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Z1300 Engine Stand | ||
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Last Update 8/22/08
This shows how I built an engine stand to do a variety of common jobs one might need to do when you have a motor out of your bike. It's very difficult to work on these motors once it's out of the bike because it's so heavy and bulky and hard to deal with. If you need to pull the pan, just flipping the motor upside down can be a chore. Cleaning and painting an engine is a problem too if it's just laying on something like your floor or even your workbench. If you took it out to recondition the motor, you always want to paint it before you put it back and sometimes it might be nice if you could test run the motor before you put it back in.
I do all these things around my shop and I need an engine stand that works for all these functions. So I decided to start building something based around these priorities. I knew that I needed to be able to flip the motor upside down and to do that it needed to be balanced to some degree. When it was in the up or down position I wanted it to have a slight tendency to stay in whatever position it was in. However it bolted up I needed as much clearance as possible around the mounting points so I could paint it without leaving any substantial spots on the surface of the motor I couldn't get paint on.
If I was going to work on it there couldn't be any places that would interfere with disassembly. When it comes to test running the finished motor, I needed to be able to mount a radiator in front, hang a gas tank above and have a place to hang all my electrical pieces. There has to be room for some kind of exhaust system too. When you look at it that way, there's only so many ways to build something that versatile.
What you see in the following images is my first attempt to fit all of these parameters. One of the considerations it that this motor weighs about 320 lbs! Even on this stand when you go to flip it over it's a job! It would of been smart to use wheels that lock in place so the stand doesn't try to move around on you. I've got the front to back balance in the right spot but I still need a long prybar to get enough leverage to flip it over.
You have to realize that if you only weigh 180-200 lbs yourself and you're man-handling a 300lb chunk of metal it doesn't like to cooperate! As I progress, I'll get more pictures but the design I have right now seems to work pretty good, though it can be better. When it's upright, it seems like it's at a good height to stand there and work on it and basically it has to be that high anyway so when it's upside down it's not touching the floor. I've only got about 4 inches of clearance from the floor with this setup you see here. You wouldn't want it much closer to the floor anyway. My original idea was to have my stand-offs bolt right to the engine at that front mounting bolt hole, but when I started looking at it, there was no way to pivot from that point. You could swing a little one way or the other but not all the way upside down.
I guess if you try this at home you'll see what I mean. If someone else has a better design than this I'd love to see it. I welded it the way I did with the tubes open on the front and the rear so I could make some removable mounts to leave attached or take off as needed. On the front I may make a slide in mount to hold a car radiator. I'll go to a local salvage yard and buy any radiator I can find that has an inlet and outlet that is the same size as our radiator hoses. Hopefully I can find something in that hose size. If not, I'll have to come up with something to adapt, but I'm guessing there's probably a car or two that uses a small radiator hose like our bike and there may actually be quite a few.
I'll use some flex hoses or maybe they'll be some hoses at the auto parts that will have the right bends to help me get it hooked up. I'll make a mount, slide it in the front and when I need to remove the radiator, I can slide it right back off and set it aside. On the backside, I'll probably need a temporary bracket of some kind to slip in and give the exhaust some support at the rear. The only real problem with my first design is that a stock exhaust won't fit between the bottom engine bracket uprights the way I did it initially. To use a stock exhaust, that mounting bracket I've got bolted to the bottom of the motor now would probably have to be a few inches lower than it is and wider too. I really should of mounted an exhaust on it before I designed the lower bracket to see if I could accommodate the stock exhaust into my design.
I really wasn't thinking so much about using the stand to test run engines on as I was about using it to paint motors and to work on the motor when it's out of the bike. Most of your work can be done with the engine in the frame, but since I recondition bikes from time to time I figure I want as much flexibility in the stand as I can get. Still, it's a lot of work to try to run engines when they're out of the bike. We'll see how it goes and I may make some design changes. If so, I'll add to this page as things progress. What I have now I made out of 2" square tube in 12 gauge. The stand is kind of heavy but then again, so is the motor that's mounted to it. I don't think using 12 gauge material is over kill on something this big and heavy. david@kz1300.com
Ok, so here is my updated design. This is actually a stock 79' radiator and exhaust I have mounted to a Voyager engine. The radiator seems to hang there pretty good even without support. I just take my shop fan and blow air across this and it works fine. I strap my fuel tank setup to the leg and I can roll this whole thing around just as it is. Stand works perfect for testing engines! You can see I had to make some mods and re-weld the front brackets to make clearance to mount a stock exhaust and those are KZ down-pipes bolted to a ZN engine by the way.
I thought I was going to fabricate some exhaust off the back of these pipes but after running it like this I kind of like the way it sounds!
While this engine stand setup does work, the balance or the center point from top to bottom is not good and the engine is too hard to flip upside down. I really need to make a change and instead of making my mount fit off the bottom of the engine, I need to make something that will be more balanced. Other issue is I don't want to block the side covers. I want to be able to remove them with the engine on the stand. Not sure right now how I can accomplish that.
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