Managing

I use this spreadsheet to manage my parts, track what I need, what I've ordered, what I paid or budgeted for the rebuild...

The parts are grouped by work package; can be filtered or grouped by vendor, order status, part number, or whatever you want.

Very useful. Here it is: http://pisl.co.uk//ArielAccounts.xlsx.zip

Resting my weary feet...

Working around the oil tank & oil lines, I need to be sure that everything in that congested area is in before I can say I've completed work for Phase 1.

Fitting the footrest mounts in place, it is clear we have a few problems though they are easily fixed. These type of issues demonstrate clearly why a mechanical - only rebuild is necessary on a bike which is in pieces.

Take a look at the picture of the RH footrest hanger - it is clearly pointing to the rear of the bike and has perhaps unsurprisingly been bent at some time.

The left hand hanger, the one that passes through the primary case is nice and straight (it is a new pattern part) but unfortunately the anti-rotation lug on the engine plate does not fit in the cut out machined for it - easily fixed with a file, but not something you would want to find when it is just back from the powder-coater. And remember the Bantam fork legs - powder coat, if that is what you are going to use, is very thick and we will need extra clearance adding for the thickness of the paint.

Here's that footrest in a better place, after a session with the Rothenberger. We also have a clutch lever boot, making it's first appearance on the blog.

Easy job - grasp the end in the vice using the handy bolt hole, and heat the area you want to move to cherry red. Use a stout tube, Stillson, ring spanner or whatever suits your purpose and you can heave it back into place - don't hit it, bend it gradually using all your He-Man (Master of the Universe) strength and if you have it hot enough it will move easily and in a controlled fashion.

Let it cool, trial fit, go through the process again if necessary.

Oh and by the way - the other valuable lesson I learned was that no, the footrest rod spacer won't go in if the engine is in. One for the future, that one.

Oil Strainer

As I said in my previous post, I still have welding to do but it is time now for something quiet. 

This is the oil strainer banjo bolt out of the bottom of the oil tank. You will note that the strainer is conspicuous by its absence - only a scrap of solder remains:

A strainer is a simple affair made from brass mesh - I selected some from an eBay shop at 40 wires/inch to be suitable for filtering bricks, flies and sweet wrappers from the cold viscous oil in the tank.

Strainers are easy to make. Select a former to match the diameter of the banjo bolt - I used a piece of chromed tube intended for making clothes rails. Pass it through the hole in the tank, and measure the maximum length of the strainer. Subtract the length of the banjo bolt.

Cut a piece of gauze to that length with your snips, or use scissors. You need good quality snips - scissors are fine. Loose or worn snips will just allow the wire to slip between the shear blades. Cut the width to wrap around your former and add 3/8".

Fold up 3/16" or so at each edge, shown in the photograph above. One edge must go up, the other down, as shown in the first sketch below. Wrap the gauze around the former so the edges overlap, shown in the middle diagram.

Ease the folded edges over one another with your fingers, so they lock together like the last diagram.

At this point, check the strainer fits over the solder area on the banjo bolt. If it's OK, find a suitable mandrel (I used a cold chisel) that will fit inside and press the seam tightly together with something hard & smooth (like the shank of a screwdriver)

Now you need to make the end. Cut a disc of gauze, about 3/16" larger than the former you used to wrap the gauze. Lay the disc over the end of the former, and press it into something soft - your palm will do. This will raise the edges of the gauze around the former. You can finish that off with your fingers. The aim is to make a little 'dish' of gauze.

When you've finished, set it upside down in the strainer (raised edges upward):

This is how it looks all together:

Next step, solder it up. Start by taking the strainer off the banjo bolt again. Use a small torch to heat the large banjo bolt, with some Baker's Fluid in the solder recess at the top. Tin this area with solder when it is up to temperature. Use ordinary plumber's or electrician's solder for this job, there is no point in using anything stronger.

When this is complete & cool, mount the strainer back on the banjo bolt. Use a big electric iron and some more Baker's Fluid to reheat the solder at the top of the banjo bolt and it should flow happily into the gauze. Now, after the bolt has cooled move the banjo bolt in the vice so that the strainer is horizontal and the seam is uppermost. Take your soldering iron and run a small amount of solder right along the seam. 

When it is cool again, have a look inside the strainer and make sure it is clean. This area is for CLEAN oil and goes direct to the oil pump - you DON'T want any gobbets of loose solder in there!

Fit the end cap, and dunk it in some flux. Use the soldering iron to run a small amount of solder around the end cap, fixing it to the barrel of the strainer.

Let it cool, and wash the flux off.

And this is the finished article:

On with the Oil Tank

Looking back, I realise that pulling those dents out cold was never going to work. The last time I did something like that, I welded the pins in and pulled the dents out hot.

Ho hum. With cracks like this, there was no going back:

So now you are all going to find out what the oil tanks looks like inside...

I decided to do what I should have done all along. Using the trusty hacksaw, I cut down each side of the damaged area. Using a cut off wheel in the Dremel, I cut a short slot, long enough to allow a hacksaw blade to pass through, in the long edges of the damaged area. Then I used a hacksaw blade to remove the damaged area:

The tank is made of 18 SWG sheet. So, taking a piece of cardboard, I cut a template roughly the same size as the hole and attached a loop of masking tape to it. I folded the edge of the card to allow it to fold around the edge of the tank. I then suspended this in the hole and drew around the inside of the hole, onto the card. I now had a card model of the repair patch I would need.

The shape was then transferred to a piece of cold rolled 20 swg sheet, and cut out with the Wiss aviation snips. I folded the edge in the vice, and then used some scrap material to press the joddle into both edges, so that the pieces would sit flush with the original surface:

I've shown it here, held in place with magnets. At this point it is important to dress the edges of the tank, take out any wobbles or dents and make sure that patch sits flat. This is not good enough:

All adjusted; and the butt joints at the short sides have been given a 45 degree weld prep. The panel is tacked in place with the MIG:

Fully welded. a bit messy in places, but I blame the lighting. The lights in my shop are either behind me when I am welding (so I am welding in the dark, with the lights shielded by my body), or if I switch the overhead lights on the sensor in my helmet picks up the brightness and darkens the lens - welding in the dark again:

Dressed with the flap wheel:

There was another weld/dress step as I tested the tank. I filled the tank with water (after it had cooled) and found several holes; these were welded & dressed; I now have two very minor holes left, but the family are complaining about the noise the grinder is making so I had better stop.

Sharpie rings mark the holes!

A couple of days later in a marvellous week at home - I have not travelled anywhere and I have the luxury of a wonderful wife who brings me Martinis in the evening - I'm done with the oil tank. It has taken two more leak test/re-weld/grind cycles to get the tank water tight, but now the repair is invisible as the day the tank was made.

A temporary coat of black hammerite, until we are ready for Phase 2, and we are finished.

Shrinking & pulling

After the gearbox was back in, I decided to have a bit of an interlude and sort out some of the fabrication jobs that had been knocking about.

Finding myself with a spare hour or two one day, I made a start on the dent in the oil tank. The tank has had a major league ding in it for some time. Some was on the AOMCC forum suggested it may have been a battery explosion - it looks more like someone has used it for target practice.

Taking inspiration from a good book 'Building Budget Brits' I decided to use a method involving brazing & pulling to remove the myriad of dents in the tank. Some of them were very deep & localised, clearly with a lot of stretching going on. Now I could have filled or lead loaded this tank and avoided all the work, but I'm keen to learn and try new things....

So the idea is, we pull the dent out without holing or cutting the tank by fixing a suitable stud, wire, piece of scrap to the bottom of the dent and pulling it outward. I'd hoped to be able to weld to the tank and to pull the dents out with the tank hot, much like I repaired the breather tower. However, I was a bit concerned that I might just end up holing the tank, weakening the area around the weld and pulling or tearing the material.

So I elected to braze plain steel nails into the bottoms of the dents and pull them out cold. This would be OK, because during multiple brazing operations the material would be annealed several times. Then, I put a steel bar across the panel being worked on, to act as a fulcrum for the pulling operation. I used a pair of combination pliers to grip the nail and pull the dent out.

So here is the first pass

Nails resited, here we go for the second time..

and a third attempt

and again - four times now...
So before the fourth attempt, we had created several 'peaks' to go with the considerable troughs already in the tank. Levelling the peaks gave us an opportunity to lose some of the stretched material, by locall heating (bright red) in the area of the peak and reducing the height with some light hammer blows.

This is almost at a stage where we could use some filler... Lead maybe...

But, reasoning that this was going well and I could get more of that dent out, I pushed on with a fifth go at shrinking & pulling. This was lower but more level until i cleaned the flux off and I realised the 50 year old steel had cried 'enough'! Take a close look at the picture and you'll see a lot of cracks have appeared:

I think that this is due to hardening. Of course, annealing or normalising steel has a time element to permit removal of stress and changes in the grain structure and of course cooling this thin material happens very quickly. Added to that, the material was obviously thin from 50 years of corrosion.

Max was very concerned:

Wheels

Sample spokes

Amid engine machining and gearbox rebuilds, I decided it would be good to actually ride Amelia at some stage. Standing in the way of this was a set of very rusty spokes on both wheels. I'd hoped to get away with commissioning the bike on it's own wheels, without any form of rebuild (continuing my 'Phase 1' rebuild with no chroming or painting) but it was not to be. Both wheels had at least one broken spoke, and the remaining spokes were very thin in places.

So, a rebuild it had to be.

Amelia has half-width cast iron hubs, front and rear. The front is the 'Qualcast' half width hub fitted to all telescopic-fork Ariels prior to the appearance of the full-width alloy hub in 1956, and the rear is the 5-stud QD hub. Tyres are 3.25-19 front on a WM2 rim & 4.00-18 rear on a WM3 rim.

Max has found some tyres

So, gathering parts. I used Central Wheel Services for spokes & tyres, since they give outstanding service and their prices for tyres were very good. I bought traditional Avon Speedmaster & SM MkII tyres, still made today in a modern soft compound.

Close inspection of the spokes revealed plain spokes on both sides of the wheel at the front, with butted spokes on the drive side at the rear, plain on the other side. This matches the description in the parts book perfectly. However, it didn't match the records at Central Wheel, so I had to provide sample spokes for them to manufacture against. I chose stainless spokes and plated brass nipples this time, since I was not at all happy with the nickel plated steel nipples I bought for the Bantam which, 2 years on, are rusty.

The first thing you must do when rebuilding a wheel is to remove the old tyre. Don't think about using an old tyre for a second - even if it has tread and sound sidewalls, the rubber will be hard as nails and will have you sliding down the road. 

Interesting paint under the original rim tape

Removing tough old tyres can be a challenge, and I often dispense with the traditional levers in favour of a set of bolt cutters, which I use to cut the wires in the bead. On an older tyre, I'll cut the rubber with a Stanley knife to ease the passage of the bolt cutter. Don't bother trying this technique with a modern tyre though, there's wire everywhere!

Rear rim offset

Next, find yourself a nice stiff flat board. A piece of 3/4" ply would be good. We need to measure and record the offset of the rim to some datum on the original wheel - the brake drum is very convenient. Place the brake drum face down on the board, and measure the distance from the edge of the rim to the board

Amelia's front wheel offset is 1 1/4" to the rim on the brake side;

On the rear, it is 9/16" to the rim on the brake side. On the rear, the offset is measured with the brake drum removed.

The next step is to photograph the spoke patterns. Make sure you have pictures of which spokes overlay others, which holes the go into on the rim and please also look at the dimpling on the rim holes and makes sure you know which way round the rim goes. 

Those of you who have read my Bantam pages will know I have rebuilt at least one wheel with the rim the wrong way round - the result is not pretty as all the spokes will be bent.

My reference photos are shown further down the page.

The next step is a real turning point in the rebuild: take your best bolt cutter, and cut the all the spokes. Do it within an inch or two of the hub. If you cut near the rim, it will be much more laborious to feed all the rusty spokes through the dirt encrusted holes on the hub.

Bolt cutters - did I really do that?

The next step is to get the rims off to the platers. This takes a while, so don't hang about! While they are gone you can clean up the hubs, get them painted, recondition the brake plates and replace the bearings.

Incidentally, I spoke to Tony at JD Wyatt Contract Polishing, who told me that it would reduce the cost of the polishing if I were to leave the painted rim centres in the blasted condition. Since this would provide a key for the paint, this is what I decided to do.

Spoke Patterns

Spoke patterns for the rear wheel:

Spoke patterns for the front wheel:

'Puzzled' of Norwich writes on the subject of Brake Rods...

Out here in the hinterlands of East Anglia, the winter has been hard & long & devoid of much motorcycling weather, so we have had to content ourselves with small jobs we can do inside, or snatch brief interludes of inner (shed) calm amidst the fun & excitement of family life.

Brian Challinor mailed with a question about the straightness of my brake rod, which had to wait for such an interlude. My brake rod is as straight as the day it was drawn through the die, since it is brand new and has never been fitted.

However, since that interlude came today, I have had it fitted to the bike. Here are several shots showing it in place:

As you see, it doesn't fit - due to the aforementioned 'straightness'

Here's a shot from a 1989 copy of 'The Classic Motorcycle' of a supposedly 1952 Square Four - I say 'supposedly' because there are a few elements that are more 1950 than 1952. Here's the brake rod:

Careful study will show you that it is bent as the proverbial 9 bob note.

Here's another one, a 1951 bike sold at Andy Tiernan's a few years ago:

Again, bent. The case rests m'lud.

So, another day. another interlude... I have taken that most useful of tools, the wire coat hanger, and bent it to form a dummy brake rod, for the purpose of determining the routing the real thing should take and the bends that would be necessary to accommodate that routing. Having satisfied myself, I bent the real thing. Here it is:

Side view, see how long it is, and the poor (low) position of the brake lever?

Here is a top view, which gives an idea of the two bends:

And here is a view of the brake rod and it's proximity to the brake plate and Anstey stirrup:

Looks like the brake arm might be the wrong way around, and the rod needs to be shorter. I'll leave that until I have relined the shoes and positioned the pedal properly - once it's cut shorter, it can't be lengthened again!

Here's a view from Brenton Roy's original '51 Square, suggesting that my installation is along the right lines:

Proving yet again that the AOMCC forum is a wonderful resource for us! I'm thinking that my brake arm is a little more bent than Brenton's:

Yet another Iron Curtain relic...

My dear son Thomas has a habit of bringing home examples of the finest Eastern Bloc motorcycle engineering available for under a tenner, mostly from eBay.

This was the first one:

It's a Minsk 125 marketed in the '70's under the Neval banner, and is one of those myriads of DKW RT125 copies of which my Bantam is a fine example.

He painted it, serviced it and we spent months fiddling around with a peculiar electrical system with no battery that was never going to drive those indicators without flashing all the other lights at the same time. It went OK though. 

He sold it for a profit, financing the purchase of whatever students drink these days.

It was followed by an MZ TS125, courtesy of eBay, it was the Luxus model (the one with the real hair?) with the rev counter. This was a bit more adventurous as when it arrived it had no wheels, tank or seat. He collected from somewhere in Hertfordshire, on the way to my Dad's funeral. He turned up behind the hearse with this MZ stuffed into the back of our Morris 1000, which was never the same again. And no, it wasn't an estate, or a van, or a pick up - just a regular two-door saloon.

Here it is:

He did a great job with it, collecting all the missing parts, repainting & rebuilding. This is how it ended up:

Strangely enough, it looks just like any other TS125 doesn't it! It ran pretty well once we got it going, which in itself was an adventure because some numbnuts had fitted a home made base gasket without cutting the transfer ports in the gasket. Puzzling - the carburettor had fuel in it, the jets were all clear, but the plug was dry...

He now has this one as well, which like all true enthusiasts he has in his dining room - along with cats & rabbits. His girlfriend, bless her, is just as enthusiastic! It quite brings a tear to my eye, reminds me of the 250 Matchless that used to occupy our living room:

So this is the latest addition, another eBay find. We bought this one together - I paid, he went & collected it - as a kind of joint project & a 'congratulations' for getting a promotion at work:

This is how the advert was worded:

1981 MZ TS250/1 Supa 5 restoration project or for spares.
Both tyres are useless and have punctures, the silencer has the usual case of MZ Rust Scabies, both tank panels have quite good chrome for an MZ but aren't perfect. The grey colour is primer and the general gunky condition is old Waxoyl put on years ago to try and help preserve it.
Engine kicks over freely and seems to have quite good compression, all gears seem to select - but it's not a runner and there's no Tax or MoT so please don't think you can ride it away. (It's happened!).
It has the correct front indicator lenses, sound speedo and tacho brackets and the rare-ish side stand plus a Rear lens and tool-box cover (no lock) come with it.
Originally bought by me (in this state) as a source of spares for my other Supa 5 back in 1994......and there it's sat ever since; and as my ride to work Supa 5 has long since gone this may as well follow it.
Interesting number plate? TEX 6**W
All in all a nice little project that just needs a little T.L.C........you could have it running by the weekend (lol)!
Just to re-iterate this is a non-running project, with no Tax or MoT so you will need a van or trailer to take it away (I'm unable to deliver). We are near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.
Having said that, there is a possibility I could take to Beverley (near Hull) for collection from there on 23rd February - but it is only a possibility, so PLEASE contact me first before assuming it's going to happen!
Any queries, please email before bidding.

And here is another view:

Now that is it at home in my garage (another thing he has learnt - why put stuff in your own house when you could leave it at your Dad's?), I have to say it is a fine machine. The Waxoyl the previous owner (I don't know his name) smeared all over it has made a great job of preserving the alloy and some of the chrome. It has apparently been standing in a garage for the past 20 years.

The rubber is shot to bits though. I was tempted to put some tyre sealant in the tyres just to move it around more easily, but on screwing the can onto the valve I found the valve completely detached from the tube!

So there it is. Waiting a bit of time, for #1 son to buy a battery and for me to take a trip to Leeds, where I understand Wyldes have some tyres at a good price...