FH - more lift please

 The design of the centre stand fitted to the swinging arm bikes is one of the few weak areas of the last aerial frame design. It's not very strong - legs are often a little bent, the holes wear oval, the stops deform, and the feet drag along the ground and wear away quickly. It's easy to use but it's faults are not helped by people starting the bike on the stand. 

When restoring a frame it's one of the first things to look at. The stand stops on the frame are likely to be deformed and you want to build them up with weld before you paint the frame. Feet are readily available from Draganfly for you to repair your own stand, and Draganfly have replacement centre stands if you don't fancy doing the welding.

Geometrically then, it's a pretty good design let down by details. The stops aren't big enough, and the single sided foot pressings are just... bad.

Stand repair is something I don't look forward to, or didn't until someone came up with a new method. Personally I've never had much success trying to lever the stand around to get the pins in, and I've hitherto resorted to the old method of pushing pennies, washers or wire into the open coils to get the springs off.

Until this method came along. Setting the scene: the bike is on a scissor lift under the frame rails and the centre stand is in the raised position - I've actually got the front wheel clamped and a cargo strap holding it upright as well.

The first step is to remove the outer circlip and washer from each side - I find it easier to push the pins into the middle.

Next I've secured two cargo straps to the ramp, each one looped around one of the stand feet. If you were doing this without a ramp, you could secure the straps to something heavy in the workshop or perhaps to the rear wheel of the bike.

The next step is to put a bit of tension on the straps - it doesn't take much, just enough to let you feel the pins go loose so you can push them out.

Getting the stand back on is almost as easy. Once you have the straps around the feet and the springs in, you can tension the straps and align the stand eyes with the holes in the frame. You'll have to manoeuvre the eyes to get them to line up, but the cargo straps take the strain and allow you to get the pins inserted without having to hurry.

To repair the stops is easy - if you can weld, or know a man who can. You don't need to add much to the stops - the stand legs are about 8" long and the stops are located 1" away from the centre of the pins, so if you add 1/8" to the stop you can move the leg about 1". Depending on the angle of your stand, that will give you maybe 3/8" of lift.

These eyes appear to be steel castings - they seem to weld very easily.

Wear aside, my stand issues are partly of my own making. When I ordered the shocks, someone suggested that I opt for a bit more length in the shock to give a bit more travel at the rear. Looking back, if I had realised I would need additional lift from the centre stand to accommodate the longer shocks I don't think I would have done it.

SQ4 - all done

This might be the last post on the Square Four for a little while - it's next trip is likely to be to my long-term storage at my son's house, where I shall go to collect W/NG to come back for some work - but more on that later .

Today I took the Square on a 15 mile round trip to Cromer to do some painting and do the final shake down on the carburettor and ignition settings. Yesterday I fitted the new mixture screw and this needed a little bit of tweaking to get it spot on and I increase the idle speed slightly - though I think I've got it too high. I also retarded the ignition slightly. 

The good news is that it's running very well. It starts easily and it will pull away cleanly in traffic from low speeds. It flies along on the open road so all in all I'm very happy.

Here it is resting at Gresham church.

Getting home, it occurred to me that in a similar fashion to the light switch yesterday I had not touched the horn for a long time. Since I fitted this horn, which came straight from eBay, I don't think it's had any work done to it and as regular readers will know I've become reasonably adept at adjusting these horns.

I gave this one a little tweak to make the sound a bit more intense.

SQ4 - idle mixture screw

 I recently took a punt on an eBay sale for a mixture screw for a carburettor from a Rolls-Royce B40 engine, the one used in the Austin Champ. It was listed as a Solex part and looked very much like the one on the Square Four.

I struck lucky - the parts are exactly the same.

This is the old one, and measures 4.86 mm at the end of the thread

This is the new one, which measures 4.92 mm at the end of the thread:

So perhaps not a huge amount of wear. It does appear though that the nose of the old screw is notched - I don't know if you can see it in this picture:

I fitted the new screw with a t-bar and put it back in the carburettor with a wrap or two of PTFE tape. 

We'll have to see if it makes a difference.

SQ4 - dodgy connections

 Riding home a couple of days ago in rather poor light I became aware that the headlamp had turned itself off. A few minutes fiddling with the light switch made me realise that there was something going on with the contacts - I could wiggle the handle and the light would flash. This needed further investigation.

As far as I could tell from various blog posts, this original Lucas U39 light switch had not been apart for probably 10 years. My own skills and knowledge have improved immensely in that time and I now clean these switches with an ammonia based clock cleaning solution as shown in this post. 

The one on the bike was clearly a bit grubby. 

I stripped it out and immersed it in a 25% solution of ammonia-based clock cleaner for about 4 hours.

After a few hours, the brass parts emerge without the tarnish and looking a lot more and conductive!

Here it is again, reassembled.

Charlie's Shed - tool restoration

 I've done a lot of posts on toolkits and tool rolls in the past, and here comes one more. Repacking the Huntmaster toolkit one day I noticed that a 3/8 BSW spanner was rather damaged - in typical fashion it had been sprung open by over exertion.

It's actually quite easy to fix these. I set it up in my little hearth and heated it cherry red, picking it out with a pair of tongs and giving it some adjustment with a 1 lb hammer. It's actually closed up nicely back to size.

The black finish is achieved by quenching it in oil.

SQ4 - idling again

 A 30-minute run out this evening confirmed that adding PTFE tape to the volume screw put us on the right track to improve the idle and hesitation problems on the Square Four.

It needs more work, adjusting the idle speed down, further adjustments to the ignition timing and probably some small changes to the idle mixture as well but it is starting well and idles smoothly. 

SQ4 - idling

 The Solex is back on, but I still have a problem with idling - but it's different. The bow in the inlet flange that I removed has changed it's behaviour at idle, as you might expect, but in tuning the idle I've realised that the idle volume screw is very worn. 

I've ordered a new one:

While I wait, I've wrapped the old screw with PTFE tape which should help.

FH - A few odds and ends

 With an hour or so to spare, I went to the workshop to finish putting the tank on the Huntmaster. Bolting it down was no problem but I noticed a drip from the tap. The plunger was very loose and I imagined the cork might have dried out since it had been empty for quite a long time. I was wrong about that - the cork was just knackered. 

Fortunately I have quite a lot of spare plungers knocking about and I found one with a good cork that I could plug the tap with whilst I repaired the original. It's the usual drill here with these post -war taps - you knock out the brass centre using a punch, replace the cork with a new one, and put the centre back in. In taps where you have to twist the plunger, the centre is actually formed as a square at the outer end and there wasn't sufficient material left here to re-peen the brass end into the chrome handle. I filed the end back a little bit to give me more length and used to centre punch to peen it into place:

The next job had been coming for a while. The chrome strip which hides the welds on the top of the tank broke at the hook holding it onto the end of the tank. I toyed with the idea of buying a new one for a while and then realised as it was brass I could probably make new hook, soldering it in place of the old one. 

I made a new one and used some solder paste to tin both the strip and the new hook adding some extra solder to it once tinned.

I held it in place with some clamps whilst I sweated the joint together.

That worked really well, and is more secure than it has ever been.

Charlie's Shed - a leather tool holster

 As some of you know I volunteer on the North Norfolk Railway as a steam fireman, trainee DMU driver and trainee guard. Some of these roles need a few bits of equipment which can be bought or made. 

Some of you also know that I have a 1930 Ariel Model A which needs two toolboxes and that I have a hankering to make these myself from leather, so I've concocted a few little jobs to learn about the leather work. 

This latest one is a little holster for a ticket clipper - that old-school tool that you used to see bus conductors and railway ticket collectors using to make holes in your ticket.

We start with a bit of 2 mm leather, soaked in the sink. Add to that the ticket clipper wrapped in cling film and a wooden form cut to the shape of the clipper plus a few millimetres.

Using the clipper and that form we can squash the wet leather around the clipper until it dries and miraculously it will have formed the shape of the clipper. Behind that there is a thicker bit of leather which will make the backing and the belt loop so that I can carry this around up and down the train.

When I've cut the backing to shape I can use my stitching punches to make the holes for the stitches. This is quite hard work on the thumbs! Since I made my key wallet a few weeks ago I have learnt to stitch in a box shape in order to make the belt loops rigid.

The next step is to glue and stitch the formed shape to the backing. We will be gluing flesh side to skin side, which will never work unless we use some sandpaper to rough up the skin side. We are going to stitch this joint as well but the stitching will go more easily if we glue it first.

We use the stitching pony to hold the work firmly whilst we sit in front of a YouTube video and sew it together using the normal saddle stitch.

The final step is to use the knife to cut the waste away.

There's always a question about belt loops but this time the design fits nicely against my waist and is easy to use. I can get the clipper in and out and the holster doesn't move at all.