[SteveFord]

So, while the people here have been debating the merits of Oxygen Free Copper versus braided silver wiring I've been out in the garage, hitting stuff with a hammer and slobbing grease around.
It's what I do best.

A few years back I purchased a 2006 Triumph 955i Tiger on Christmas Eve from a fellow in NYC as a little present for being such a good boy. 
At least someday thinks so.  That would be me.
Here it is the day I got it.


It only had 8,000 miles on it and once I got it home and washed and waxed it and checked the tire pressure and swiped a battery from another bike and filled up the tank and went for a ride I discovered the oil was a quart low.  I called the guy a moron, added oil and proceeded to put a few miles on it.  Fuel mileage was REALLY bad so I pulled the air filter and uh oh, it's full of red sand from Florida.  Fun Boy had been using it as a giant dirt bike down there.  I wonder...
Wonder no more, oil consumption was way up there and every once in a while it would be smoking away during start up and the exhaust was black with oily soot.
A compression check showed 100/200/180 with cylinder Number One only going up to 140 with oil down the spark plug hole.  At least I found the problem to fix at a later date.
At 32,000 miles the idle speed dropped and then it cut out and didn't want to restart. 
Time for the Magic Hammer.

[SteveFord]

Off comes the everything in sight and it's down to it's skivvies.




And it looks like the oil consumption problems aren't confined to just the evil Cylinder One.


The evil Cylinder Numero Uno sucked in a bunch of sand just like I suspected.





and the compression rings were lined up.

[SteveFord]

Triumph parts are criminally over priced (probably worse than Ferrari) so I picked up a NOS gasket kit (which somebody had ripped off a bunch of crush washers that I needed), a used piston and liner and had to bite the bullet and order two new piston pin circlips and 3 sets of rings.  $280 to my door for just the rings and two circlips - ouch!
I stripped and cleaned the heads, lapped the valves, put on new valve guide seals and got to put on 24 tiny little valve keepers.  Fun with grease, indeed.



Then I ran a Flex Hone through all three cylinder liners and installed the replacement piston and 3 sets of rings.

[SteveFord]

On with the head, the valve shim buckets, the cams, the timing chain, the fuel rail, the exhaust, the radiator, the oil cooler, the this, the that.
New plugs, cleaned and reoiled the K&N, new coolant, new filter, new oil, hooked up the wiring, hooked up the tank, went to start it up and off with the tank, reseat the radiator cap, reseat the ignition coil wiring and success!
Ran it up to operating temperature at around 2-3000 RPM, let it cool over night and then ring break in:
fast idle for warm up, ride gently until oil is up to temperature and then a dozen full throttle blasts in 3rd and 4th gear in fairly rapid succession. 
Go home, coolant does another puke while it finds its level and Molly Dog supervises.



I've put around 500 miles on it since it went back together and oil consumption is either negligible or non existent, the coolant has settled down, it sounds much, much better than when I got it all those miles ago, it moves along pretty good and fuel mileage is around 48 MPG which sure beats what it was doing.

And that concludes my time lapse motor refresh. 
It was certainly much easier doing it in front of the laptop than it was out in the garage during the recent heat wave!

[FullRangeMan]

Nice bike, the space between each cylinder are minimal incredible.

[SteveFord]

Yeah, they really squeeze stuff in there.
Not the kind of thing I'd want to have to do too often.

Overall, a really well made product.  It's like riding a La-Z-Boy chair.
Some cost cutting stuff, too, but that's easily enough fixed. 
And now, it's back to my original plan of putting 100,000 miles on this one.

[S Clark]

Sumthin' tells me this ain't your first rodeo. 

[SteveFord]

Nope!
 
First time inside the bowels of a Triumph triple motor, though, so it was read the manual, do Step 597, read the manual, do Step 598...
Next time I have to screw around inside one it'll go a lot faster although these are the kind of things you need to have the manual in front of you as everything is a real specific procedure to keep from warping or snapping things. 

[ArthurDent]

Nice ride Steve. Nice work as well. Brings back memories of an old Renault R-8 I had to perform similar surgery on back in the day. In that case though it was restricted to cylinder sleeve/ piston work. Valve work gets trickier with all those fiddlybits. A good service manual is always a mechanics best friend. Enjoy the fruits of your work.  JD 

[mcgsxr]

Takes me back ~20 years when I was racing 2 strokes.  Replacing the pistons and rings was a common occurrence, vs waiting for the engine to have problems.

Loved that there were no valves, it was open and shut for me.

Great work!

[FullRangeMan]

Wonder where two strokes engines could be today, too bad California laws forced they out.