Sewing Awl

 It’s amazing what you can do with a few bits of junk lying around the workshop. A leatherwork project (shortening a belt) revealed that sewing leather is not as easy as it looks - even when you have made the holes with your awl, you still need to re-open them as you make each stitch, and I didn’t have a sharp awl.

I had a long, sharp needle of about 2 mm, and went in search of a file handle - all of which had file-tang size holes in them, when the little wood lathe caught my eye. I sliced a bit of scrap oak on the bandsaw to make a 1” square blank, and attacked it with chisels:

I turned the end to 13 mm OD, to fit snugly inside a bit of 15 mm copper tube; I annealed the tube a formed the end over so that I had a neat ferrule, and glued it on the handle with some Loctite, pushing the needle into a 1.5 mm hole in the end.

Took about an hour:

FH - where are we?

 A bit of a boring post, but I just need to catch up with where I am. I have four work faces with various bits on order and I’ll summarise where I am in order to work out what to do next:

1. Engine: waiting to fit the rocker box and the ATD. I need a couple of replacement studs for the rocker box/head/head steady connection which I’ll make on the lathe. I’ll spin the engine to get the oil circulating before fitting the rocker box, and I’ll fit the ATD when the rocker box is fitted.
2. Oil System: waiting to finish the connection of the chain oiler and rocker box pipes, and clean the oil tank, before finally fixing the oil tank in place. I’ve ordered the running in oil and the SAE 40 for later. I’ll need to put a cupful in the sump (probably through the rocker box drains) and to fill the return filter through the hose.
3. Gearbox: I’ve made the new pushrod from 5/16” silver steel; I have the gasket and the ball; I’m going to spin the engine on the mainshaft nut to get the oil system working and once I have done that I can fill the gearbox and put the kickstart case cover back on.
4. Clutch: waiting for the gearbox to go back together for testing. May need new corks, which are in stock.
5. Chains: primary is in, tensioned but not oiled; secondary has a dummy fitted.
6. Exhausts: waiting for the clutch dome and timing covers to go on.
7. Electrics: I’ve reviewed the wiring diagram, estimated the cable lengths and ordered the cables, bullets, straps and sleeving. The dynamo is not connected up yet (mechanically or electrically), but it works.
8. Control Cables: There’s nothing stopping me making the cables for the carburetter, though  the clutch cable needs to wait for the gearbox case to go back together.
9. Wheels & tyres: these are parked until the machine is running.

That about sums it up. Opportunities today are:

1. Make some rocker box studs
2. Start wiring the dashboard
3. Finish the oil pipes and clean the tank
4. Fit the rear chain

Every blog post needs a picture, even an old one!

Skiving Knife

As you know I have a diverse range of interests, though they are often linked in some way. When the Model A finally finds a space on the bench, it's going to need a seat cover and two leather 'front's' for the toolboxes, so I have a hankering to learn about leather working. I've also made one or two knives...

Leatherworking is one of many hobbies for which you can buy a huge range of tools with an equally huge range of qualities. I'm a beginner, unwilling to invest in some I may be no good at, and unsure of what tools are really useful. My wife bought a few old leatherworking awls, which I cleaned and sharpened, with a view to trimming an over-long belt that I have had for years, from the buckle end..

Remanufacturing the belt with the buckle in a different place involved slimming down the end of the belt to reduce the thickness of the leather - a process known as skiving.

Skiving is used in leatherwork especially in areas that are to be bent or folded and which must be pliable without becoming weakened. You really need a wide bladed knife for skiving; there are plenty of cheap ones available on eBay but of course you get what you pay for and they are unlikely to be made of decent steel. As you know I've made a few knives and it was a simple matter to make one of my own from a piece of 40 mm wide 1095 knife steel.

As usual I drew out the pattern on a piece of paper stuck to the steel. This is 3 mm thick flat bar to provide a stiff and heavy knife. The profile was cut out with the hacksaw and filed to shape. 

I cut the primary bevel on the linisher before heating the blade area cherry red in the furnace and the quenching in oil.

Whilst the blade has yet to be tempered it takes an edge very well and it's perfectly suited to the job it was designed for. 

FH - hooking up the oil tank

 There's a few jobs knocking around at the moment and it's all starting to get a bit confusing. This next task is aimed at preparing for running the engine up on a power drill to circulate the oil before we put it under any load. 

First off I'll have a look around the oil tank and make sure it's clean and to make sure that I understand the connections - basically that so I don't make a mistake when I'm hooking it up.

Looking inside the filler neck with a camera reveals the return pipe and its hole just above the return strainer.

Next to this on a flat ledge is the restricted hole which leads down to the chain oiler:

Deeper in the tank we can see the feed pipe which is raised above the bottom of the tank, and behind it the drain plug which unsurprisingly is right at the bottom of the tank.

The next step is to finalise the hooking up of the oil lines. These are connected correctly, with the feed pipe on the outside of the tank going to the feed connection at the bottom of the engine.

Next we'll swill out the tank with paraffin, finalise the screwed connections, and make up the push fit hoses for the chain oiler and the rocker box oil feed.

FH - centre stand

 I noticed as I was building the Huntmaster up that the rear wheel was in contact with the deck of the lift. Now I did specify rear suspension units that were marginally longer than normal to give me some extra travel and some extra comfort but I hadn't bargained for the fact that the centre stand had so little lift that the wheel touched the ground.

Shame I painted it before I noticed this, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I found a spare moment and removed the springs again using 2.5 mm copper wire wound into the open coils mainly because I didn't have enough thin washers to hold the coils extended. The springs came off relatively easily and I built up the stand stops which were rather worn, using the TIG welder. This picture shows one of the stops part way through the process: I added another layer because this did not prove to be thick enough.

Testing installation for the second time gave me 3/8" of clearance to the rear tyre. The lift has a removable panel under the rear wheel to allow the wheel to drop out and this is something like an 1/8" thick, so we probably have a total of 1/2" or so of lift off the ground. 

That job was a lot easier than I thought it might be. I had the welder set to 60 amps with quite a long stick out to allow me to get into the corners of the stand stops. I didn't have worried about the paint - it was scarcely burnt. 

Whilst I was under there I fitted the spacer between the frame and the primary case. Now all Ariels need this spacer and it is of somewhat variable thickness. Unfortunately I realised that I should have fitted the spacer before the primary case went on; withdrawing the gearbox bottom bolt at this point to fit the spacer would have released the centre stand springs that I had worked so hard to install.

This photograph therefore is here as a reminder to me to fit the spacer properly next time I take the primary case off. Right now the spacer is of a C-section so that it can be fitted without withdrawing the bolt.

FH - gearbox

 First off let me just say that I'm not going to rebuild the GB gearbox on the Huntmaster just yet. The gears select well, there's no play in the mainshaft, no lateral play in the gearbox as far as I can tell and whilst there's a little bit of movement in the sleeve gear it's no worse than other gearboxes I've looked at at the outset. Turning the shaft by hand doesn't reveal any strange noises so I think we'll just leave it be for the moment. 

However, there is something strange going on. When I assembled the clutch I discovered that I couldn't get the plates to touch, even when the screws were done up relatively tightly against the springs which made me think that perhaps there were two ball bearings within the main shaft. I fitted a new one when I replaced the push rod but now that the pushrod assembly is effectively over long I think there may be two. 

Of course I can't remove the ball bearings from the clutch side because they are right down at the other end of the mainshaft and I've no means of pulling them out. Therefore I've got to remove the kickstart case cover, have a look at the clutch mechanism and remove the balls from that end. This will give me a chance to polish the kickstart case cover to match the timing cover. Secondly it will give me a chance to look at the mainshaft end float and to learn a little bit about the gear selector mechanism on the GB, which I've never looked at before.

The kickstart quadrant is in lovely condition:

It looks very clean inside and it's immediately obvious that the design is a little more sophisticated than the BA/CP type that I'm used to. The mainshaft has no detectable end float that I can find. It's obvious that the gearbox has only had oil in it; though I will probably use the Morris K400EP grease in it as usual.

Moving the pushrod from the clutch side, having pulled the lifting mushroom out revealed something rather strange. There's a large lump of what appears to be oily rust sitting at the end of the main shaft:

I pushed this out and then ran a little roll of paper up and down the inside of the mainshaft swabbing out the remaining muck. It was at this point that I realised that the quarter inch push rod that I had made in a previous post is the wrong diameter for the GB gearbox. Speaking to the various members of the club, including the gearbox specialist, revealed that GB gearboxes use a 5/16" diameter push rod. 

While waiting for some new bits to arrive I'll polish the end cover: