Seal Puller

 The Rat Turd had developed another leak and although it's a rat, I won't tolerate a leaking motorcycle. In this case it was the shift shaft seal. A new seal was still available from Kawasaki, now all I had to do was remove the old seal. Larger seals are easy to remove with a screwdriver or seal puller but small seals can be a challenge.

 I decided to modify a screwdriver into a small seal puller. Oh I'm sure there's a fancy tool in the Snap-On catalog but this works on a budget.

 Just slip the tool under the seal lip and pry. Care must be taken not to scratch the sealing surface of the shaft.

  So big deal. Who gives a crap about a leaky seal? Well I'm writing this to help myself work something out. The cover that goes on this left side of the engine supports that shift shaft. You can kinda see the shiny area on the shaft in the above picture. I don't want to run with the cover. The exposed transmission without the cover looks more mechanical and appealing to me.

 Here is the unpainted exposed transmission.  I needed to make a new support for the shift shaft but didn't want to dink around measuring out and creating a fancy bracket.

 Here you see the new bushing I drilled out to fit over the shift shaft. That raised boss with threaded hole to the left is where the bushing will be supported from. So in true cheap ass greasy shop rag form, I just bolted a slug to the raised boss then laid a piece of tubing on top of those two and welded it all together. Simple and very rat-like.

 This leads me to my next project. I want to add a foot shifter to the hiway peg. I thought about a hand shifter but right now I'm thinking foot. Having recently made a header that moves all the exhaust system to the other side of the bike, I now have plenty of room for this project. I won't go into details as I don't have any idea yet how I am going to do this but I can say that I have a small collection of free lawn mower parts I want to use.

End.