Building the engine up

So its all a case of popping everything back together now isnt it?
Well almost.  Im trying to grab a half hour here, and hour there so you can imagine how miffed I was when it turns out that my gasket set didnt include the carb/engine case gasket.  Another lunch time trip to Gransport who assure me that it should have been in there, so gave me one anyway - Thanks Dan.
rebuilding all the bits is pretty plain sailing really - though i do often have little panics - did I tighten those nuts properly? did I remove the bit of rag stuffed in to stop dirt falling in? etc etc

One small panic is that I forgot to soak the new clutch plates in oil before reassembling.  I notice that some engine rebuild blogs and books, dont make reference to this proceedure, but some do.  I wonder if I should take the clutch out again? or will the engine oil splash his way up there nice and easily anyway?

Another little head-scratch ive had is over the timing.  The position of the stator plate that I removed is different to that suggested by Haynes manual.  Being electronic ignition there isnt any contact breakers to adjust, but you can still advance/retard the timing by the rotary position of the stator.  The picture here, shows the timing as it was when I broke the engine down (i know it runs like that, but I dont know if it was running properly).  Haynes say that the PX200E engine should have the mark on the casing aligned with the 'A' mark on the stator plate - that looks like a couple of degrees different to how it was.
So, what to do?
Well in the end I went with what Haynes says, reasoning that I was better to trust him than some previous owner who thought a pop-riveted plate over a rotted out chassis was satisfactory engineering.
We shall see what happens when I try to start her (soon I hope)


I do worry about the autolube device - I have no evidence to say it wont work properly, but it does all seem so marginal to me - its a delicate bit of mechanics, doing a finely tuned operation with a thick gunk that is just waiting for a blockage - and then it all goes catastrophic!  I decided that as I didnt know the history of the 2-stroke oil already in the tank, I would drain it and refill with fresh - I should have thought this through, but it turns out that there is more than a pint milk-bottles worth of oil in that tank, and the following morning there was probably a good half pint of oil all over my garage floor! still at least i know ive got a flushed tank now, so fingers crossed for many years of trouble free autolube. 
Tip No.1 from Dan at Gransport - always put a couple of caps of 2-stroke oil in a full tank of petrol - as a just in case.  Tip No.2 from Dan - only fill the oil tank part way up so that you dont fill the complete sight-glass - this way you can see if the oil is being consumed by a correctly working autolube mechanism.

So everything assembled, it all seems to turn over nice and smoothly and compression feels good