We were helping a friend. No good deed goes unpunished. Long story short we were trying to remove the inner cam bearing with a Harbor freight puller and broke the tip off of one of the jaws, which of course fell in behind the bearing.

There doesn't seem to be enough clearance for this part to make it's way to the bottom of the case where we could fish it out with a magnet.

Does anyone have any ideas other than splitting the cases?

 

Shop Vac?

 

Turn the bike upside down and use a cow magnet on surgical tubing you can get the magnet @ a feed store

 

Maybe a plumbers camera would help you see were its at.

 

if you do like post#3 post some pics I got to see this. see if u can get it with a thin refrigerator magnet those flexible ones. stop use in harbor fright crap

 

If I understand what you're saying correctly the broken off piece might still be behind the bearing you were trying to remove, sort of held in place by the flywheel? (It's hard sometimes to understand things via the Internet. Much easier if you're standing there scratching your heads at the same time.) If so, I would approach the problem like this:

1) Get another puller and carefully remove the bearing. Once it's out, use a magnet or picker or whatever works to get the broken off piece out of the bearing cavity. I'm assuming this is a TC engine.

2) If that's a no-go, then I'd try taking off the cam cover, cam support plate and cams, and the oil pump. Obviously depending on your set-up I'd have to remove a few other things, but the goal is to get the oil pump out so the hole where the pick-up tubes fit is open.

3) I'd then block the bike up so it's leaning over to the right, and flush out the engine with kerosene or varsol or whatever you have. You'll need to put some sort of filter over your catch pan so you can see when the broken piece comes out. The more you can flow through there the better, so if you can remove the engine from the frame and do this whole thing over a parts washer so much the better.

I've flushed metal shavings from engines before, but I've haven't yet encountered your exact situation. I believe you stand a good chance of succeeding if you work carefully. Let me know how it works out if you get the chance.

 

thanks for the replies, even the one about turning the bike upside down, we already thought of that. We split the cases wasn't as bad as I thought because we already a lot of stuff stripped because we're doing base and head gaskets and an EV27 cam. We found the nasty little bugger when the cases came apart, right where I thought it would be, between the right case and the flywheel. looked like it should have fallen through but I guess not.

All of this was after replacing the shift rod that is the second part placed in the tranny at the factory. It was stripped and was the cause of this whole project.
So when that was done we decided to paint the cylinders black do the new gaskets, then I remembered I had an EV27 that wasn't being used.

So I'll let ya know how it alll turns out when we get it running again.

 

All's well that ends well. :-)