For those who like old Motorcycles.

[New Haven Neil]

1 hour ago, MrWolf said:

BSA B31 plunger that I had just bought, some clown had fitted a solderless nipple to the front brake cable, came up to a roundabout and it went twang. 

Luckily, as I had my girlfriend on the back, there was nothing coming across the roundabout so I just changed down a gear and shot across. 

I try to check everything on a secondhand bike now, especially if it has been "recommissioned" to sell on.

 

It is certainly true that the bodges some folk resort to for quick sales are unbelievable, even on safety critical items.  I found a drum brake shoe with the linings self-tappered on when the glue had failed.   Nice job of counter boring the holes to miss the screw heads - for a mile or two. Might have been stronger than the pop rivets a friend found doing the same thing on a C10.  Not that it could go fast enough to need brakes.  A pal here more recently had a throttle stick wide open on an Ariel Arrow due to cable shards fraying, which had insulating tape wrapped around them to 'fix' it.  Lovely restoration too, cosmetically.

[MrWolf]

I can well believe it. Just got a D1 Bantam running that had a virtually concours looking restoration and the fork top nuts / yoke were barely finger tight. I see that a lot on trailer queens because the restorer didn't want to chip the thirty coats of paint bolting up or wanted all the screw heads to line up.

 

I get lots of those, the restorer gets it running, enough to show to the buyer. The buyer might do a lap of an arena at a show in order to collect a pot for "his" restoration before putting it away as an investment. He will then pull it out a year or two later, (usually because one has appeared in a magazine article for silly money) and it won't start.

 

I get it running and (in the case of a trials Goldstar) might point out that the reason that the front wheel spindle won't come out easily is that the right hand fork leg is bent back by nearly 3/4" and the whole bike needs a bolt check. New legs are about £70 a pair - weep ye owners of modern bikes! 

 

The response was - it's okay, I'm not planning on riding it far....

 

Just as well, because the clutch is about bu66ered....

[Northmoor]

@MrWolfthis is good advice and why if/when I buy a "modern classic" car or bike, I will probably still buy from a private seller, not a dealer.  This might seem counter-intuitive when you might have some comeback against a dealer; my logic is that if I'm buying a 30 year old bike, it WILL need something close to a complete rebuild, so I'm not going to pay considerably more for the same bike with the same intended outcome. 

Too many dealers will pay £1000 for a "barn find" bike, spend a day cleaning it thoroughly and another fixing it enough for it to start and scrape through an MOT with a friendly tester.  They will then put it for sale for at least £3000, expecting to make over a grand for a day's work, but it will still have knackered wheel and head bearings, the chain will be on its last adjustment, the "new" tyres have probably been in the warehouse for more than ten years, etc.  Cars are worse, you can get a just-about-MOT'd XJS for £3-4k, but I'm not convinced that these aren't the same cars that turn up in dealers a few weeks later for £15k and described as "probably among the best in the country".  There are quite a few charlatans in the classic car world who are basically charging you a lot of money for using cleaning products.

Edited April 13, 2021 by Northmoor

[spikey]

1 hour ago, MrWolf said:

 Just got a D1 Bantam running  ...

 

I do wish you hadn't said that.  After a good half hour's searching, I've reluctantly given up hope of ever finding my Bantam Racing Club lapel badge and the as-new never-been-on-a-jacket cloth version of the same, so now I'll never see what they'd fetch on Ebay (:

 

Ref dangerous bodges, the one I remember most clearly was on the secondhand BSA Spitfire I got from Speed Kings in Liverpool at a very good price 'cos it had an enormous old wood and ally double-adult sidecar on it.  Suffice it to say that on the way home, going round a right-hand bend in rush-hour traffic, the chair decided to start going its own sweet way due to an adjustable strut that wasn't locked tight and two bodged attachment clamps.  I'd never really warmed to driving outfits anyhow, but that certainly put me right off for life.

 

 

[MrWolf]

I've got this Watsonian Ascot body stashed away in case I can find a VG21 chassis. The original owner used the chassis as a test bed, reporting back to Watsonian in words of one syllable where they were going wrong!

I might be a bit more inclined if I had a suitable plodder to attach it to! 

Hitching it to the Star Twin would be like lashing Red Rum to Steptoe's rag and bone cart.

 

 

 

[MrWolf]

2 hours ago, Northmoor said:

@MrWolfthis is good advice and why if/when I buy a "modern classic" car or bike, I will probably still buy from a private seller, not a dealer.  This might seem counter-intuitive when you might have some comeback against a dealer; my logic is that if I'm buying a 30 year old bike, it WILL need something close to a complete rebuild, so I'm not going to pay considerably more for the same bike with the same intended outcome. 

Too many dealers will pay £1000 for a "barn find" bike, spend a day cleaning it thoroughly and another fixing it enough for it to start and scrape through an MOT with a friendly tester.  They will then put it for sale for at least £3000, expecting to make over a grand for a day's work, but it will still have knackered wheel and head bearings, the chain will be on its last adjustment, the "new" tyres have probably been in the warehouse for more than ten years, etc.  Cars are worse, you can get a just-about-MOT'd XJS for £3-4k, but I'm not convinced that these aren't the same cars that turn up in dealers a few weeks later for £15k and described as "probably among the best in the country".  There are quite a few charlatans in the classic car world who are basically charging you a lot of money for using cleaning products.

 

I know exactly what you mean. I don't buy from dealers (although I have a couple of friends who are dealers, they're the exception.) I know what kind of mark up most make for polishing and a bent MOT.

Not appropriate on this thread, but I could tell you some real horror stories about cars. Including a particular dealer who ripped off a friend of mine to the tune of £2300.

 

[MrWolf]

@spikey Funny that you should mention old motorcycle pin badges. Have you seen the sterr-hooo-pid money  being asked on eBay for some of the (allegedly) RARE!!!! examples? 

£75 for some of them. But, they don't appear to sell. How the F... can it be justified? Is it the bohee crowd who buys a Triton someone else built and have it on a plinth in their docklands loft apartment? 

 

How much is my old jacket worth I wonder?

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by MrWolf
Picture no attach!

[Kickstart]

8 hours ago, MrWolf said:

BSA B31 plunger that I had just bought, some clown had fitted a solderless nipple to the front brake cable, came up to a roundabout and it went twang. 

While I have the kit to make up cables, I won’t touch a brake cable. Risk to reward ratio too far! Useful for clutch cables, throttles, etc

 

All the best

 

Katy

[MrWolf]

Likewise, I have made quite a few cables, but even though I stake over the cable end and flood it back into the well in the nipple, I still have more faith in a factory made front brake cable, even though it might have been hanging about for seventy years or more.

I keep a full set of cables rolled up in the toolbox on all of our bikes just in case.

[spikey]

7 hours ago, MrWolf said:

I keep a full set of cables rolled up in the toolbox on all of our bikes just in case.

 

I used to do that, then took it one step further with the Vincent after seeing what had been done to a bike I had a go on that had just come back from the ISDT.  I got the hiss taken a fair bit for running spare clutch, front brake and throttle cables alongside the working ones, but it was well worth the hassle 'cos after doing that, I never once had any more cable trouble ... 

[steve1]

23 hours ago, MrWolf said:

 

 

How much is my old jacket worth I wonder?

 

 

I'll give you 30 bob.

 

steve

[MrWolf]

1 hour ago, steve1 said:

 

I'll give you 30 bob.

 

steve

 

I'd say it's worth double that just for the weight in scrap iron. 

[MrWolf]

This would be fun / interesting / terrifying to ride...

 

[Kickstart]

On 23/04/2021 at 22:46, MrWolf said:

This would be fun / interesting / terrifying to ride...

 

I think I am scared enough not to want to try and find out!

 

But of a mare of a week. I gave a friends bike here to sort a few wiring issues. And replace the rocker cover gasket. Rocker cover off and I cleaned it and refinished it. Then noticed a missing locating dowel. Cams out and no sign of it. Sump off and found it. But then could get the cams timed. Set them right, finish tightening down and there would be a noise, and the cams would be 1 tooth out relative to the crank. Eventually got it right. Presume the cam chain wasn’t seating correctly on the crank. But took close to 20 attempts to get it right!

 

All the best

 

Katy

[MrWolf]

Sod's law says that dowel dropped into the engine as you were removing the cover. A lot of older bikes have a couple of studs that are either screwed into the cover or head to provide positive alignment.

The timing chain tensioner unit on Yamahas was quite clever and far better engineered / easier to get at than most. 

You have my sympathy over timing aggravation. On an old school four cylinder car engine, a timing chain is fine and works perfectly well. It all starts getting fiddly when you have more than one cam or you go OHC. 

Gears are ideal for pushrod engines, unless you make them out of cheese.

Norton and Ariel junked their chain driven cams. Belts, whilst quiet are cheap and nasty engineering (like running cams direct in the head material) and get expensive very quickly when they need replacing, especially on cars. 

A shaft and bevel gears is far more reliable for OHC and a sight easier to time up.

I learned the hard way that you should stuff rags into crankcase mouth's whilst the barrels are off. You wouldn't have had a hope of catching that dowel.

Full marks for persistence though. I might be calling on your services next time I have to refit the rocker boxes to a pre 1950 BSA parallel twin. They redesigned it for 1951 and gave you a special tool to align the inaccessible pushrods.

[spikey]

5 hours ago, MrWolf said:

...  They redesigned it for 1951 and gave you a special tool to align the inaccessible pushrods ...

Gosh.  The comb.  I'd quite forgotten about that.  Certainly a big improvement over dabs of grease and slight of hand ...

[Kickstart]

20 hours ago, MrWolf said:

You have my sympathy over timing aggravation. On an old school four cylinder car engine, a timing chain is fine and works perfectly well. It all starts getting fiddly when you have more than one cam or you go OHC. 

Gears are ideal for pushrod engines, unless you make them out of cheese.

Norton and Ariel junked their chain driven cams. Belts, whilst quiet are cheap and nasty engineering (like running cams direct in the head material) and get expensive very quickly when they need replacing, especially on cars. 

A shaft and bevel gears is far more reliable for OHC and a sight easier to time up.

I learned the hard way that you should stuff rags into crankcase mouth's whilst the barrels are off. You wouldn't have had a hope of catching that dowel.

Full marks for persistence though. I might be calling on your services next time I have to refit the rocker boxes to a pre 1950 BSA parallel twin. They redesigned it for 1951 and gave you a special tool to align the inaccessible pushrods.

Belts partly are used as they don’t “stretch” with wear, unlike chains. Just they become a maintenance nightmare, especially when engineers do strange things (like drive the water pump for it to wreck the engine when the pump fails, or bury the belt making it a nightmare to get at).

 

Heard in the US there in a minimum belt life required on cars

 

Bevel drive should have the best of both worlds (or cam gear drive), but adds to the cost.

 

Not a clue when the dowel dropped down. Going to clean out the holes for the dowels with brake cleaner, and loctite them in!

 

All the best

 

Katy

[Sidecar Racer]

 

Came across this today , the first 11 minutes are just a tour of a hoarders

sheds , although there are a couple of interesting bikes , but from 11-30

we meet a brit ex-pat and his smaller collection of real classic bikes .

 

 

[MrWolf]

16 hours ago, Kickstart said:

Belts partly are used as they don’t “stretch” with wear, unlike chains. Just they become a maintenance nightmare, especially when engineers do strange things (like drive the water pump for it to wreck the engine when the pump fails, or bury the belt making it a nightmare to get at).

 

A Weller tensioner takes care of that, but the accountants don't like good engineering

 

16 hours ago, Kickstart said:

 

Heard in the US there in a minimum belt life required on cars

 

Service intervals do seem to vary wildly, 30000 miles seems about average, compared to 80000 for a more expensive chain, but 1950s engines were generally ready for overhaul at that mileage and the chain would be swapped as a matter of course, to do otherwise was a false economy.

 

16 hours ago, Kickstart said:

Bevel drive should have the best of both worlds (or cam gear drive), but adds to the cost.

 

Accountants have been the bane of engineer's, designers, scientists and ultimately the customer since day one.

 

16 hours ago, Kickstart said:

 

Not a clue when the dowel dropped down. Going to clean out the holes for the dowels with brake cleaner, and loctite them in!

 

All the best

 

Katy

 

Good plan. They're meant to be an interference fit one side or the other anyway, you just found out why!

 

Don't you just hate it / have a sense of impending doom when you open an engine up and find dowels or studs that aren't seated right because everything is cagged up with RTV silicone? 

[Kickstart]

It became an interference fit between the crank and cam chain!

Honda did use gear driven cams, but not in more cost conscious ranges. For the Japanese market they made the vfr400, then produced the cbr400 as a cheaper bike. Both with cam gear drive. Most of the world  got the cbr600, built to a substantially lower price point, with cam chains (and steel frames, and other cost savings). Uk did get the vfr400 in small numbers, at close to 50% more expensive than the cbr600! The cbr750 was pretty much the same as the cbr1000 the rest of the world got, but the 750 had gear driven cams.

 

Irony is that Japanese market bikes of the time tended to have a far shorter life (very fashion conscious market)

 

A lot comes down to what the engine is designed for. Cam chain on the end of the crank is easier to change, but that means longer cams, hence needing to be heavier. All a pain.
 

All the best

 

Katy

[Northmoor]

11 minutes ago, Kickstart said:

Irony is that Japanese market bikes of the time tended to have a far shorter life (very fashion conscious market)

 

It's also that Japan has an incredibly strict MOT regime, which means that lots of bikes used to be sold for export (hence the thriving grey market in the UK in the 1990s) rather than scraped through.  Jap market 400s were superb bikes though, I'd love one but am probably 4" too tall and about 4 stone too heavy.

[Kickstart]

50 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

It's also that Japan has an incredibly strict MOT regime, which means that lots of bikes used to be sold for export (hence the thriving grey market in the UK in the 1990s) rather than scraped through.  Jap market 400s were superb bikes though, I'd love one but am probably 4" too tall and about 4 stone too heavy.

Plenty didn’t even get to their MOT equivalent. At one time they had a problem with abandoned bikes, as you had to pay the dealers to take your old bike in “part exchange”!
 

I have a friends zxr400 engine in the garage. Had it for over a decade!

 

All the best

 

Katy

[MrWolf]

22 minutes ago, Kickstart said:

Plenty didn’t even get to their MOT equivalent. At one time they had a problem with abandoned bikes, as you had to pay the dealers to take your old bike in “part exchange”!
 

I have a friends zxr400 engine in the garage. Had it for over a decade!

 

All the best

 

Katy

 

That's a true sign that your manufacturers dominate the market when you can treat customers like that. Britain's motor industry died from an attitude of we are the market leaders, take it or leave it. 

The buyers left it and instead of buying Nortons and Austins, they bought Kawasakis and Datsuns.

 

Although several bike dealers tell me that Japan has virtually lost the lightweight market. Shades of Birmingham 1967 possibly?

[polybear]

This Bear gets "Bike" magazine every month - I have a savings account with Lloyds and as part of the package I get the choice of a free mag every month; since MRJ isn't on the list the best alternative is "Bike" ("Knitting for Fun" etc. just doesn't float my boat somehow...).

I do have my Honda CB750FD (3800 miles from new! ) in safe storage, though am planning to sell it when C-19 backs off to stand any chance of a sensible price.  Anyway, the one thing that hits me every time I get a new mag is just how expensive new bikes are now - ten grand is dead easy to blow, fifteen no problem and twenty isn't a struggle either. Jeez.  So it's no wonder the are losing out to the likes of Royal Enfield (under 6K).  Personally I'd like a CCM, but the lack of a garage (or even easy access to a shed - though a C15 was just about practical for getting around the 90 degree bend in the alleyway) screws things for me - which is why the Honda has to go ; the fact that they're ten grand and cheap s/h ones just don't exist doesn't help either.

The other thing that strikes me with modern bikes (not the RE or CCM) is that they are soooo intricately wedged together and complicated that any chance of keeping them clean must involve a couple of thousand cotton buds every weekend.  No thanks.

Edited April 28, 2021 by polybear

[spikey]

54 minutes ago, polybear said:

This Bear gets "Bike" magazine every month ...

 

So that's still on the go then.  I remember picking up the first issue of it and being impressed by the breath of much-needed fresh air.   I quite liked "Superbike" when Tony Middlehurst edited it around 1984-ish, but "Motor Cycle" did have its charm in the 1960s.  It certainly did its best to preserve the status quo by always putting a positive spin on where the British bike industry was concerned.  Hence its preservation for years of the fiction that the roadtest bikes weren't specially prepared by the factories, and its regular use in test writeups of the notorious sentence "All the controls fell readily to hand", this being a sure sign that they were really scratching for something good to say about a bike.

 

PS  Mr Bear, can we please stick with black ink?  That blue, this laptop and the early-morning sunshine fair made my old eyes go peculiar.