be fairly low usage and run time and with decent maintenance but we really don't know. We do know it sat up for several years, so the seals may have simply deteriorated from age and sitting, plus it went from a very dry climate to a soaking wet climate (CO to MS/LA Gulf Coast). Things like this really show how such different climates affect, well, everything. We have another friend who is much more familiar with 2 cycle stuff (but not this engine or even carts in particular - dirt bikes and the like), so we are adding him as an auxiliary member to what we jokingly call the skunk works.

[JoeBleaux]

OK, we finally found a 2" long 3/4" fine-thread bolt and spend a few minutes with that this evening. However, the "hydraulic pop-off" didn't work. There is port hole in the clutch receptacle bore that allowed the oil to go into the clutch housing. So we took a short piece of round bar that was slightly shorter than than the retaining bolt and placed that in the hole and used the 3/4" bolt to remove the clutch. And then cleaned up the mess from the oil. We had to use studs and connector nuts with 80mm 6mm bolts to pull the flywheel as we could not find any 4"-ish 6mm bolts. That worked like a charm. I'll post more details in a couple of day, along with some more pics. We are still sorting out the picture thing. We may start using a GoPro.

[JoeBleaux]

A not-really-an-update update. As I mentioned early on, this is a "as time permits" project and my buddy and I have been pretty busy over the last week or two, so nothing new. I just wanted to let folks interested know that I hadn't just abandoned the thread. We'll probably do a bit this weekend and I'll post details if we do.