Old Bike Hack

Royal Enfield Meteor Minor 500 twin

2012-01-11T07:21:00.003Z

Here's the new project: it belonged to my old friend John Robinson, technical editor of Performance Bikes. I plan to restore it along the lines John would have chosen: better suspension, brakes and ground clearance, more comfortable riding position.
Early days, but it should turn out to be a handsome beast. Styling, if I can afford it, will resemble a Series 2 US export Interceptor – small tank, chrome and upswept pipes.

BSA A50/A65 wiring diagram

2012-01-09T12:11:00.003Z

I've cleaned up the old wiring diagram which I first drew in 2009, and which has since been downloaded 44 times by people in India, Australia, Canada, the US and elsewhere. This new version is easier to follow. It shows a bike with a non-standard ignition switch, Boyer Bransden electronic ignition and a 12V conversion with Zener diode. Not how I'd do it now, but it worked OK.

There's a good quality hi res version free to download here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?zbomb9hlhuow0

What goes wrong with NX650's Keihin carb?

2012-01-09T11:53:00.004Z

1000 miles later nothing has broken, fallen off or worn out. Considering how worried I was when I first saw the inside of the engine, that's a decent result. The one nuisance is a tendency to stall approaching junctions, even though the bike ticks over and pulls away perfectly well.
Another owner, Simon Relph, says they all do that, and the best cure is a new carb from an XR600. I've also talked to the previous three owners and they all say the pre-rebuild bike stalled like that for years. The question is, why?
Assuming the ignition and valve clearances are fine, and taking Simon's observation that a new carb fixes it, I decided that the carb must still have some problem despite professional cleaning. Replacement isn't cheap, and the carb isn't worn, so it must be possible to put whatever is wrong right. Maybe the design makes some of the small bleed drillings incredibly prone to gumming up?
I stripped the carb down and spent a long time with carb cleaner and compressed air, trying to ensure the four pilot drillings were clear. These are the holes which the pilot adjustment screw covers or uncovers as you screw it in and out. I concentrated on these bits because when I tried to set the carb up originally after the rebuild this screw made virtually no difference.
Carb reassembled and fitted, fire it up – still no good.
I have found some extremely small drills. They may come in handy.

NX650 restored

2011-09-06T15:41:00.000+01:00

After a month and 500 miles of debugging the bike is pretty sorted. The rear master cylinder turned out to have a blocked return port. It was the one thing on the entire bike I didn't dismantle and clean, and the heat from the dragging pads cost me a new rear disc.

I replaced the cracked Bridgestones with new Dunlop Trailmax. Like other Dunlops they feel very stable, and glutinous as you lean over. They're good in the wet, and grippy enough in the dry for this kind of bike. If the Dommie is allowed onto Classic Bike's end of season Burn-Up at Rockingham circuit I reckon they'll be up to it.

I'd originally put Putoline 10W oil in the forks, which was too harsh. Honda recommend ATF which turns out to be quite light – equivalent to something like 2.5W Putoline. Since changing to that oil the front end is comfortable, though I've forgotten how crude these old damper rod forks were.

There are two problems left: first, the rear caliper bolts and bushes are worn, giving lots of lost motion at the pedal and a vague rear brake. I might need a new caliper, though it easily passes an MOT.

Second, the engine stalls round town and doesn't respond to Honda's recommended pilot screw adjustments. It could be that some fresh dirt got in there after the clean-up, so I'll check the pilot galleries. Otherwise the motor feels like new. Valve clearances are stable and I've revved it to 6000rpm without trouble now.

It's great to have breathed new life into a bike that belonged in a skip, and Fiona loves buzzing around the local lanes on it too.

Finished

2011-07-23T22:53:00.001+01:00

It took a few days to sort out the odds and ends that inevitably arise: frayed carb cable, sticking brake pistons, carb setup and that kind of thing. So far the bike's not gone over 4500rpm out of consideration for the new rings. But it feels absolutely lovely, and handles a treat. So far the cracked head hasn't made its presence felt. Long may it continue. I used Castrol Power 1 after interviewing Matt Symonds, head of Castrol's bike development programme last year at Pangbourne. I am convinced they make some of the best oil available.

Things that have worked:

The rebuilt oe shock (Falcon Engineering)
Carb refurb (JRS of Swansea)
The pattern gasket set (no oil leaks)
The 1989 camshaft and new rockers/followers/sub followers
Five Wheel Steel paint on forks, pillion hangers and swing arm etc
Simoniz tough black paint on footrests and sidestand

Things that haven't:
Hycote high temperature black exhaust paint
The pattern Honda grips (they smell of creosote)

I'll report back in 1000 miles to say whether the engine is still OK.

NX650 top end rebuild

2011-07-23T22:27:00.000+01:00

As the bike was burning oil I replaced the valve guide oil seals with genuine Honda ones. The pattern gasket set (from Wemoto) is fine in every other respect but Mark White at M&M Motorcycles in Essendine warned me not to risk pattern seals in such an important location. He should know.

A simple gap check showed the rings were beyond their service limits. Dave Silver supplied some genuine new ones, while the excellent Q Prep, a great engineering shop in Oundle run by bike enthusiasts, measured the piston, found it to be OK, and honed the bore for the new rings for £20. I cleaned up the piston and cylinder head with 00 wire wool, water and sieved wood ash.

The 1989 NX650 camshaft had been a risk. Sure enough it was slightly different from the 1990 dead one. But in a good way: the peg that secures the decompressor cam was slightly longer. Thirty seconds with a grinder sorted that. Pulling the decompressor parts off the old cam took a bit of heat and Rupe Farnsworth's three legged puller, but they went onto the new cam just fine.

Phil Joy had warned me to make sure the central journal didn't touch the camshaft, so Farnsworth scraped the journal carefully, removing any potential debris. The grey gloop on the lobes is moly grease, recommended by Honda.

NX650 bottom end rebuild

2011-07-23T22:18:00.000+01:00

The only reason the cases had to come apart was the worn-out splines on the gearshift shaft. The Dominator is actually pretty simple to strip and reassemble if you have the factory manual. You don't need any special tools beyond a clutch centre holder, a very long 5mm Allen key which you can hook up to a torque wrench (for the engine casings), and a universal flywheel puller. A handy substitute for the Honda cam chain tensioner holder tool is a small punch, or even a ground-down nail would do.

NX650 cylinder head

2011-07-23T21:42:00.000+01:00

The only way out of the morass of worn parts is to spend money.

Repair options first: Phil Joy at Joy Engineering, Ware, no longer repairs cylinder heads as he did for many years. He suggested one person who might do the job, but then pointed out the scored central journal is not critical. That reminded me of a stripdown Honda UK did of a 1989 Dominator used by Performance Bikes. Nine months from new the central journal was scored, but it went as well as ever and there was no other engine damage.

This gave me hope, but we still had a cylinder head crack to deal with. I soon gave up looking for a second hand head. They aren't available, for obvious reasons, and used engines on eBay or from breakers sell around the £650 mark. Not a risk worth taking. They could have cracked heads too. New heads are £800-£1000 as far as I can tell.

The Cylinder Head Shop told me they could pop out the valve seats, grind the crack out, fill it with weld, remachine and then refit the seats for about £350. As a bonus, they would thicken the plug area to take a long reach plug. I sent it off. Six weeks and many calls later they hadn't started the job, so I got it sent back. They apologised and offered to get it done pronto, but I had lost all faith. The highly respected SRM Engineering reckoned a repair was not worth doing. Can you see daylight through the crack? No. Was it running OK when you got it? Yes. Well, you could always try putting it together and running it as is, they suggested.

I got a third opinion from Ducati bevel expert Tony Brancato, who I went to see on a job for Bike. Tony said he could repair it, but it would never be as good as a new. That settled it. I decided to replace the worn cam parts and re-use the old head. The cracks happen, apparently, due to overheating. I will make sure this engine never runs low on oil again.

Dave Silver Spares quoted £203 for a new camshaft. I found a cam billed on eBay (usa-motorcycles-inc) as an XR650/89 Dominator fitment in the USA for about £75 and went for that. Dave Silver supplied two followers and two sub-rockers for another £70 or so.

What goes wrong with 650 Honda singles

2011-02-02T23:46:00.000Z

After 30,000 miles and a reported running-out-of-oil incident at some point the bottom end, piston and gearbox seem fine. The rest is a bit of a mess:
– knackered gearshift splines
– worn clutch shock absorber springs
– scored central cam journal in the head
– severe wear on two cam lobes and followers
– coked-up exhaust ports (it was burning oil)
– suspected worn rings (yet to be measured)
– a crack in the cylinder head.
I will explain how I propose to solve these problems, and what it costs, in future posts. For now here are the pics. And clearly I was robbed when I bought the bike for £31.

Carb refurb

2011-01-23T19:55:00.001Z

Carbs, I have discovered, are often the first thing to wear out on an old engine. Slides, needles and main jets are all affected by the gas shuttling back and forth on tickover and at low revs. The result is crap fuel consumption and wooly low-speed running. There's also the problem of fuel residues building up during laid-up periods.
Under the filth this Keihin carb looked OK after 30,000 miles but the odd auxiliary slide lifter mechanism was seized. The bike ran like a pig, partly due to the lifter but mostly I suspect due to the inlet stub having a large crack.
Fed up with carb trouble on my ZZ-R I sent the Domi carb to Mike Davies at JRS in Swansea (www.jrs.uk.com, 01792 402458), who refurbishes mainly Keihin, Mikuni and Dell'Orto to what I consider to be the best standard in the UK. Japanese carbs are either unobtainable or very expensive, so worth taking care of. Mike's service was very good. He rang me to confirm he'd received the carb, told me what he was doing and estimated the final cost. When a pilot screw didn't shift he rang me to say the machining and spares (from Dave Silver) would be a bit more.
It came back clean, set to Honda's recommended values and with a superb fact sheet. Cost was £110.
The stripdown shot shows the strange auxiliary lifter, which uses a ramp on the throttle pulley to help lift the slide under sudden throttle openings.

Chassis finished

2011-01-23T19:01:00.000Z

After a lapse of months, I've done the chassis. Nothing too tricky, just lots of cleaning and repainting. The rattle can Simoniz Five Wheel Steel which goes on so nicely and dries pretty hard is, I've discovered, not resistant to brake fluid. But then what is? The oily clag all over the top frame tube, ignition coil and loom due to clumsy refilling with oil (the engine burned a lot) took hours to clean with solvent (usually white spirit) and toothbrush.

The rear brake shows a sensible (tight-fisted) mix of repainted bits and cleaned-up old stuff. With summer use rust isn't going to be a big problem.

Suspension linkage gets another shot at life

2010-05-16T22:45:00.000+01:00

Instead of working, spent a dreamy afternoon assembling parts onto the newly cleaned up chassis. These pics show how even the most unpromising bits and pieces can sort themselves out. Blasting by Pete at Summit, Paint by Simoniz Three Wheel Steel rattle can, bearings by Dave Silver spares. Unfortunately the four genuine Honda chassis bearings in this linkage were an odd size (24.5mm OD) and thus £73, plus another £18 for the seals. The swing arm bearings, exactly the same thing but 26mm OD, were a tenner for two at Anglia Bearings in Peterborough. The other good source of suspension bearings is Wemoto's website, but they didn't have the full set for the Dommie so I didn't bother this time.

Shock rebuilds

2010-05-09T20:37:00.000+01:00

Most people would regard a knackered old oe shock as scrap, and it is – but a decent quality new one starts at £300. So rebuilding one for £180 is worth thinking about.

I've had five shocks rebuilt by Falcon Engineering (falconshockabsorbers.co.uk): a TDR250, VFR750, ZZ-R1100, RRV Blade and now this. Robin Packham opens the cylinder, cleans everything up, and puts in a better-than-new PTFE piston ring, new oil and usually a new damper rod and seal too. He also cuts a thread in the cap and screws it back on. A final gas-up to get the pressure back and the job's done.

I've had the best results with non-adjustable shocks. The rebuilds on the Blade and ZZ-R altered the damping range somewhat. As the Dommie's shock is straightforward (once you've hacked off the plastic outer cover which eventually keeps the dirt and moisture in – note the blocked drain hole in the rusty 'before' pic) I got it blasted and sent it off. It came back quickly and with only a few paint chips on my rattle can-sprayed spring and shock body. On this shock there's nowhere to put the gas valve except the top portion of the thread (Honda must have assembled the original in a pressure chamber). So I lined up the best place and marked it with some tape before packing it in the box.

Robin replaced the spring and fitted the preload collars before Loctiting the valve in and gassing up. I can never change the spring now, or reduce preload beyond a certain amount, but that's OK.

The Dommie they couldn't kill

2010-04-29T20:50:00.000+01:00

I guess I had better introduce the bike. It's an old hound NX650 Dominator, 1990 vintage, previously owned by three bike journalists, thus proving that I am acutely lazy when it comes to buying bikes. The price, two bottles of wine to Simon Brown of MCN, seemed generous for a runner with an MOT. But actually once I pulled it apart I realised it was a lost cause.

Oh well. Too late for being sensible.

The main trouble is wear and tear, an engine covered in oil, and corrosion. And Simon mentioned that it burned oil. It wouldn't tick over either, which I hope isn't due to a worn carb.

The pics show the bike after about two hours of cleaning.Plenty to do, but it should be salvageable.

And so to bed

2010-04-14T22:15:00.001+01:00

Or at least, back to long-lost owner Fee Kelly. In a final flurry I screwed the last few parts together, ran it up, left it for two weeks and then, suddenly, a courier going to Cornwall had a space. So off it went...

(cue Monty Python Spanish Inquisition voice)

... with just one small problem. Fee couldn't start it. As this was the original reason she'd given me the bike 14 months before it was a bit embarrassing. It transpired that the soft 'mud' which formed as part of the tank electrolysis had settled on the fuel tap mesh inside the tank, and restricted or blocked the fuel flow. The first you know is that the carb won't flood for startup. I should have flushed the tank out moire thoroughly.

Intriguingly a Classic Bike reader suggested another tank de-rusting process, using a solution of water and black treacle left in for 10 days. Same effect as electrolysis, apparently.

The fuel starvation is a tiresome inconvenience, and may need doing more than once, but 20 minutes will sort it. Sooner or later Fee will find the time.

Next project: a 1990 Honda Dominator I bought for £31. My target is a nice bike for £600.

A Vincent Series C wiring diagram

2010-03-11T22:04:00.000Z

I've also been wiring up my friend Mark's Series C Vinnie, which he's been restoring for about four years. Vincent specialist Bob Culver built the engine and did most of the stove enamelling.

It looks like the simplest loom in the world, but the tail light wires go through the mudguard stays, and you really need a highly trained baby earthworm to grab the cable in its teeth and slither down the inside of the tube, before poking it out the other end. Perhaps the original works at Stevenage had such influence over invertebrates.

Being happiest with Japanese notation, I redrew the loom in that style. I think it's going to work, but if the past pace of the restoration is any guide we could be a few months away from firing the old carthorse up. Or longer.

You can get the loom diagram hi res on this link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=28d9934ccbdf5306ab1eab3e9fa335ca3844f2d1a0c32910

BSA anti-vibration mounts

2010-02-11T19:34:00.000Z

Rebuilding old Brit tat is an infinitely elastic occupation. Most of this is down to pattern parts, which almost never fit and provide hours of frustration.

For example the headlamp shell had the wrong cable cutout (and flaky paint), the headlamp brackets were different lengths, the speedo cable was too long, the tail light fouled the number plate, a fork top cap didn't screw into the fork leg and the headlamp bayonet connector didn't actually transmit electricity. The little rascals had crimped on the brass contacts without stripping the wires underneath.

So when the anti vibe mount on the tank came up for consideration I decided to make one myself. The rubber mount came from an autojumble stand ('tank rubbers', £1.50). The sleeve (which was a perfect fit) came from the wheel spindle spacers of a TS50 Suzuki.

Four hours with a bottom-of-the-range Clarke welder, a grinding wheel and files and Bob's your uncle.

BSA A50/65 wiring loom in colour

2010-01-25T22:08:00.000Z

Call me a sentimental old git, but I couldn't resist redoing the wiring diagram in colour. You can download the hi res version on:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=28d9934ccbdf5306ab1eab3e9fa335ca3844f2d1a0c32910.
To my utter amazement, six people downloaded the black and white version. How did they even find it?

De-rusting with electrolysis: the details

2010-01-23T20:43:00.000Z

This is such an interesting subject I am putting as many pics and details up as possible. I got the idea from Mike Brown's excellent 2009 book Building Budget Brits, which is essential reading for anyone fool enough to own a Triumph or BSA unit twin.

Here's the method.

1. Shake nuts, bolts or gravel around in the tank to dislodge any big flakes of rust. Use a cement mixer if you have one. Remove with old vacuum cleaner.
2. Make up solution of tablespoon of washing soda to a gallon of water.
3. Bung fuel filler holes with Blu Tac and fill tank to brim.
4. Hook up a battery charger, negative lead to the tank body, positive lead to an iron anode suspended over the filler hole, in the soda solution but not touching the tank.
5. Some chargers have cutouts that won't let them pass current when used like this. I used an old mobile charger delivering 500mA max.
6. Leave it fizzing until the reaction appears to stop. It was a few days for me (plus a couple of weeks before I had time to work on it again), but heavier current might speed it up a bit. The rust is being converted to an inert blackish substance. I don't know what the chemical reaction is but I guess it's reducing (de-oxidising) the rust.
7. The process deals with even the remotest corners of the tank. But once you turn off the current you must dry it asap. Mike recommends pouring out the solution (which is not particularly toxic – I dumped it on the gravel drive) and flushing with acetone to chase out the water. I used cellulose thinners (similar thing), then sat the tank in front of a fan heater for half an hour. Dry as a bone.

Did it work? See the before and after pic and judge for yourself. I think so. The orange, rusty smudge you can just see is only under the electrode, where very fine particles of brown sludge fall downwards. Otherwise the entire inside is grey or black.

Obviously it's less stress if you do the job before painting the outside, but the solution (which fizzes over sometimes when a big hydrogen bubble forms inside) is non corrosive on paint and chrome. Also, it helps to scoop out the scum and clean up the electrode (see pic) from time to time.

You can now seal the tank but I'm taking my chances as it is.

The joys (and otherwise) of pattern parts

2010-01-18T14:38:00.000Z

Seeing as BSA shut down in 1973, it's amazing that you can still get virtually every part. Hardly any of it is original though, and the tinware generally comes from India.

You can get chromed tanks from the very useful Kidderminster Motorcycles (01562 66679), as well as headlamp brackets, mudguards and headlight shells. It ain't cheap: the original brackets I picked up at Stafford were £65 discounted, but I chose the wrong ones. The shorter replacements, for the earlier drop-yoke A50s, were £90 from the equally helpful Burton Bike Bits (www.burtonbikebits.net).

The catch is that this stuff only fits approximately. The chroming and polishing and overall quality is good, but one of the brackets was 7mm taller than the other. It needed shortening with Alan Seeley's disc cutter to fit between the top and bottom yoke. This then leaves a gap which rain and muck could get into, so I'll need to find some fat o-rings or use RTV to bung them up. The 'ears' are too wide for the 7in headlamp shell too, so I Araldited on a couple of washers to the inside to take up the clearance.

The biggest pain has been a new fork top nut. The threads are just too fat to screw into the new (or, for that matter, the old) fork tube. Mr Seeley's thread files and rat tail files have made no impression so far. I really need a lathe.

The picture shows Diplomat finishing off the installation of a new timing cover gasket last Sunday afternoon. What a fine fellow he is.

How to de-rust a tank

2010-01-05T22:02:00.000Z

If I had a brain I would have looked inside the tank first and dealt with the light dusting of rust before applying the expensive paint to the outside. But no matter.

I went for a combination of mechanical and electrochemical treatment:

1. Chuck in some dried alpine grit, bung all holes with Blu Tac and wrap the tank tenderly
2. Tumble for 25 mins or so in a cement mixer (packed tightly with cardboard and polystyrene blocks)
3. Hoover out the gravel
4. Fill the tank with baking soda solution and electrolyse it using an old iron chisel as the anode, dangled in the solution. Electrical oomph provided by old mobile phone charger (c.500mA)
5. Flush, dry, add more gravel (washed this time) and shake it about
6. More hoovering and flushing, et voila.

I could have coated the inside of the tank with a sealer but the inside looked pretty good so I didn't bother.

Here's how the tank started out

2009-12-08T21:16:00.000Z

Note healthy dose of scars, dents and scrapes in what is probably the original metallic red paint job from 1966. Sad to see all that history go in a way, but now she's ready for another 40 years.

A 650 quid paint job

2009-12-05T20:35:00.000Z

Progress has been slow due to continued rotator cuff nonsense, but I've now got the tinware grit blasted by the excellent Peter Boonham at Summit Blast Cleaning in Easton (01480 891696), on the recommendation of motorcycle-friendly body shop AJ Cobb in Hilton (ajcobb.com).

Peter de-rusted and etch primered the mudguards, rear light unit, side panels, chain guard, fork legs and a few miscellaneous brackets for £65. Adrian Cobb agreed to paint it all, filling in the dents and scrapes, and refinishing the tank, for £650 plus VAT. It's a hell of a lot of money but this is top quality work, with painstaking use of filler, baking the undercoat on at 80C, much rubbing down, then painting and polishing (and more rubbing and baking).

The result is liquidly beautiful. This cameraphone snap hardly does it justice, but things should look better once the bike is rebuilt.

A grand day out

2009-10-18T18:39:00.000+01:00

Back from the Stafford Show and it's been the best day's shopping I could have imagined. Every part I needed for the stricken A50 was there. Total outlay: £340.

The redoubtable Mr Seeley provided expert guidance on how to lurk, pounce and haggle, and by early afternoon, snuffling around in boxes like a pig questing for truffles, I turned up an original teardrop tank badge to replace the one that broke. Better still was a pretty decent tank for £85, though the later filler cap was another £15. Even Diplomat came round on Sunday morning to look at the treasure trove.

Kidderminster Motorcycles provided most of the headlamp assembly stuff. They were hugely knowledgeable. I was also impressed by Bantam John's stock. You can get chromed, Indian-made tanks for the A7, A10, Gold Star and maybe a few others but they haven't yet started on the A50/A65.

The whole atmosphere of the place was one of thousands of blokes milling around rooting for bits or dreaming about their next project. It's amazing what jolts through your brain when you see even a sidepanel from your first bike. I felt huge pangs of desire for an old KH250 (a mere £600 with original exhausts), not to mention various XT500s and even another old BSA. It made up for the food being the usual dogburger standard of yesteryear.

Having stored all the new parts away I spent Sunday afternoon ripping into the bike to get the forks ready for straightening. This is harder than it sounds when only one arm works properly, but I am pretty certain now we have enough to put the old fossil together in a day. Only remaining problem is finding someone to do the paintwork for not too much.

A 50 year-old jigsaw

2009-10-07T13:13:00.000+01:00

First job: assess the damage. Enter my friend Alan Sealey, a long time contributor to Classic Bike and Brit bike boffin. He rolled up the other night on his orange metalflake 750 Commando and, powered by nothing more than tea and a desire to see good done, inspected the stricken A50.

I would like to say I helped, but I didn't. Seven weeks after the crash my torn rotator cuff still doesn't even look like working. The legs, however, are more or less OK (the pic, included for purely voyeuristic reasons, shows them a few days after the event).

The full horror is thus:

New parts needed:

Switchgear

Clutch lever and clamp

Cowhorn handlebars, as preferred by owner Fee

Headlamp brackets and shell

Fork stanchions

Seat cover

Left footrest

Petrol tank

Sidepanel and front mudguard repaint

Check:

Yokes

Advisable:

Steering damper and lockstops

Alan has plenty of ideas about where to get this stuff. First stop is the autojumble at the Stafford show on October 17th.

Fixed – and broken again

2009-09-27T22:05:00.000+01:00

Several non-blog months have elapsed, but work on the crusty old A50 continued to the point where it ran sweetly, got an MOT and did 500 shakedown miles. I hooked up the alternator, repainted lots more bits, fitted head bearings, aligned the wheels, sorted the carb and fuel taps, and discovered that it needed a 35A fuse.

Finally there was nothing left to do but ride it 350 miles to Fee's place in Cornwall to give it back. 30 miles from my destination, doing about 35mph, I hit a series of white-painted rumble strips on the entry to St Blazey near Cornwall. As I was stretching back at the time (the riding position is agony after 320 miles) I didn't have a good grip on the bars and it instantly went lock to lock. I baled out as it flipped full right, and landed on my arm, tearing the rotator cuff in my left shoulder. This injury is not recommended.

The bike was insured via Classic Bike magazine, but CB's owners charge the full cost of the claim to the editor's budget, which is effectively a form of blackmail. If I get it done properly in a shop Hugo Wilson, who is a good friend of mine, will be unable to make his magazine. So I will do the rebuild myself, and CB's costs stay at the minimum.

More on this sorry tale when my arm works well enough to wield a spanner.

Hammerite vs Plastikote

2009-02-22T17:51:00.000Z

In the course of tarting up various bedraggled bits I tried both these aerosols in gloss black, on surfaces with most of the rust rotary brushed off, and treated with Jenolite, but otherwise unprimed. You'd think the Hammerite would be the best but it seemed a bit thin. Even after four coats you could still see the underlying metal on the edges of the shock mounts, for example. The cheaper Plastikote (c.£6 vs c.£9 for Hammerite) has a lot more covering efficiency.

According to the labels both paints contain enough VOCs to fry the eyes of every baby seal within a 50 mile radius, but Hammerite is far less obnoxious to use. The chemicals coming off the Plastikote make your head swim in seconds. Hammerite also has more of an enamel look to the finish. Plastikote is super shiny – something you may feel is out of place on an old Brit shonker.

The pics show the swing arm affected by Fee's original Cornish maritime rust, and the same item after a bout of rotary wire brushing and two coasts of plastikote. After a month it's dried rock hard.

Now in high resolution

2009-02-03T21:16:00.000Z

You can download a hi res of the diagram on http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=28d9934ccbdf5306ab1eab3e9fa335ca3844f2d1a0c32910

A proper wiring diagram (I think)

2009-02-03T09:32:00.001Z

Half way through doing the loom I got so hacked off with the standard BSA wiring diagram that I drew my own, along the lines of the Japanese ones I'm used to. This at least shows roughly where the different electrical components are on the bike.

Drawing a wiring diagram is harder than it looks but as far as I can tell this is electrically identical to the original, and to what is on the bike now. It certainly all seems to work (bar the charging system – some rear mudguard paintwork issues mean I've not had it running yet).

The red letters denote deviations from the standard BSA colours. There were a few decent bits of wire on the bike which served peripheral items, and as long as you leave a record to show the next owner what's what then I reckon you've discharged your social responsibility. Black dots show a connector join with different coloured wire either side.

The ignition switch is non standard and doesn't make the connections of the original, so the quaint 'emergency' position, intended to allow the motor to fire with a flat battery, is redundant on this bike. My justification for this act of historical auto electrical vandalism is that I don't plan to leave the lights on all night.

If by some staggeringly small chance anyone would like a civilised wiring diagram for a 1962 BSA A50/A65 running 12V electrics, here it is.

STOP PRESS: This diagram is now available in colour on this blog, Jan 2010. And in a further improved version in Jan 2012 here: http://oldbikehack.blogspot.com/2012/01/bsa-a50a65-wiring-diagram.html

A rescued BSA

2009-01-15T11:02:00.000Z

This is the first Brit bike I've ever had in my garage. It's a 1962 BSA A50, which means it's as old as me, although (unless there's something I don't know) it's in considerably worse nick. It belongs to Fee, a friend in Cornwall, who keeps it in a shed round the back of her house, where it avoids most of the sea spray unless there's a serious storm whipping up. When it finally refused to start I offered to have a look.

I've sniffed around a few musty bikes in my time but the hum off this one is quite something – a miasma of three parts old oil, eighteen parts mould, and a generous dash of despair. The period factory manual, if anything, is even niffier. No matter.

It didn't take long to figure out the problem. The wiring was held together with the ubiquitous crap pre-insulated red and blue fasteners and bits of tarnished cable, none of which resembled the colours in the manual. My favourite touch was two alternator wires twisted together and rubbing on the crankcase.

Being used to Japanese electrics I took a while to grasp the stone age simplicity of switched alternator coils, and a brake light and horn which work even with the ignition off.

But eventually I figured out what I needed and ordered up the right coloured cables from the excellent Vehicle Wiring Products. The horn, rectifier, zener diode and switchgear all test OK, and Fee thoughtfully added Boyer Bransden III ignition at some point. I've now set to converting all the connectors to Japanese bullet spec. Total cost so far: about £15.

I must admit I find the whole thing strangely satisfying.