Cannondaleriders

Time was tight on this one but we managed to make progress over the weekend. Bill made the 10 hour road trip for his engine build session so I figured he might be another serious Dale man. On a conservative budget he opted for a 432 with a ported head. He was pretty lucky as although the cams and pumps were destroyed by overtorqued cam caps the crank was still good. From the looks of it the quad is very low mileage. I will let Bill tell the background story.

We shortly had him on his knees taking relentless ridicule and harassment under the watchfull eye of my new engine build drill instructor.LOL

Lord help you if you don't get the crank plate seal in the first try. What a trooper.... we tried to break him but he soldiered on. Karen wanted to use the cattle prod to speed things up but like everything this weekend the batteries were dead.

Heres something we learned many years ago. Never put your engine breather on top of the engine and don't use louvers on a Dale. If you have an oil purge episode you just turned your radiator into a dirt collecting filter. It was very difficult to clean the packed in mud out of this one. Solvent, pressure wash, solvent, pressure wash, air gun, do it over again. I was thinking we were going to have to scrap it. What a mess.
Funny thing, you really couldn't tell with the louvers on it was so bad.

We got it installed yesterday and worked till about midnight to get it running.

It wasn't too tough to talk Bill into tossing his somewhat questionable exhaust for the last of my spare Ti headers. He needed to fab up some brackets, as the subframe ones were torn off.

Since he lives in Michigan and the trails are very narrow and lower speeds we opted for low cam timing to get the best low and midrange out of the 432. He also has the old style thottle body with the quick action bellcrank for super snappy response. We had no opportunity to do any type of tuning so it will have to run with a best guess generic rich map until we get it out on the trails later this summer. It still had some giddy up for some parking lot entertainment.

Speedfreak should be home from his trip sometime monday. I had fun as I always do whipping the rookie Dalers into shape and look forward to riding the trails systems you were talking about.

Good write-up John. The radiator issue is a little more common than you think. I had one here with a stock air box, that puked oil due to an internal engine leak overfilling the engine side and puking out the stock breather onto the radiator. The result due to riding in a sandy area was a cooked on mess that caused the motor to overheat to boot! Time for a John-boy inspired oil level indictor for all of the lazy guys out there who do not check their oil level often enough.

You know who this was right? The guy whose Ti header you just fixed that you are sending to me along with mine......

I had the same issue with mine after you rebuilt my motor. I had to drain the spar of oil by removing the hoses opposite the right footpeg. After puking oil and riding in very dusty conditions, I had created a super mortar in the radiator. I finally broke it loose with lots of simple green and lots of water pressure.