FH - not charging...

 Having learned that the FH will drain it's oil tank through the gear pump into the sump, I try to run it once a week or so during the winter. It was on one of these occasions that I noticed it wasn't charging and my first thought was to look at the dynamo to see if it had broken another chain.

Fortunately not - so I left it alone for a dose of thinking about.

Coming back the next day, I worked through the other electrical systems to see if anything jogged my thoughts and found the rear light wasn't working either: given that the ammeter and the rear light connect through the lighting switch I had a look under the top yoke:

Two wires had pulled out of the five way connector. Harness too tight or connectors not assembled properly in the first place?

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 - Number Plate and Rear Lamp

 For a while I've felt that I wanted to impart a more traditional English look to the back of the W/NG, which for years has worn its Italian number plate and lamp:

I chose the 5647-35 number plate which I found on eBay. It's designed for the flat 'D' mudguard with no rib, so I have cut a notch in it for the rib.

It's got a replica MT110, which would have been a standard fit for civilian machines in-period:

FH Dry Build - tail light plinth

 The FH, along with other swinging arm Ariels of the period has an unusual feature used to mount the tail light vertically - a little pressed steel plinth, part number 5611-55. Drags do a very nice replica for about £15, but they have been out of stock for a while and it is an easy thing to make.

Starting with the Lucas 564 rear lamp, we need a caliper, some plastic holes, a piece of card and a scalpel.

I used the holes and the caliper to mark out three holes in the card - one for the bulb holder and two for the mounting bolts. Then I can fit the lamp to the card and draw around it:

Next, I can develop the part around the shape of the lamp: 

Cut it out with the scalpel, using a wad punch for the holes if you have one of a suitable size. In my case, I punched the smaller holes and used a swivelling scalpel for the larger one:

Next, make some nice sharp folds with a ruler and use staples or a glue gun to fix the edges which will eventually be welded:

Now, we can do a test fit and trim the pattern to allow the lamp to sit vertically above the number plate:

With the part to the shape we want, we can undo the staples and stick the pattern to a suitable steel sheet. It's that old bread bin again, that gave us the air filter for the QR50:

I used the bandsaw to cut it out, but you can use a hacksaw, shears or whatever you have. The edges are cleaned and deburred with a variety of files.

Folding is quite straightforward using just the vice and my trusty bit of copper bar. With folding completed, the next step is to weld up the joints - most of which came together to weld autogenously. The linisher springs into action to clean it up:

After a couple of trial fits and a bit more time on the linisher, I treated the plinth to a bit of UPol etch primer before fitting it to the bike - temporarily, with a few magnets:

I think it looks fine.

Updating the rear light

One of the things I really liked about this W/NG was the pseudo Italian styling brought about as a result of its resurrection after the war - the red & black paint, the racy downswept bars, the white grips and the vintage style knee rubbers, and of course the rear light.

The rear light, whilst stylish in my eyes was equipped for two festoon type bulbs, and with a 40 W E3HM dynamo this was going to be a problem. In my experience it is easy to get a bright, low current LED for the back but using an LED in the front is less desirable, so, aiming to use my power budget in the front, we need an LED for the rear.

Now, since the light we have is a bit of a pancake (pork pie? cheese?) shape compared to the 529 on the Square Four or the Wipac 'Sabrina' on the Bantam, we can't use a regular bulb holder. In this case I'm going to use an LED light board which I bought from CDRC recently.

To use this we will need to remove the festoon bulb holders. This is as easy as drilling out the rivets:

I don't want to clean any of this up - I like the patina of the old light and the corrosion will not affect function in any way in this case.

So here's a simple group of components - the lens, case, back plate and LED board:

Since the area the rear light fits in the number plate is quite badly damaged, there is limited opportunity for fixing holes. I am going to use an existing one, but since any fastener in this hole will be inaccessible after the light board goes in, we must make it captive. I'll use a small coach bolt, fitted into a square hole in the light unit and retained with cyanoacrylate.

The LED board sits on two brass posts retained with M3 screws, so we need a couple of holes for them. Use a blanking plug to close the spare hole and a grommet to protect the wires.

The cables need to be restrained somehow, so that an inadvertent tug on the wires does not pull on the solder joint to the LED board. To do this, we'll use a tie-wrap to retain the wires to one of the brass posts supporting the light board:

And that's it. Here are a couple of views of the finished article, terminated with Japanese bullets: