I feel your pain buddy... my old gs has made that noise for months now.... btw it no longer runs on the left cylinder.... I'm sad for you!

Austin

Clunk from the left bottom end: Goats syndrome?

That's what I am thinking ... after reading more ... I replied just reading the title the first time ...
Cool.
Srinath.

Goat's syndrome is essentially an alternator tearing itself to pieces, correct?  I'm planning on removing the left crankcase cover this weekend, I'll have an update then.

Quote from: KYGS500E on June 29, 2006, 05:26:17 AM
I feel your pain buddy... my old gs has made that noise for months now.... btw it no longer runs on the left cylinder.... I'm sad for you!

Austin

Hey Austin, have you figured out what's wrong with your bike?


scratch -- thanks for the info!

Quote from: WildBlue on June 30, 2006, 11:55:15 AM
Goat's syndrome is essentially an alternator tearing itself to pieces, correct?  I'm planning on removing the left crankcase cover this weekend, I'll have an update then.

Quote from: KYGS500E on June 29, 2006, 05:26:17 AM
I feel your pain buddy... my old gs has made that noise for months now.... btw it no longer runs on the left cylinder.... I'm sad for you!

Austin

Hey Austin, have you figured out what's wrong with your bike?


scratch -- thanks for the info!

Right ... that's the gist of it.
Cool.
Srinath.

Well, on Saturday I decided to remove the left crankcase cover as suggested here.  Everything in there looked pretty good actually, with no signs of the alternator wanting to fall apart.

The stator:



The rotor assembly (notice a small nick on the bottom magnet):



A closer look at that small damage on the bottom magnet:



So it seems like it isn't the alternator after all and she doesn't have goat's syndrome.  That small nick on the one magnet might need some patching, but I don't think it'd cause any of the symptoms that I have.

Checked all the bolts too, and they were solid on there.  I then grabbed the rotor with my hands and tried to shake it up and down to see if there was any play (potentially confirming a busted crankshaft bearing) and it didn't move at all.  There was some tiny play along the axis of rotation of the rotor (probably less than 1mm), but nothing that suggested any damage.  I couldn't really check the crankshaft balancer from there.

So even though there was no play in the crankshaft I suppose it could still be a bad bearing, or something wrong with the crankshaft balancer.  Anything else I can check before I have the shop tear down the engine?