W/NG - on the bench

 With the Square Four away it's time for the Huntmaster to step up and become go-to bike. The W/NG is going on the bench for a bit of a look around and some little jobs .

It's quite oily and I know that the decompressor is still leaking. What I didn't expect was to see that the leak appears to come from the main decompressor body and not from the spindle - it appears that the Dowty washer isn't doing its job and perhaps that is because the mating surface isn't as flat as it might be. I've cleaned up the nut and mating surface and relaced the Dowty washer with a new one, as I don't have a fibre washer of the correct size.

I've also replaced the (missing) gasket in the exhaust inspection cap - see that drip?

On a club run a couple of years ago, the horn fell off and it's retaining bolt was replaced by a 5/16 screw from the spares kit. I've replaced this with the proper 3/8 screw and I've also moved the horn bracket a little bit so that the terminals don't touch the engine plates and the horn body doesn't press the cable against the frame. The horn is now free to vibrate properly.

I've taken the opportunity to reroute the cable as well.

There are always tiny little things that bug you about a bike, particularly one which is in patinated condition like this. The washers under the headlamp bolts were very large and unsightly being chromed. I've replaced these with some rough old washers of the right size which look a lot better.

I've stripped the carburetter and cleaned the idle ports, but I didn't really find anything.

In other news, the Huntmaster has most definitely wet-sumped. There's probably a pint of oil here in this pan which I drained from the sump, being unable to start the bike. You could feel the oil in the crankcase being churned up when you kicked it over.

W/NG - it's home!

 Well, it's home!

Today I took the SQ4 down to my son's house for a holiday, and brought the W/NG home - a round trip of about 60 miles with a bit of extra lane-thumping. I'd forgotten what a laugh it was.

For some reason it's refusing to idle, and the decompressor is still leaking...

W/NG - broken MT110

 Checking over the W/NG yesterday whilst babysitting the two youngest revealed a bike that started, whose lights worked with a new battery but no brake light. A bit of nosing around soon found the problem - all the wires to the Lucas MT110 rear lamp were torn out of the fitting somehow. Since it's been sitting in Thomas' garage surrounded by bicycles, tools, other motorcycles, lawn mowers and the accoutrements of three small boys it's hardly surprising that it's suffered some damage. 

The problem is that I have very little time to repair the lamp before I need to ride it back tomorrow. I bought the lamp back to the workshop to give it a dose of looking at.

The first job was to sort out a way of replicating the contacts in the lamp base. I discovered that these boot lace ferrules I had in the terminals box have a slightly belled end and you can thread a new wire through, spread the strands out and add a blob of solder.

That's the first problem fixed.

Next is to sort out the earth connection. I thought that the original earth wire was soldered to the outside of the lamp holder - turns out I was wrong about that but what I planned to do was put a washer type fitting inside the lamp base and solder a wire to that, like this:

I eventually found that actually the original wire was soldered to a brass washer which was still there, and which I could have used. Hey ho.

The next bit, and apologies for the terrible picture, was to add some heat shrink to the rear lamp and brake lamp terminals to add a bit of extra strength. This is actually a bit long and inhibits the deflection of the connectors as they go into the bulb holder. 

Reassembling the lamp left me with something that didn't work at all. I pulled it all the part again and realised that the inside of the bulb holder was corroded and I wasn't getting an earth connection. The Dremel fixed that along with a bit of sandpaper.

So that left it all working again and hopefully I can bring the bike back tomorrow. I might pull this lamp apart again and use the original brass washer, since the spring is not in very good shape and is rather weak.

W/NG - it's coming home?

 It's been a while but I'm hoping that the W/NG will be coming home soon for a few jobs. It will be great to see it, since I've not been on it since August 2023 when I delivered it to Tom's before the 2023 Castle Acre Run with the local VMCC.

To prepare there's a couple of things to do: 

• Check the tyre pressures 
• Make sure the fuel tap doesn't leak 
• Make sure the electrics work 
• Check if I've got fuel & oil

Son Thomas has already replaced the handlebar grips:

These had all but fallen apart in the couple of years that it's been away. It's getting a new battery - the existing one is dated 2013 and won't take a charge.

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 Ariel 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.

Here's another one:

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.