Left Hand Side Engine Case Exploded on Highway

[nd4spdbh]

Hey all. Had a nightmare day today, was riding around 135/140kmh on the Autobahn in Germany and out of nowhere the bike made a horrible sound, lost power and I was lucky enough to nurse it to the shoulder where I found that the left hand side top crank Case had a huge hole in it, bits are definitely missing and I have absolutely no idea the cause.

The bike was recovered and taken to a depot so I won't be able to get more photos until tomorrow, but had a scout on this forum to see if anyone else had a similar incident and had no luck.

The bikes a 2015 S10 with around 35k kms on the odo so I wouldn't have expected this level of catastrophic failure at this point in time. It's been well looked after and serviced well within the windows. I'd done about 800km today at the point when this happened.

Not sure what this post is for... Awareness? Venting? I dunno... It's 1am and I'm annoyed and stuck in Germany now instead of on a nice riding holiday

DUDE! Glad you are OK! Thats a hell of a grenade underneath you going off at speed! You are the first i have heard/seen that has had this happen.

Not trying to point fingers, but curious as to what oil and filter you were using at the time of this failure.

 

[thompn]

The oil was changed two days before this happened, funnily enough.

I was using Motul 5100 15W-50 oil & a K&N 204 oil filter. Same as I've been using ever since I've owned the bike for a couple years now.

 

[OldRider]

I would be sending some pictures of this to Yamaha before I tore it apart. Being as this is a super rare event, probably the only one that has ever happened, they may be interested in inspecting the engine and show you a little love. This was a mechanical failure that didn't have anything to do with oil, filters, rpm's or anything you could have done wrong and I think they would like to analyze it to see what happened. JMO

 

[thompn]

@OldRider I spoke with Yamaha and they are pretty disinterested in helping me. I definitely thought they would want to hear something about it since this seems to be a pretty rare mechanical failure but they basically told me to take it to a dealer and pay them to do an engine rebuild (which would be much more expensive than just buying a used engine and swapping). Shame, but I guess it's also an older bike now that they don't even make anymore.

 

[Fordf350]

Any further updates?

 

[thompn]

Hey all, no further updates on this case at the moment as life and work have gotten in the way recently. I'm hoping to get some time to work on the bike soon, and I'll post here as soon as I have more photos/vids/information!

 

[lund]

I'm curious on what kind of RPMs the engine was seeing at 135-140kms/hr and for how long?
This motor is more of a stroker, high RPMs long term will be the death of it. It ain't no sport bike with its short stroke high RPMs design.

 

[thompn]

I'm curious on what kind of RPMs the engine was seeing at 135-140kms/hr and for how long?
This motor is more of a stroker, high RPMs long term will be the death of it. It ain't no sport bike with its short stroke high RPMs design.

Usually at that sort of speed I'd have it sat around 4-5k RPMs. I rarely ride at high RPMs on this bike, so much so the "ECO" still shows up unless I'm accelerating. If I was sat in 4th gear with it at 10k RPMs then it woudn't be a question, I wouldn't expect this engine to suffer with this style of riding.

 

[scott123007]

I'm curious on what kind of RPMs the engine was seeing at 135-140kms/hr and for how long?
This motor is more of a stroker, high RPMs long term will be the death of it. It ain't no sport bike with its short stroke high RPMs design.

The rev limiter is well within the design limits of that engines' capability. You could run it damn near endlessly within those limits with no worries. That's why the redline on that engine is only half of what a short stroke sport bike might be.