In May, 2022, Brick House Builds first shared the story of how it came to find a poor, neglected, 1976 Benelli 750 Sei barn find nearby. The bike was on Facebook Marketplace, and like any good bike rescuer, BJ, the guy behind the BHB channel, immediately leaped into action to go pull this poor bike to (relative) safety.
If you’re familiar with the BHB channel, you already know that he’s got a steadily increasing number of project bikes on his plate. (To be fair, that seems to be a thing with folks who get way into project bikes, so he’s certainly not alone.) As he’s shared occasionally in videos since that time, there are a number of projects that take precedence over this one, so he’s been managing our expectations about how often we should expect to see updates about it from the beginning.
Now, in March, 2023, we finally have an update on the Brickhouse Benelli—and it’s a pretty important one. As you may recall, that beautiful six-cylinder engine was seized. It wasn’t a huge surprise, of course—but that obviously means more work to put it right. This video is about that process, and although it’s nearly 50 minutes long, it shows a process that actually took a few days to complete.
When tackling any problem, the first thing to do is to see exactly how bad the problem is. Once you’ve assessed the actual situation, you have a better idea of how you can start to fix it. To kick off the proceedings, BJ gets his trusty borescope and starts examining the cylinders, one by one. With the help of his phone as a screen to view what the camera is seeing inside each bore, he’s able to easily see what’s happening.
How do things look? Cylinders one through five actually don’t look too bad, considering how long it’s been sitting. There’s a little surface rust in one or two of them, but it appears to be minor, and the actual condition of the cylinders themselves looks really decent.
Cylinder six, however, looks pretty bad. BJ says that’s not actually surprising, because there’s a crack in the engine case, and an exhaust valve was also partly open. It’s also the side that the bike was laying on in the barn, so that’s where any water would have gotten inside—and sure enough, that’s where it seems to be seized.
Armed with that knowledge, he’s ready to get to work. First, it’s time for some Evaporust. After going through a couple of cycles with it, he switches to a 50-50 mix of automatic transmission fluid (ATF) and acetone to clean up all the bores and hopefully get things moving.
Plenty of hours later, after a lot of incremental hard work, he finally gets the result he was hoping for! The 750 Sei engine is successfully unseized, and all it took was a small shower of ATF and acetone all over the shop to do it. (Hey, at least it didn’t require a blood sacrifice. That’s something, right?) At the end of the video, BJ cautions that it may take quite a bit of time before we see more updates about this bike again, but regardless, we still look forward to seeing how this project progresses in the future.
