THE WORST PART OF A MOTORBIKE ENGINE SWAP!

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Now, I bought this crashed Honda Blackbird, which was the fastest bike ever in the '9s, and it's fast enough Ferrari the Ferrari and faster than a McLaren P1 to put it in this Pagio Porter.

[00:00:13]Now, in the last couple episode, we've already completely stripped the bike down to take everything we need for an engine swap. And we've completely stripped the Pagio down as well, which means removing the engine, and we even made it into a pickup truck. Now, in the last video, we spent the entire video getting the motorbike engine mounted inside the Pajio, and we finally got the thing running for the first time.

[00:00:39]And today, we're doing what I believe is the hardest job of the entire series.

[00:00:46]Okay, we're back with the motorbike engine swap pajio and uh we're going to be doing one of the hardest tasks in my opinion today and it's the task that I struggled with the most with the Reliance to me weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and I still couldn't get it working properly and ultimately that was the problem that ended up me selling the car cuz I just couldn't get my head around this problem and it was how to make the shifter work. Uh, but we're a little bit clever now, and we're definitely not scared to bodgege some stuff. So, we're going to make the original shifter in the car work with the bike engine shifter. Now, it's going to be confusing. It's confusing for me. I've been spending around 20 minutes thinking, well, I'm going to do this. Uh, so it might work first time, it might not. So, let's show you what we got to do. Okay, so obviously this is the standard shifter in the PIO and it's a standard conventional 5-speed gearbox. One, two, three, four, five, and reverse, right?

[00:01:47]And it's a cable. So, it goes to this cable here. So, originally, this would go onto the end of the gearbox and it would go 1 2 3 4, you know, five. It goes back and forth like that. Now, this is completely different to how a gearbox on a motorbike works. Now, the shifter on the motorbike engine is right down the bottom, right next to the sprocket.

[00:02:10]So, this is the shifter on a motorbike.

[00:02:13]Now, basically, it's just a bit of a rod which actually attaches to the spline on here. On a motorbike, you have what they call one down, five up, which means first gear, one is down. So after that five up which means one down and then second gear, third gear, fourth gear, fifth gear. Now that is what they call a sequential gearbox, which is why another reason why a load of people like doing bike engine swaps because to put a sequential gearbox into a car engine, you're talking a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of fabrication. bike engines come with them all in one package, which is what makes them so sick. Uh, so yes, this PJ will have a sequential gearbox after it's done. But the problem is we what we've got to think we've got to fabricate is we need to turn a traditional H pattern gear linkage into a sequential gearbox. So, we're going to break it down on how we're actually going to do that. First and foremost, what we need to figure out what do we actually need? We don't need left and right anymore. We don't need left and right. All we need is forward and back. Now, we have to convert this forward and back movement cuz the cable's going to be like this into an upward and down. Now, how are we going to convert a forward and back into an up and down? Now, this is where it gets confusing. This might be not the prettiest thing in the world, but look at the rest of the [ __ ] van. Are we bothered? Nah. Is it gonna work?

[00:03:53]I hope so. So, I've never done this before. But here is my thought. Now, the system I'm going to go with is what they call a bell crank. And it's quite a simple idea, but putting into practice when you've got limited space can be a little bit more difficult. Now, the way I'm going to describe this most simply is I'm going to use a square like this.

[00:04:13]Now, say you have a square like this.

[00:04:15]Okay. Now, you want to choose a pivot point, which we're going to use. is the pivot point is this bottom left. Now you can split that into two different rotations. This one up here is going forward and back, right? That's going forward and back. This axis is doing what? Up or down and up. So we can convert axises from forward and back to up and down. And that is what we're going to use on this. But we've got to make it first. The plan is to use the original shifter cable and we can mount it somewhere here using this. And then that's we're going to have our forward and back. From there, we're going to have a bar coming down onto the shift lever.

[00:05:09]And when I push this rod down, down a gear. And when we pull it up, we're going to come up a gear. I don't expect to get this banger on the first time because we need to mount a hell of a lot of different things in a hell of a lot of different places. So, first and foremost, we're going to get some three or four mil steel and we're going to make an L bracket for our bell crank.

[00:05:33]Now, you can buy bell cranks online, but I want this done today. And I think it's always good practice to do everything yourself. Now, I've no idea how big I want this bell crank. So, I'm going to make it oversized for the time being, and we can chop it down worst case scenario. So, I'm just going to make an L bracket like this out of 4 mil steel so it's nice and strong. Now, it is looking a little bit messy at the minute, but when it works, we can tidy it up. The first thing we're going to do is drill a hole in the corner, and that's going to be our pivot point. So, now we have our L-shaped bracket. You can kind of see what we're going to be doing. So, we're going to need to mount this somewhere probably like here. So, if we can bolt this to this frame, not too tight, loose enough so it moves.

[00:06:16]Now, what you can see is as we pull this one forward, this one will go down, right? And as we pull this one back, this one is going to come up. So, now we've converted a horizontal axis into a vertical access axis. Need to find a way to bolt this somewhere. Now, I think here is a good location cuz we're somewhat in line with the shifter cable and we're not too far off the shifter on the bike. Now, I found this bracket just lying around in one of my boxes. It's something off a Ford. I'm not sure what it is, but it's going to be nice and strong. It's a good shape, and it's already got a hole there where we can loosely nut and bolt our uh bell crank.

[00:06:55]So, all we're going to do is put in the right position, and we're going to firstly just tack this into place onto the frame.

[00:07:03]Now, we need a way to mount this onto there because obviously we need this bit solid. Now, all of this is alley or rubber. Now, it would be good if we could make some kind of pushing bracket to go around here, but I think that's just going to take long. Now, I found this bracket just randomly in one of my boxes. And when I push that up, it fits beautifully against that nut, which is obviously steel. So, we can just weld this bracket to that nut. We've got some bolts there.

[00:07:34]We can bolt it through there. And then we're going to have a solid cable.

[00:07:45]So, we've got the bracket on there, and it's going to be bolted down somewhere like that. But before I start drilling holes that we're not going to use, uh, all I'm going to do is just do a couple of tacks over here. And then when it's all working uh and stuff, we can just cut those tacks off and drill a hole and nut and bolt it.

[00:08:03]And then now, as you can see, we have a strong forward and backward movement from the shifter. Now, I have a lot of cars that always have problems with them, and fixing it can be a right pain in the ass, especially when you've got things old and they're pre-OBBD. Now, this thing obviously doesn't have OBD.

[00:08:21]This thing obviously doesn't have OBD either. Now, when you're fixing cars, it's always good to have as much help as you can possibly get, and OBD2 does give you that. But the thing that allows you to do that allows you to use Carly. Now, Carly is an OBD2 scanner, and it's a mobile mechanic. So, this thing will plug straight into your OBD and you can read and clear codes, but not only that, you can actually look into live data. It allows you to do hot functions and it actually allows you to code in added features as well. So, this car has actually come into the garage where I share unit with with an engine management light and we're going to try and fix it with Kylie. So, we're going to plug Cari into the OBD2 port. We're going to tell Kylie what vehicle it is and what year and we're going to do a full health check. Now, this is going to scan every single ECU and body control module it can access in the entire vehicle. As you can see, we've actually got five engine issues here. So, we've got particulate filter restriction, exhaust gas temperature circuit, an O2 heater circuit as well. We now know that there's obviously something to do with the exhaust emissions in the car. First code is particulate filter restriction.

[00:09:27]So, it's very obvious that on this vehicle, the DPF is clogged up. Now, there's one thing which stands out for Carly, and that's you can do live data and coding. Now, we're not this is this is not my car, so we're not going to go into the code and ECU, but you can see here what I could do to my BMW X5. There was a hundreds and hundreds of different things. I could have the boot auto closing in, auto opening. I can have change the lighting. I can change something in I can change things in the iDrive. It was absolutely crazy. So, instead of carrying around two or 3,000 scanners with you, you can carry around this tiny little thing. In fact, I have one in every single one of my cars, especially when I'm going abroad, which means you don't have to drive around scared out of your skin with an engine management light, not knowing what it is. So, if you want to try out Carly, there'll be a link on the screen somewhere and it will give you a nice little discount to give you peace of mind when you're driving around in your cars. So, we need to convert well this into something which can bolt onto here. So, we could probably use a little bit of rod. And we're going to keep this as simple as possible. All I'm going to do is just tack the end of that rod onto the end of the shifter cable, which originally did have a bush in there, but it's steel and we want to get this done. So, let's just weld it.

[00:10:44]Now, it's kind of making sense. So, now we need to figure out what angle we want that. We kind of want that straight. 90° 90°. And it's going to be even each way then. So, we're going to make a mark here. Now, we're not going to chop obviously, we can't weld that to here.

[00:10:59]We need it to be uh on on a joint like this. So, we need to drill a hole and ideally in a flat bit of metal so that when this goes forward, it can stay like this. Otherwise, as well, it's going to try and rotate on itself. So, we need to drill this uh and either pin it or not and bolt, but just loosely. Now, we obviously don't want to drill through this um a we want it to be a flat bit of metal. So, we're probably going to get that at 90°.

[00:11:27]Going to chop this here. And then we're going to weld a flat bit of steel onto the end of this. That way, we can nut and bolt it through there. I think that's going to be the easiest way.

[00:11:43]Now, in my little special box, I found this clamp, which I'm never going to use. And as you can see, it's got two flat pieces of thick steel with pre-drilled holes. So, we're going to cut this off the clamp and we're going to use them. And as you can see, we're going to mount these to the end of the rod like this. And this is going to give us a nice flat bit of steel to bolt onto our bell crank. So, just to make sure it all works, we're going to tack it in place for the time being. Now, where we do this mounting point is very important. The closer we put this to the pivot point, we're going to have more angular gain, which means the rod's going to move further. But the further we drill the hole away like this, the lighter it's going to feel and the easier it's going to shift. So I'm going to drill two holes so we can choose that later on. Right after nut and bolting it, you can see what we're going to be doing. So let's do let's pull a shifter. Let's see what how much movement we get. Loads of movement. Look at that. You can see how that now translates to a up and down.

[00:12:42]Now, you can actually hear the bell crank hitting the tubular frame. So, it probably wants to go even more than that. So, let's put that theory into practice and let's swap it around to the top one and see the difference in angular gain. See, that's actually less throw up there. And as you can hear, it's no longer hitting that frame. So, you get a lot less angle from bolting it further away from the pivot point.

[00:13:05]So, our forward and back movement.

[00:13:08]And so the plan is now we need to do a rod to this up to this. Now obviously that is aluminum so we can't weld anything to it. We don't want to be doing that anyway. We want a a rotation. So we're going to take this arm off totally. And luckily that is actually quite a good size to drill through. So, we're just going to put a hole through there and we can nut and bolt one side of the rod and then do the exact same thing to here as did here. Weld a flat bit on and put the rod up there. The only problem is you can see it's not straight down. It's over there at an angle. We will have the prop shaft here as well. So, we are going to have to be somewhat considerate of that. So, we might have to do a bit of an S bar. So, come down and then bend and then bend over again. So, let's take this off and let's drill a hole in that and we'll go from there. Once you undo the bolt holding it onto the spline, you can just pull off the shifter depending on how long it's been on there cuz it might be a little bit tight. So, I just had a thought instead of drilling through the center bit of the um shifter, whatever you call it.

[00:14:17]Obviously, where this where the foot thing would be there, that's I've just pulled that off. And it probably be easier just to utilize this. And then instead of just, you know, drilling a hole through this, we can just slide that over there. Hopefully that hole is the same size as that. If not, I'll drill it out a little bit. Cut this end off. And then what we can do then is once that's on, we can just put a little hole through there and then put a split pin through it.

[00:14:43]Perfect. Look at that. And now we know that bracket slides over. Well, we can tack it to a piece of rod. We can install a shifter back on the bike. And we can put it down to see if it's going to work. You can see that's actually working really well down there. All we got to do is just put a little bit of a bend in it here. Sits flat. So right now we're not sitting flat on the metal. So to make sure the shifter is nice and secure on there, we're going to install it onto our rod and just mark where a little hole needs to go. And then with that little hole, we can install a split pin.

[00:15:14]And that's going to stop it from moving off the rod. Now to put a bend in this, all I'm going to do is just strap it to a vise and just use the muscles that God gave me. And as you can see, the bend in that is perfect. It's away from the prop shaft, and it's sitting flat on our bell crank. So, what we're going to do is just mark the correct length as we did with the first rod, cut it off, and weld a flat bit of steel on the end so we can bolt it through the bell crank.

[00:15:42]Okay, so it is all linked up now, and it should Well, hopefully it works. Let's try it. Woohoo.

[00:15:55]So, as you can see and hear there, it's going up gears fine, but it's getting a little bit stuck trying to go down the gears. So, we need to have a look of what is going on there. It's working coming up a gear, which is good news.

[00:16:06]That's better. But to go Yeah, we just not got enough travel going down. The potential might be that it's not in neutral and we've put it in a position where it's not in neutral. So, if we're not perfectly in neutral on the gear stick on the car, we're going to have more throw forward than we are backwards.

[00:16:28]So, we want it like here. Right now, the cable's not in the middle. It's too far towards forward. So, when we're trying to pull it forward, we've not got enough leverage. So, we need to just play around with neutral to make sure neutral is right in the middle between first and forward. So, right now, we're a little bit off. So, we can do that by adjusting that lower bottom arm. We can bring it down or higher. So, I'm going have a play around and just see if I can get neutral right in the middle. Uh and then uh I'll come back to you. All right, guys. I've done it. So, it's changing gear really easy now.

[00:17:02]Really easy. So, first of all, I had to move this back. So, I'm not going to be able to nut and bolt it anymore, but I'm not bothered. So, I can just weld that straight to the frame. Now, moving that forward has kind of brung the neutral back a little bit. So it means I've got the same throw forward and the same throw back now. And what I had to do was I had to change this over to there from there. So what's happening now is that I've got the short lever arm here which is forcing this to now go longer. So putting that further out it means it's got more throw. So when I go forward there's going to be way more throw on that arm. So, I need to just put a little bit more of a bend in that arm to get that done. And I think now we're done. Ow. I just sat on something really sharp. Oh, good job. It wasn't in my [ __ ] Just off camera, I've just gone and welded everything up properly, so it's nice and strong. Now, annoyingly, I was just looking through the boxes over there because obviously we've just been using normal nuts and bolts, which aren't going to work uh because they're going to work their way loose. So, we need to use a uh a nylon nut, which means you can get it tight enough to, you know, stay where it is, but then it won't loosen itself off. Um, and I've just come across this in that box. How annoy that is. Literally, we could have just used this one and it would have looked 10 times neater. Look at that. Wow. Annoying. But it is what it is. We made our own. Now, we're going to make this look a little bit neater.

[00:18:33]Going to smooth off the edges. Smooth it all up. Get a get a grinder on there.

[00:18:38]Smooth it up. take off these sharp edges and give it a bit of paint. Make it look a little bit nicer. I'm going to clean up some of the welves. We're not going to paint it all just yet. We might need to make some changes later on. So, until it's fully working and running, we're going to leave it. But what we can do is we can finish off the rest of them engine mounts. When Amy was here, we we just carried on, you know, getting the wiring to make it run and make it make it a bit of a better video. But, we do need to make up the bottom engine mounts cuz right now the engine can move around, which is not great news. So, we need to get the get the box section out and start welding up just something on that bottom engine mount. Now, just smoothing off the sharp edges can make something look 10 times better. Now, I did go and paint it, but it was still drying and I forgot to show you all when it was getting painted. So, just imagine it black. All right. Okay. So, we need to finish off the bottom engine mount.

[00:19:23]So, as you can see right now, it's only bolted to the top. But the original bike engine on the bike frame, it sits through this one and this one. Now, we've got two really long bolts that came off this. One of them had a massive spacer on. So, we need to utilize these bolts and do an engine frame. Now, I'm not going to do both cuz I just think it's overkill for what we're going to be doing. So, we're not going to do both.

[00:19:50]We need to decide if we're going to do this bottom one or if we're going to go to the top knot. If we're going to go to the bottom one, we'll do something like that. So, straight to there, then right up to the chassis leg, or are we going to go to the top one and come across like that? It's probably stronger to go to the bottom one. But if we do some the way we want to do it, if we go to these bottom engine mounts, the engine is never going to come out cuz right now, we want to drop it out from the bottom and that would just never work. So, let's just do what we were going to do originally to the top one to the top of the chassis leg. It'll be fine. For extra strength, we can tie it in to the top to the top bar just for extra strength, but let's just do that. So, we're going to get our 3 mil by 3 mil steel tube and we're going to make a mark of how long it needs to be to slide it in between the engine and the chassis leg. And then when it slides inside, I can make a mark of exactly where I need to drill for it to go through the engine mount on the engine. Now, I've cut an angle at the end of the box frame so it sits up against the chassis leg nice and true. And once we've got this side done, we can start doing the exact same thing to the other side. And then we can whack through the bolt and see where they're both sitting. And as you can see, we got a fair amount of overhang on the other side, and a lot of it is uh an actual shoulder, which isn't going to work.

[00:21:09]Now, they did come with the spacers original on the bike, but it's just a little bit too long. So, we're going to cut that spacer down just by a few cm just so it's going to take up the rest of that shoulder. And after tightening the bolt down, we now know where our cross frame is going to be sitting on the chassis lathe. So, we can give it a good clean with the flapping wheel getting ready to weld it fully in place.

[00:21:48]And then that is pretty much it. The engine can't flex here because we've got top chassis leg holding the top engine in and this side to the chassis leg. So, I was thinking about even just adding in some strengthening bits here, but I genuinely don't really think it needs it. Uh it can't really flex cuz it's all tied into the chassis. Now, in a perfect world, it would be good to tie in these lower engine mounts, but for what we're doing, I don't really think it's worth it. Uh because if we do that then we're gonna it's gonna we're gonna have to make some stupid complicated design where we're gonna have to unbolt it or the or the engine's never going to come out. So I think what we're going to do is we're only going to be doing some [ __ ] donuts and some crazy stuff with it to be honest. We're not going to be doing any 200 mph runs or getting emoted or anything. So I think for what for what we want it'll do it's fine. It's more than strong enough. Now as you can see this bike has been on its side and we've got a big crack in a stat cover there. Now I've got Airtech agreed they were going to weld it up. So we need to get this off and take it to them.

[00:22:49]Actually put some oil in it and properly run it up because they can't run it up so far. So it's got no bloody oil and we can't put any oil in it cuz the starter covers got a big crack in it. So I properly want to get this thing running, warmed up and make sure it runs good. So we need to take off the starter cover and it's a bunch of 8 mm. Once those are off, you can just pull it out. Now, be careful here because there is a floating gear and this is basically what what it uses to start the bike. And with this off, we can take it down to Airtech to get welded. Now, if you've not heard of Airtech, you've probably been living under a rock. You've definitely seen cars running their intercoolers. They make parts for absolutely everything.

[00:23:29]Oil coolers, intercoolers, radiators, exhaust, shifters. They make so much stuff here and they all do it in house which makes them kings of welding up aluminum. So anything like this I always ask them if they can if they can help and they of course always say yes. So we're going to be welding this. We're going to be putting a lot of heat through it. So first of all we're going to move the statter. I think that's what they call in motorbike. Basically like the alternator. Now Mark is the guy who's going to be doing this for me. And he said how nice do you want it? Do you want it looking OEM or do you want it just hold oil? And I said, "Just so it holds oil. I don't want you guys taking up a full day doing this." And Mark actually smashed this out in about 15 minutes. So, first of all, it's just going to clean off all the paint. So, it's back to raw aluminum. Then, there was actually a load of deep scratches from where the bike's been on its side, and uh he actually wanted to remove those so it looked a lot nicer. So, thanks, Mark. So, the plan is to just basically weld a patch over the top using some sheet alley. So, first of all, he measures what kind of patch that we need, and he's just making some small adjustments just so it fits exactly where it needs to fit without getting in any of the way, especially of the bolt holes. Now, it's nice to see he uses the same approach as what I've been doing when I'm welding up cars. You make small tacks where the metal fits, and then that allows you to manipulate the metal, uh, in this case with a tiny little bit of a hammer just to join the grooves and the curves of what you're welding to.

[00:24:56]And after around five minutes, literally five minutes of welding, we have something that looks like this, which is absolutely perfect for what we want.

[00:25:04]It's fixed. It's took five minutes and it's not going to leak any oil. That's all we got time for. We've done pretty good today. We've got it fully welded in, welded to the chassis frame, and we've done the hardest thing, which is the shifter. Now, we've got a bit of a problem to convert this to a prop shaft. the company who make them have gone bust and they said that the earliest they can get replacements in is the end of May. Now, that's really annoying because that's the one thing we need to make it drive.

[00:25:32]Um, and we got to wait till the end of May. Uh, I'm going to keep pestering and pestering and pestering them and hopefully can get it sooner, but they seem pretty confident on end of May earliest. Now, it's a bit of a pain in the ass cuz that's the only way we can actually get the thing driving. So, in the meantime, we'll have to just uh, you know, spend a little time making it neater and getting all the wiring so that when the prop thing is here, we can whack it on and go. But, we can't even get the prop shaft made until we've got that flange. So, it's a bit annoying. We got to keep waiting. But, this is not going to be driving as fast as we wanted it to be driving, but it is what it is.

[00:26:08]This is the life of cars. We all know it very well. It happens to you guys, and it happens to me as well. So, love you all. Almost to the next video.