Hitchcocks Forum

I thought this might interest some. It is not the first time I have encountered it and it probably wont be the last. It is an Indian Bullet 500 'classic' type crank with very bad runout and it was removed from a running engine, which vibrated. The original Indian main bearings are still intact, with some wear evident - hardly surprising - and they will be replaced with European ones when the crank has been dealt with and the bottom end reassembled. I know the Indian main bearings are not too well thought of, but trying to support and control a crank as bad as this would not help them to last very long and the engine will run much smoother once the crank is trued properly, without any balancing required ... https://youtu.be/Xe8pihqbeYA

Very Interesting well worth watching.

I have drive shafts bought new from india with 40 thou run out on the alt nut end, wondered why rotor kept fouling stator. Dont think indians dynamically balance crank assy, some bikes reasonable for a 500 single others would give a tuning fork a run flr the money.

Would think that is the old tooling and non existent quality control and new manufacturing and quality control for Himalayan etc. is sorted.I am an optimist.

Presumably how this kind of thing happens (inner race from a 500 bullet main).

I don’t know about the Himalayan or the Euro IV singles but the vibration on earlier UCE singles does vary a lot, irrespective of how the engine is run in. The fact that Hitchcock’s now sell the Carberry vibration reduction plate suggests that there is an issue. I fitted one to my C5; as expected it hasn’t changed my shaker into a dynamo and I firmly believe it’s all down to how accurately the bottom end was trued at the factory.

Thanks Paul MH for showing the video properly for us. Scotty, what you say doesn't surprise me, although I have always maintained balancing is less vital than truing for smooth [ish] running. Hold on to that optimism, Jamesy! Stinkwheel, that is just the sort of thing you can expect as a result of this problem. Rattlebattle, if you were to have a crank something like this trying to flail around inside an engine and then fitted what is really just an outrigger bearing to try and reduce vibrations, it might even put you on the road to a broken crankpin sooner or later! Regards to all, Paul.

Yes, I’m inclined to think it’s another form of snake oil; prior to all the hype about it on another forum I was unaware of any tendency of the UCE to wear out the bottom end prematurely. I’ve seen no threads on this at all; an Electra it isn’t. An answer to a question nobody actually asked? Also, a number of people have found that their miracle plate has not been machined accurately. (Well, it is made in India...). Mine has actually improved things to a noticeable extent and is accurate so for now I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It reminds me of the middle bearing in the old AMC twins. Reducing the flex inherent in two bearing designs like the Triumph using a middle bearing actually made the vibrations worse. The crank whipping in a Triumph wasn’t that harmful and they were way better than AMC twins at standing up to a thrashing, bearings notwithstanding. It seems to me that anything from India that requires skilled assembly is likely to fall short whereas hopefully the bikes made by robots on a modern automated assembly line are probably good ng to be on a par with any other make. We’ll see.

This may be of use:-

I have seen have mixed review about cranberry. but if our host is selling it .. then this might be real thing. not sure.