EZ-RIDER - Front Caliper Hangar Pin & Pin Cover **REFURB**

A Hangar Pin Cover That You'd Never Want To Meet

One of the largest challenges I faced when rebuilding the Calipers from Hell was getting the hangar pin cover out.  The hangar pin itself is threaded through the two brake pads that go into the front calipers, ensuring that they are securely fastened to the unit.  Once the hangar pin has been installed, a pin cover is used to further fill the hole left behind.  My inability to get the hangar pin cover out completely stalled the caliper rebuild for about a week, because I couldn't figure out a way to get the hangar pin cover out without damaging it to the point where I would need to do something drastic, like drill it out.

The hangar pin cover is a proportionately large, wide and shallow screw type fitting that goes into the hole that is left over after the hangar pin has been installed.  Its apparent function is to make sure that that the hangar pin, which has a recessed 5mm hex head fitting, doesn't get filled up with brake material and grime and resultingly difficult to remove.  

Why is the hangar pin cover such a problem?  The main reason why is because the caliper body is made of aluminum, whereas the pin cover is made of steel.  These two differing metals not only have different thermal characteristics, they also have electrochemical characteristics that give them a tendency to bond together, particularly in the presence of water.

The idea of a pin cover is a great idea, except for the fact that the pin cover tends to get seized in the caliper, becoming an even greater removal problem than the hangar pin itself.  The removal of the hangar pin cover is further complicated by its design:  It features a very wide and very shallow slot that requires a huge flat-headed screwdriver, of a size that most people don't normally have in their toolbox (9.5mm wide).  

So what people do is use a smaller screwdriver which then skips out of the slot, chewing up an already alarmingly shallow slot in the head of the screw.  It only takes a few failed attempts to make the screw head useless, turning a bad situation into a horrible one.

Getting the hangar pin cover out of the front caliper is a very common challenge for people who restore older Honda motorcycles.  There are many techniques around to get the pin cover out (Heat, Drilling, Impact), but the technique that worked for me was using a penetrating oil for a few days, then a properly sized screwdriver with a six-sided shaft, an adjustable wrench, and the strength of two men to generate a lot of torque, maybe 60lbs or 80lbs worth.  That did the trick!

Once I got the hangar pin cover out, it took just a few seconds (but an equal amount of torque) to get the actual hangar pin out.  With that accomplished, I was faced with a choice:  Refurbish or Replace.  

Ultimately, even though replacement parts are not terribly expensive, I decided that it would be more entertaining to refurbish these two parts and replace them only if the refurbished units didn't work out.  That not only served to lower the cost of bringing EZ-RIDER back into service, it also provides people with an opportunity to see how they might refurbish parts that may be even more difficult to source than EZ-RIDER, which is not exactly an easy motorcycle to source parts for, considering it's the last edition of a small displacement model only distributed in Japan and the UK.

One thing I made sure of was to deepen the slot on the hangar pin cover by about 50% using a little cutting wheel in my moto-tool, to give the next screwdriver in line more meat to work with.  I would also probably use a vice next time to secure the pin in place, or take it out while the calipers are still on the forks of the motorcycle.

Enjoy!

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