Model A - still milling

 It's been a busy week what with one thing and another but one thing that did happen was a delivery from Tracy Tools - 2 milling cutters and a slot drill which enabled me to finish the first slot and start the second. 

This is how it looks in place:

Note that the edges of the slots are currently radial - they will have more of a tangential slope once we move to the vertical slide setup.

This is the same view with the original kickstart shaft:

And for the record, from the other end of the kickstart travel:

Next we are back on the lathe to mill the long slot that goes most of the way around the shaft:

That is three 0.5 mm passes.

FH - 30 miles in an Hour

Norfolk is a vast county, and North Norfolk offers a wide range of things to do, places to go and lovely winding roads with hardly a dual carriageway amongst them. There are no motorways here and most of these roads are just as they were laid out when our favourite bikes were new. It's a wonderful place to ride if you've got nowhere particular to go and no schedule to hurry you back home.

Today's trip started out as a plan for a magazine article where you ride 30 miles in an hour taking in some local scenery, and so it worked out. We planned the route using Google maps and totted up the miles between a few local sites. Here's the map:

It made more sense to start and finish in Weybourne than at home to reduce the amount of time going out and back on the same road, and our chosen starting point was All Saints Church.

Weybourne All Saints is on the site of a small Augustinian priory founded in 1280 and dissolved in 1536. The land and the buildings were granted to John Gresham, an English merchant courtier and financier who worked for Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolseley and Thomas Cromwell it's no surprise then that the school he founded nearby in Holt is now a wealthy organisation with a number of famous old boys, from the spy Donald McLean through the composer Benjamin Britten to the inventor James Dyson and actor Olivia Coleman.

From Weybourne, we head out in a westerly direction heading past Muckleburgh hill, home of Weybourne Camp whose anti-aircraft defences look out over the deep water port at Weybourne. Once over the hill we reach the little village of Kelling with its charming post office and tea room before branching up onto Kelling Heath towards our next stop. This is a beautiful area of yellow gorse bushes, trees and winding lanes perfect in the bright sunshine. We turn to the north and head down to our next stop which is the RAF Bard Hill radar station. Contrary to popular belief Norfolk - whilst not particularly high, is not flat at all - we are at about 60 m above sea level here. 

We drove from there in the direction of Salthouse, before taking a wrong turn I ended up on Salthouse Heath overlooking the sea and a cable lay vessel which wasn't there when Edward Seago painted a picture from here some 100 years ago.

Having taken the wrong turn, we rode down into Salthouse and took the steep road up to RAF Bard Hill. We turn off to visit the remains of the RAF radar station. Bard Hill was established in 1941 as a ship tracking and Chain Home Low radar station and stands on a bluff above the village. There's not a great deal left here now other than a blast wall, concrete base and the foundations of the huge antenna tower. There's a memorial in Salthouse Church to a Lancaster crew who had the misfortune of flying into one of the antennae in the middle of the night and later crashed at Langham airfield.

Back down the hill, which the Ariel's full width hubs handled pretty well, we stop for a minor carburettor adjustment at a regular watering hole, The Dun Cow. The pub garden looks out over the salt marshes towards the sea and is a lovely place to spend the afternoon on a fine day. If it's windy, go and huddle indoors - this can be a wild & rough place, much like the Huntmaster's idle. We spend the first half of the trip moving the idle air screw up and down trying to get the engine to keep running.

We ride along the edge of the salt marshes and the beginning of Norfolk's famous bird reserves. we pass through the village of Cley, to buy some cake for later, with its windmill which used to look out over a huge harbour from Tudor times, long since silted up. Twisting through the village we come out the other side and head up the hill towards Blakeney. 

Blakeney has a lovely harbour, pictured elsewhere on the blog but we're not going down there today. Whipping through the village on the main road, we travel along the coast through Morston to the village of Stiffkey. We stop by St. John & St. Mary's church, known for its slightly wayward vicar who's life inspired Michael Palin in the film 'The Missionary', and who met his fate after his ecclesiastical career finished as a rather unsuccessful lion tamer. 

Next we're off to find the iron age hillfort known as Warham camp, which we know to be on the Wells & Walsingham Light Railway, just inland from Wells-next-the-Sea. We find the village of Warham but we've completely forgotten how to get to the earthwork from the village and instead take the next road to Binham to take a picture of a beautiful priory in the morning sun:

Binham was a Benedictine priory founded in 1091 and completed in the mid 13th century and destroyed, like many others in the area, during Henry VIII 'dissolution of the monasteries' in 1539.

We're on the way home now and running short of time. This trip is supposed to be 1 hour, but of course stopping and taking pictures (and adjusting the carburettor, which is now idling perfectly by the way - I have raised the idle speed a tiny bit and put the air screw back to where it was) all takes some time, and I'm supposed to be home by 12:30. There is time however to revisit a remarkable structure near the village of Langham, at RAF Cockthorp, known as Langham Dome. This is the anti-aircraft gun crew trainer which we visited before on the W/NG, with my friend John on his MT350. Since we've been here it's got a full size Spitfire gate guardian and it's open as a museum.

Home from Langham through the pretty little town of Holt leaves us perilously close to the most westerly station on our favourite railway - the North Norfolk Railway - but the station is closed today. We've got our keys and we could ride up to the station building and take a better photo but we really don't have time...

Another station to end the trip - Weybourne station, which is about 2.5 miles from Holt and another 2.5 miles to Sheringham - seen here with the marvellous English Electric Class 37 locomotive D6732 on a sunny day last year. The loco was built at Newton le Willows in 1960, so it's a bit younger than the Huntmaster.

So that's it, until next time. We're pleased to find that the FH is all in order when we get home, nothing broken or falling off and it doesn't seem to have used any oil. It's done nearly 400 miles now and is no longer smoking from #2 cylinder. Those rings must have bedded in a bit.

Model A - milling the kickstart shaft

 Milling starts with the realisation that I only have long-series end mills, and the largest one is pretty blunt.

We crack on anyway, to get a feel for it, test the setup, and try out the rotary table.

Learning about the state of the 3/8" mill, I press on with a new 1/4" cutter.

Shortly after I took this picture, and having spent some time sharpening a cutter, I broke the 3/8" mill by feeding it too hard. I pressed a dovetail bit into service and got a lot more material out.

Model A - Kickstart Shaft, setting up for milling

 After a turn on the railway and with the grandchildren coming for the weekend there's not much time for workshop stuff, but I'm inching closer to finishing the setup for milling. 

Some countersunk M6 screws have arrived to clamp the right angle plate to the cross slide, underneath the rotary table:

Using the slot that we milled a few weeks ago, we can adjust the rotary table to align with the centre of the lathe spindle: 

The tap follower I'm using as a pointer here looks like it might be useful for marking out the parts of the work we are going to mill away.

A little while later, after all the preparation for the visiting little ones is done, I venture back to the workshop. I've reduced the diameter of the 2" section to the required 1.990" to match the original, and increased the length of the 1 1/8" section by about 0.040" such that it protrudes from the kickstart shaft bush by 0.020" rather than hiding inside it. I've also changed the carbide tool inserts for new ones.

I've also made a new set of clamps, but I've made them a bit big - I think we might have to do that again... That's development work for you!

In the same package as the M6 screws for the right angle plate came some button head M6. These are to replace the cap heads on the cross and compound slide handles to avoid skinning our knuckles: 

They look a lot neater as well.

Model A - kickstart shaft inches closer

 First job today was to drill a 5mm hole in the 2" end of the fledgling shaft to prepare for the trial fit on the rotary table. That done, I discovered that the end face isn't quite flat, so that will need correcting before we start milling - it's difficult to get in close to face of the end with the revolving centre in the way - maybe I will use my half-centre.

Anyhow, I think I have enough bits in the milling clamp box to hold it together:

The work is located on the rotary table with this little 5 mm pin:

I'll probably improve the security of the clamping arrangement, like this:

In other news, rooting around in my collection of adjustable reamers revealed an H8 reamer, perfect for the kickstart lever.

It's now a perfect fit: