Well, I finally repaired my clutch today - just over 2,000 miles since frying it. After a short ride of 30 miles with lots of WOT, all seems well with no detectable slipping. Repair was not all that difficult - thanks for all the encouragement, help and advice I received from everyone. There was one thing however, that has caused me concern.................
Remember what the new pieces looked like. Pay close attention to the 'unique' friction plate in the lower left corner of the photo.
Here's what everything looked like after removing the cover. There's the clutch spring, and whoa! There's the crankshaft!!! I could also see #4 connecting rod though it's not in the photo. Cool.
Remove those 6 bolts and off comes the clutch spring, the 7 & 7 friction and steel plates and the one unique friction plate. Here's the old friction plates. They look pretty good. I didn't measure them to see if they have worn too thin, but they all looked good.
And here's the steel plates. They looked good too (with one exception). No noticeable bluing, warping, or unusual wear.
The one exception. Looks like some bluing from heat.
So here I get into my problem area - the one unique friction plate. Here's the one side that looked ok.
But CRAP!!! Here's what the other side looked like (with the matching steel plate).
Here's a close-up. All friction material has been worn off, and even the metal has been scored/worn. This can't be good.
So here's the clutch basket with all the plates removed. Note the little black blobs of worn friction/plate material.
More photos of the burned off **** floating around my clutch.
Well, I cleaned as much of that **** out of there as I could, but there was more I could not access without removing the clutch basket. And I wasn't going to try that. I would have liked to because there was one more friction and steel plate in there I would have liked to inspected that you can't see in my photos. Hope those two are ok. Anyway, that **** has been in there for 2,000 miles already. I guess that's what an oil filter is for. (Note that I DID drain and replace the oil immediately after burning up the clutch) Note that the outer portions of the clutch housing are clean as a whistle. In hindsight, riding 2,000 miles after burning up the clutch perhaps wasn't such a good idea. I should have got in there and replaced and cleaned out all that stuff pronto. Lesson learned. I still want to get a minimum of 200,000 miles out of this FJR. Hope this clutch burning hasn't reduced that possibility of that.
One last thing. Despite buying a new bearing I didn't replace it. The current one felt smooth, with no binding or looseness. I didn't want to screw anything else up while trying to press the old one out and the new one in without the proper tools. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'