It's a beautiful day in Norfolk and after doing a lot of routine maintenance it's time for a quick run out to warm up the oil prior to changing it. We make a 20 mile round trip to Cromer to do some shopping.
On the way back we stop at home to drop off the contents of the panniers and find something interesting - leaving the bike running on the field stand reveals that it smokes on the field stand - and drips oil from the decompressor.
The reason is obvious when you think about it - the rocker box is drained down the pushrod tubes and on the field stand the whole rocker box is higher on the push rod side and will fill up with more oil than it would when standing vertically. Consequently oil goes down the valve guides and out of the decompressor...
The picture above is the giveaway to this theory - here the bike has been standing outside Morrisons for 10 minutes on the field stand but not running. There's barely a drop of oil on the ground and what there is is on the timing side. It comes from the magneto to chaincase connection I think.
Still, the decompressor shouldn't leak so we'll have to have a look at that yet again. One of the outstanding maintenance tasks is to check the head bolts and since the rocker boxes will have to come off to do that, we will check the decompressor then. I think a key issue is whether the main nut is square to the rocker box and is successfully making a seal there.
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