FH - bottom end complete

A little bit later than expected I am back in the workshop. My generator decided to burn out it's alternator winding, and took the battery charger with it which meant buying a new generator, building a trolley for it (it doesn't fit where the old one was) and building a trolley for the welders - because their spot is not taken up by the generator...

Having got most of that out of the way, I can strip the cases again to fit the replacement connector rod nuts, BSA part number 37-1691. These are genuine new old stock from Vale-Onslow. Looking at the picture below, from left to right we have the modified Draganfly nut, an unmodified nut, and on the right the new lower profile nut:

This, by the way, is the mark left by the Draganfly nuts before I modified them:

Here are the Draganfly big end bolt washers. These are laser cut stainless and whilst some suggested they were rather small, they are much the same size as the bearing surface of the nut so I am leaving them in place.

Stupidly, I forgot to picture the new nuts in place on the big end caps. Mrs H phoned to see where I had got to (I'll just be 10 minutes dear!), and that's always a distraction. Suffice to say that they were torqued up to 22 lbf.ft in accordance with the BSA data sheet and I oiled up the various bearings before closing the cases. I made sure to remove all traces of Threebond and was very sparing with it when reassembling.

The case bolts are all stainless, from Acme as usual and they fit beautifully. I made this chart from the diagram in the Draganfly catalogue to show me where the different bolts go:

Lovely and easy putting them in; I used my frame spreader to make it a bit easier.

Now that the bottom end is in, we've got a number of workfaces to tackle:

• the barrel and pistons
• the primary case
• the timing gear

We can look at any of these really but before we do there are some components around the engine that will become less accessible as we progress. The first of these is the engine breather shown here in the form in which it arrived:

This isn't how Ariel designed it. It's supposed to bend around and appear behind the FERC, above the gearbox sprocket somewhere.

Another item is the magneto. It's fitted here temporarily with the long bottom nut, which is on the job list for zinc plating. With the primary case loosely bolted in place you can see that it's quite restricted in there:

Something that surprised me, and thanks to Daniel Rix on the FH Facebook page for this, is that you cannot get the brake bell crank on with the primary case in place. That's a pain, because I want to get on with the mechanical build and I hadn't planned on doing any plating just yet... and the bell crank needs plating.

The other thing I must remember is to fit the oil lines before I fit the primary cases! Access will be a trifle difficult if I forget, so let's not get ahead of ourselves and we will get on with sorting out some of the details.