MAINTENANCE CORNER
Merv and I have agreed that our particular Vessel units are each over 40 years old. If you didn’t have an impact driver or the screw head was already a bit rounded then an effective ‘bodge’ to get the screw out was to use some grinding paste on the tip of your screwdriver. This paste is designed to bed the exhaust and inlet valves into the valve seat when reconditioning an engine. It is very ‘gritty’ which makes it ideal to help the screwdriver head bite into the screw head. Many years down the track I learned that it wasn’t necessarily the poor quality metal of the screws in these Japanese bikes that was the problem. The screws they were using were manufactured to the ‘Japanese Industry Standard’ and required a JIS screwdriver to remove them properly. The screw head design is slightly different to a standard Phillips head. I do not remember that JIS screwdrivers were ever available in Australia back in the 1970s so we all just cursed the quality of the screws. The following link explains it all far better than I can. Click link below and be enlightened: htt ps : / / w w w. m o to rc yc l e . co m /a s k- m o anything/difference-between-japanese-jisphillips.html
DECEMBER 2020
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