New Ariel Site

I haven't seen this one before:

http://wdariel.nl/

Sorting the front brake rod

Two brake levers: the top one is a Drags repro and very nice it is too; the bottom one is the original one from my bike, which has a fully round hole for the brake rod. This obviously allows the brake rod to spin when you are trying to adjust the brake, which is irritating.

This hole is not supposed to be round...

This is a very dodgy picture, nicely illustrating the problem of focusing on small subjects while confusing the auto-focus with a confusion of adjacent objects. It shows the brake rod with a small weld, partially closing the hole on each side. I use MIG wire as a filler for jobs like this. 

After welding, I filed the hole back to shape to fit the brake rod. Here it is in place:

Job done. Now I can adjust the brake easily.

Trip to the City

An eye test gave me an excuse for a trip to the city yesterday: not a particularly nice day, but the SQ4 has not been out for a bit so it was time to stretch her legs.

I chose an A-road route outward, with 60 mph stretches for several miles and she is flying along; a mixed A & B-road route back gave me more of the same with some twisties and peaceful roads at the end:

At the start of the trip, the early morning starting ritual revealed the carburetter flooding: switching off, starting the engine, and switching on again, the flood did not repeat itself - I think the float sticks occasionally.

On the road, my 28/24 psi front/rear tyre pressure combination may be questionable. The front end feels light and not terribly planted - I may need to reduce the pressure on the front. The bike wants to drift to the side of the road so I think I will look at the wheel alignment.

In town traffic, in the morning, you can feel that she's not happy. She gets hot, and the carburation appears rough - not too bad to be called a misfire but not relaxing either. Arriving home, I noticed the same arriving in our small seaside town, and you can see oil on the HT leads so perhaps this is not carburation at all. The clutch also starts to drag a little, so maybe some adjustment there.

Stopping to pick up some Argon on the way back (The TIG welder is hungry again) I noticed a slight clonk when moving the handlebars - this may not come from the front end, but needs investigating.

I also noticed a little oil leak, two in fact - both from the primary drive, one at the clutch and one at the front. The chain is also not getting any lubricant.

I had the LED headlamp on all the way back - it's nice to see the bike balances charge in town with this fitted. Not so nice was the flickering rear lamp apparent with the bike idling, when I took these pictures. I also noticed that I had lost one of the 4 BA screws that retain the ammeter/switch panel to the headlamp. More fool me, for not fitting shakeproof washers!

So, a few little jobs (including the perpetual speedo fault) but generally a grand day out. I must have been going some, because my shoulders ache this morning!

Sump Guard

Another lucky find on eBay:

Kickstart Jamming - Properly this time...

So, excessive use of the kickstart while evaluating a magneto probelm eventually made a permanent situation of the jammed kickstart. The lever got very stiff and it was clear the kickstart case had to come apart. The strip is fully explained in one of this blog's most popular posts 'Spend a night in the box', and is documented here for the W/NG.

I leave the gear lever in place when I pull the kickstart cover off, and push both the selector shaft and the kickstart shaft to make sure they stay in place. With a soft mallet, pulling on the gear lever, this is what you see when the cover comes free:

Close inspection of the spring revealed that the 90 degree bend on the end, which hooks to the kickstart shaft, had fractured though it does not look like it here. After 70 odd years of use, the spring has suffered a brittle fracture across about 75% of its width:

It was also apparent that the kickstart quadrant bump stop was missing. I suspected that this had been deleted from the design when the rubber footrests & other parts were deleted in 1942, but a look at a 1941, 1942 and 1943 parts list revealed the bump stop present in all three.

The CP gearbox has a 1/4" wide kickstart spring, unlike the BA whose spring is 3/8" wide. There is not much room for the spring, which chafes on the inner case:

Using a small gas torch, I could re-bend and temper the spring, which was handy as Draganfly were out of stock. Here it is in position again:

I took the opportunity to replace the kickstart quadrant bump stop with one from stock.

When you replace the kickstart, you have to wind the spring up significantly to avoid it binding on the case.

You can see the witness marks where the spring has been in touch with the kickstart case.

Kickstart Jamming

Since the beginning i have had persistent and intermittent problems with the W/NG kickstart jamming. Until now, this hasn't been much of a problem since it hasn't been going anywhere but since it is almost ready for the road, the problem needs a dose of thinking about.

Questions on the forum revealed suggestions about excessive end float in the kickstart quadrant, so I have turned the bike in the workshop preparing to take the gearbox end cover off. Looking at it from the outside I have realised the lever is somewhat loose.

Tightening it all up, I've realised the lever clamp nut fouls the clutch lever pivot on the gearbox end cover:

Tightening that up, the jamming problem goes away. Another schoolboy error.

I'm told I had a lucky break and that I should put the bolt in the other way around. Apparently if that nut comes loose and you give the lever a hefty kick, the clutch lever pivot will break off...

Tool boxes

As I move along with the resurrection of the W/NG, I've got around to sorting out the toolboxes. They both have the wrong knobs, and they both have stripped threads; additionally, the lower toolbox appears to be in the wrong place since the lid won't open very far...

And if you look at this one, its more or less the same:

You'll notice that none of these bikes have pillion footrests. I don't know when this was taken, but some of these bikes have early toolboxes and some have later toolboxes; None of them have pannier frames though:

The pillion footrests won't let the lid descend even when they are in the 'down' position. You can see the damage to the paint:

With it off, I can see that the tool roll has to be carefully packed to get it in. You can also see the knob thread which someone has drilled out to 9 mm...

10 minutes with the TIG sorted that out...

And here is the other one, from the small tool box - this is just worn. Its set up with a small piece of 1.5 mm sheet closing the hole, with a big copper heatsink underneath to help me weld it up.

The small toolbox also has this sleeve around the knob, riveted into the lid. This is missing from the bigger toolbox.

These tabs are threaded 1/4" CEI. I drilled and tapped these through the knob hole:

Gravity knobs fitted with thackeray washers and dual lock nuts:

So that's it, done. Now I can load up the tool boxes - its quite difficult to get the tools in:

Some of the large toolboxes have a document holder in the lid, and a chain to stop them opening too far. The chains appear from some time in 1942 - the part numbers are the same, but the description in the parts book changes. Not sure whether mine should yet... There is something in the lid of this one, and no chain - you can see from the knobs it's quite an early toolbox (the gravity toolbox knobs appeared in 1942):

Some odd paint marks and brass rivets in the lid of my larger toolbox. The paint marks suggest the shape of the document holder in the period picture above:

Brake Pedal

For some time I have seen the brake pedal above the footrest like this:

It's very difficult to get your foot onto it in that position and quite unnatural. It's caused by the fact that the brake pedal stop is missing, having been replaced by a plain bolt. You can see where the stop used to be, witnessed by the dent in the brake lever:

Its a simple matter to make a new one, out of a 5/16" bolt and a short length of 3/8" round bar, welded together:

This is a genuine Ariel one:

Here it is in place:

This is how the pedal sits now:

Collecting bits

What do we have here? A camshaft, in much better shape than the one in my SQ4:

Chained for Safety

Various bits of my W/NG are supposed to be chained in place to avoid loss in the field, like the fuel and oil caps and the toolbox lid. Having looked around for the right sort of chain, and not found anything suitable I set about making some.

I figured that I could weave figure-8s from brass wire and solder them together, so I made a hairpin jig out of some 4 mm rod, thinking this would give me a nominally 1/4" chain by the time the loops had sprung apart:

Holding this in the vice, with enough of the legs protruding for me to make a couple of links, I set about weaving:

And some more, pushing down and extending the legs as I went:

When I had made 5 links, and pushing them links down the legs was getting difficult, I stopped and cut the ends of the links. I cut twice on each link, to make sure the loops were equal and that the ends butted down onto the middle wire. I used a regular hacksaw for the prototype:

Here's how they look:

I wanted each link to have a right angle twist, so I twisted them with pliers:

Next job, hook them together and close them up

Make a lot more...

And here's the petrol cap chained in:

Here's the oil tank cap with its original chain, sent to me by Jørgen Andersen of the AOMCC, all the way from Denmark:

More TIG Welding

You might have seen my recent post on my first attempts at TIG. This is the second lesson, repeating the first and adding some specific tasks related to the real welding jobs immediately at hand. To this end, I cut a piece of 1.0 mm cold rolled mild steel sheet, about 5" x 8", and cut three 1" strips so that I ended up with a 5" square and three 1" strips. I cleaned the metal with a wire brush in the bench grinder.

I set the machine up with pure argon shielding at 3-5 l/min; I used a 1.6 mm red band tungsten electrode ground in a long taper; a number 4 ceramic and a welding current of 30-50 Amps. Tungsten stick-out was about 3 mm in most cases.

I planned to do a lap weld, a butt weld, a fillet weld with thin to thin material and with thick to thin material, and to plug some holes. All these welds were to be autogenous - no filler rod was used.

Lap Weld

This is a simple lap weld, with two sheets of 1.0 mm; welding current was 30 Amps. The material was cleaned much more thoroughly this time, and the results are much more pleasing:

Plug Welds

I wanted to test the TIG set on some plug welds: I have to reduce the size of a hole in one of the toolbox lids which is 1.0 mm thick, so this is an attempt to close a hole prior to redrilling. The back of these plugs is the same 1.0 mm sheet that I used for the lap weld.

Again the welder is set to 30 Amps; this is possible a little high as there is some burning here.

This pictures shows good penetration from the lap joint. In the lap joint picture, you can see the penetration from these welds - not quite as good as the lap joint penetration.

Butt Joint

This is a 1.0 mm autogenous butt joint, welder set to 30 Amps. The fit here was much better than the previous attempt, and this shows in the quality of the weld:

Penetration is mostly good:

Fillet Welds

This is a 1.0 mm to 1.0 mm fillet joint. Fit as good for most of the length, worse at the left hand end where I have blown that hole:

Penetration is good too:

Thick to Thin Fillet

This is a 2 mm wall tube fillet welded to a 1.0 mm sheet. Not so successful, but this is more down to access than welding technique.