Dirty Deeds Done Cheap

With the Velo tucked away, I've been just just batting about on my Suzuki to and from work.  I've been pretty busy on the work front since last May and having small kids (7 and 10 now) seems to mop up the gaps between putting an honest crust on the table.  Inevitably something had to give and it came just before Christmas when the Suzuki pegged out on me.

No compression, then some compression, then even with no compression on the kick starter it would start and run.  Yes, performance was down, but I couldn't believe it would go 110 kph with so little resistance at the kick-starter.  I should point out that the decompresser cable to the kick start broke ages ago and I bought the bike without the valve lifter lever or cable.  Finally, one night it just gave up on me and it was clear that the head would have to come off.

 

Endoscope

A while back I bought a USB endoscope to search for electrical wiring sealed up above suspended ceilings without having to rip holes in them.  For €16 it came with 5m of cable and worked a treat saving hours of work.  It just so happened that it fitted down the plug hole in the head of the Suzuki.  I saw a bore a tad glazed but without scratches or signs  bad damage.  I'm not sure this was much use but it was fun and made me feel clever!

Head off then...

So off came the head and it looked fine.  Nice healthy deposits for an engine with so many kms on it. Then I popped the valves out and hey presto!  

Clink!  Out fell the valve seat onto the floor

The valve seat from the left hand exhaust port fell out and rolled across the floor.  It must have been loose for a year or more - this was the source of that noise I couldn't trace!

I popped off the cylinder and found the rings were sound enough to show almost no stains from blow-by, so nothing to change there. 

The remedy was simple enough - I got another head, cam and rocker box from the same bike through e-bay.  €175 got me a very good set of parts, I doubt I could have had the head re-worked for that. Here's the excellent guy I got it from (click).

Straight from the box the inlet and exhaust ports were dry and so I decided to test the valve sealing.

Testing the existing valves

Good practice is to strip out the valves and overhaul the springs, guides, seats and re-grind, but I needed to get the bike back asap for work, so I decided to take a risk.  I manually moved each of the valves a dozen or so times then turned the head upside down and filled it with parafin and waited.  The idea is that parafin, having no surface tension to speak about is a "searching" liquid.  When painted or soaked onto a join, it will find any cracks or non sealing areas and pass through, showing up on the other side like a pee stain on a schoolboy's shorts.  When I worked in silo and pressure vessel construction this was a cheap technique used to find cracks in welds, with the parafin on the inside  and the outside painted with whitewash.  Anyway, after an hour there were no signs of parafin on the otherwise dry inlet or exhaust ports.  Good enough, then.

Re-assembly

So, a base gasket cut from my daughter's Barby doll box and a head gasket from Poland (cheap and efficient service - click here) and back together it went uneventfully.  I'm really impressed by the design and layout of this engine, it goes together easily and stuff just works!  As a final dodge, I fitted the exhaust headers with transparent bathroom sealant - cheap as chips and works really well!

The end result is like a new bike.  Not bad for a mere €175 + €16 (head gasket) = €191.  I bought this bike as a cheapo hack so that I could concentrate on the Triumph and the Velo, but this Suzuki is finding it's place in my heart!

Less and Less Original!

Well it finally made it! RPR 657's bits are all in one place again!

Donkey's years ago my life took a few twists and turns that made storing a project bike (blew it up you see) not practical or even feasable.  It just so happened that my Mum (bless her) had a spare out-house and it was big enough for my Velo.

The years rolled by and one day my Mum mentioned conversationally that there was a problem with the out house and that the neighbour had done something to the roof.  Instantly I forgot what she said (well she used to go on and on) and it was when I visited a few years later that I noticed that the roof had actually collapsed!  The Velo was undamaged by the tiles but looked ruined so I wrapped it in plastic tarpaulins and vowed to be back for it.  The neighbour had moved away...

So the years rolled on again and I was able to get the engine and gearbox plus oil tank and various other odds and sods delivered here through a mate's contacts in the transport business.  The chassis had to wait for a force majure and that turned out to be the passing away of my Mum in January of this year.  As is normal in these situations, things needed putting in order and one of those involved me getting some transport sorted for the chassis and a couple of boxes of other effects.

I struck gold with the transport.  Through Shipley.com I found a guy called Mattieu Rottreau - a Frenchman based in Birmingham in the UK for some 25 years.  He specialises in moving people's vehicles about all across Europe and is a total star.  If you want to move a bike or car either to or from the UK I recommend him whole heartedly!  You can find him here - mrparcels@sky.com.

So here it is.

People talk to me about the value of this bike and even just this chassis .  Adjectives like "original" and "authentic" are thrown about in these conversations like custard pies in a clown fight, but there's nothing further from the truth (again - see here).  

When I was just eighteen years old I had an altercation with a ford cortina and the chassis of the Velo was a write off.  I had to sell everything else of value I had to buy a new frame, swinging arm and forks from no less than Geoff Dodkin himself and I have the letter from him to prove it.  

So on my '61 venom, the engine's a '58, the maneto's a rare competition model, and the chassis is from who-know's-when.

Don't care.

Everything's back in one place again.  That's a good thing.

 

Catching up

Well I did say I miss out on posting regularly!

It's been what?  Over a year since I posted "gunge and schrapnell" and the Suzuki's still running.  It's still noisy as well.  The tips of the valve stems are pitted making the setting up of the tappets approximate at best.  What can I say?  It needs a re-build really but it does run well, so all in good time...

But, but, but the biggie is that I've finally got it together and the Velo's chassis arrives tomorrow morning!!
 

Two tanks and bits...

Cadavre - erm, chassis I mean.

Gunge and Schrapnell

Sympoms 

My trusty DR600 has begun to make some alarming noises.  Well, one alarming noise actually.  It goes tickety, tickety, tickety in time with the engine and is independant of anything transmission or loose and floppy like a loose number plate or clutch lever.

This bike is brilliant.  Me and my Missus have had some really lovely times with it.  It cannot be allowed to die!

Initial diagnosis

I stuck a screwdriver stethoscope on various places and confirmed it's to be heard almost everywhere inside the engine, although reassuringly louder at the top to middle.  There's enough compression for me to stand on the kick start all day when the valve lifter mechanism is disconnected.

A history of malpractice

I'll confess that because the only thing this bike has ever done is run, I have been as lax at looking after it as my predecessors.  I've maintained and changed the oil and filters as necessary, but little more.

Testing and investigation

To put matters right I tensioned the ballancer chain, checked the cam chain tensioner, spark plugs, re-set the tappets and did an oil and filter change.

Indications

Well the results were interesting.  The plugs were perfect, as was the cam chain tensioner.  The ballancer chain was as slack as a tart's knicker elastic and the tappets had closed up.  This is the point where you have to get a good grip on your sense of reason and not let the imagination run away, well I do anyway.  What makes tappets close up?  Deteriorating valve seats?  Valve train support, proplems?

I turned my attention to the oil and carefully drained it into a very clean container.  I set this up to filter through some coffee filter papers, aided with a drop of white spirit so that it didn't take all day.
Whilst I was waiting for that, I dropped off the sump and cut up the oil filter and had a bit of a look.
 

Oil filter cut up and unraveled, coffee filter paper on the left, white spirit for rincing on the right and no, those screws are from an old radio cabinet, not the Suzuki!  Yes my workshop got dirty.

I used a couple of nifty tools to go with the magnet on a stick my wife found for me in Liddle (of all places!) on sale. Magnets on sticks are so useful!  I pulled apart an old hard drive and popped out the lovely rare earth magnets and glued them onto some M4 rods I had lying around.  These I swiped over the filters and sump to try and find bad things.  My heart was in my mouth.

Ex-hard drive magnets on sticks.  Very handy tools.

In all I found seven tiny pieces of magnetic metal between the sump, filter and the old oil.  I don't know if that's all that bad as I doubt if anyone has done anything nice to this engine in a long time.  Is this terminal?  Is the bottom end breaking up?  I have no references yet.  Everything I have read says if you find anything you should drop the engine and fit a new bottom end immediately.  Before I do that I'm going to try a few other things.

What I did next

I gave the poor thing some very superior oil (all the cheap stuff was out of stock!) and put it all back together because I needed it to go to work.

The noise is still there, but it does sound like it's not in the bottom end.  I live in hope.  On the positive side, it sounds like a BSA, it's really smooth running and it goes like a train!  Next Sunday I'll pop off the rocker box and see if there's anything to see.

Hold your breath for the next installment!  Actually don't do that, sometimes it takes me an age to add a post.

Truth.

And then I woke up to find things had changed...

A couple of things have stirred my otherwise dampened imagination recently and it’s all about electric vehicles and specifically electric motorbikes.

Blindspot Electric Custom Motorcycles
http://www.blindspotcycles.com/bikes.html

Brammo Empulse R from the review in Cycle World here;
http://www.cycleworld.com/2012/11/19/brammo-empulse-r-electric-motorcycle/

Until now the debates have run back and forth over things like “feel” and ideas of what constitutes a real enthusiasts vehicle.  This has gone on safe in the knowledge that unless you want a bike that will outweigh a Honda Gold Wing but not outrun a Honda 500 and be limited to around fifty miles range then its all so much science fiction.  That is until now.

The first thing that, as I mentioned above, stirred me is something called Graphine, a material that I believe will change a lot of our world.  It’s a form of carbon that turns out to be ridiculously easy to make (one scientist uses water dispersant and a computer DVD drive) but it has electrical, thermal and mechanical properties that could replace silicone and steel.  I could babble on for ages but I’ll cut to the chase instead.  Watch this link, right up to about 3 mins :15secomds (after that it repeats in silence with Spanish sub-titles). 

So unless you were distracted during that you will have surmised that a very fast charge, long life battery is a practical feasibility now.  For electric vehicles that’s a game changer.  

Of course there’s a lot of work to be done before we consumers will see the benefit, but if think how fast your tech such as phones and cameras have developed in the last ten years, then you can begin to believe that this is no longer science fiction. 

So the second stirring thing I referred to earlier is this rather extreme but nonetheless exciting illustration of how it could feel – you need sound, by the way;

Inspiration and procrastination

As I was scanning through Faceache tonight I stumbled on thiss little nugget;

Take your eyes off the gallery setting and just concentrate on the machine.  Yes it's a Honda wet dream from sometime in the eighties.  As I recall, duller than ditch water but equally reliable and endowed with Honda's "Euro styling", which at the time I hated. 

No, I don't like it much now either, but whoever built this has uncovered some interesting lines.  Remove most or all of the bathroom acessories these were festooned with and you end up with a purposefull looking bike.  As I've been discovering lately, a low powered bike with good tyres and springy bits can be husled along at a supprising rate.  So much so that it can really unsettle riders of very sporty bikes not to mention run rings around expensive large engine cruisers.  

This is all very exciting!  These things are at the bottom of the heap along with CX500s and those Yamaha XS twins that exhuded an aura of beigeness.  They're machines though and machines can be fixed to become characterfull and entertaining.  Let's look at the Wet Dream again. 

The builder/ exhibiter is probably going for the "diamond in the rough" appeal.  The essence of biking lurking somewhere in the rat bike before you.  This is fine if you like bikes but don't know much about them.   It certainly works as an exhibit, but what if it had a pair of half decent forks, rear sets and good sticky tyres?  The shocks look newish.  What if you knew you could give it all the beans and hold that into the next bend with confidence?  All that and then when you arrive, you can have a cuppa and admire the lines.  Oh a double-entendre - I must be right!

Lovely rides are in the morning.

This I had to post.  Old Empire Motorcycles are one of the new wave of custom bike builders who specialise in the neo-retro style and have put a lot of effort in building their brand tastefully.  They are clearly very creative, have a good sense of aesthetics as well as practicality and seem to favour engines and donor bikes that I like.  That said, I confess to not keeping up to date with their stuff after they did a load of bikes with those silly firestone tyres (sidecar type pattern). Yes, I'm one of those. 

Then I happened on this video of theirs.  It's nothing short of heartwarming.

Lovely memories stirred up eh?

Going Slow

(Thanks to http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.fr for the graphic)

I've been re-discovering the pleasures of going slow.  Nothing to do with the Venom, althought I've hit an obstacle there, no just biking in general.

To get to work here I have bought a ratty old DR600 Suzuki.  It's not likely to turn heads, but that's fine by me because I didn't buy it for that.  We all joke about mid life crises and I reckon I need to put up my hands to this one because I suppose I'm trying to understand a bit of what would have happened if I had kept my first propper bike, a BSA 250, and put in the CCM 550 engine - I'll explain. 

I learned most of my basic spanner twirling on a 1971 BSA B25SS.  I fell in love with it before I bought it because to me it looked right, it sounded right, smelt right and above all, it felt right.  I think that a mixture of established, but expensive manufacturing methods used by the Small Heath factory and the use of common parts across the ranges, made this bike a tactile pleasure in the same way as a gun can be.  Sharing cycle parts with 650s, the frame and suspension were way over the top for the modest 250cc engine.  All the steel parts were a decent gauge, the aluminium castings were lovely and there were no plastic bits at all!

In the follwing 12 months I ran through a gamet of emotions as it dumped me in the middle of nowhere, set fire to my trousers, broke expensive bits, refused to start etc.  The night before my motorcycle test, it dropped it's clutch basket inside the chain case and I suffered the ignomony of taking the test on my brother's C90 Honda!  Every one of those faults could be traced back to me abusing or not using key parts (like tab washers!) correctly.  Consequently, bit by bit, I grew to understand what made it tick and what stopped it ticking and in doing so I bonded with it.

Sadly though, teenagers can be fickle creatures and I was no exception, bowing to peer pressure to move on to a 500.  This is how I ended up with the Velo, but at the time I was becoming familiar with that bike, I was missing my old BSA.  The angst was compounded when a bloke came and bought the BSA and took it away for ever just a week before I read an old article in Bike magazine about a B25/CCM 550 custom entitled "Staying Single" (May 1978).  It looked fast and fun and I was especially grabbed by the part that read "...a better power to weight ratio than an RD400" - crikey, on a level with the enemy!

BSA B50s look very purposeful.  CCM used to re-work these engines to raise the power and put right various known faults.  The chassis is almost identical to the 250.  Rubbish tyres though eh?

The rest is history, but I have often wondered what such a bike would have felt like to ride. Thirty four years later and enter the DR600, 45 bhp, 160Kg including fuel and oil.  Compared with the BSA B50 at 35 bhp, 135kg dry, then the DR600 looks like it may answer the question of what the CCM special would have been like, particularly when you look at the RD400 at 43 bhp and 175 Kg wet.

The DR600 with supermoto wheels

Where does all this lead?  Everyone knows that young men's biking has usually been about going as fast as you can.  Ring the bugger's neck, get to the front and above all overtake in bends to show how much better you are than your prey.  It's a culture of bravado and daring do on a par with Italian cavalry rules of fire engine driving down mountain roads.  Consequently, I wore the sides off my shoes and learned about falling off gracefully as I stuck with my mates entering the next unknown bend way beyond our limits of competence and ashen faced with fear.  Don't get me wrong though - I wouldn't change a moment, not one.

On the other hand, I would also sneak out alone and chug around country lanes just enjoying the sensation of the engine burbling away happily and the country side unfolding with each corner I exited.   A secret pleasure that was (as far as I knew) mine alone...

Some thirty years on and I have the machine and the maturity to go my own way.  It's brilliant, bloody brilliant.  The supermotard conversion means that once again the cycle parts are well beyond the engine spec to the point that I can even forgive the plastic bits.  So easy to set up for the next bend and so forgiving when I balls it up. The power to weight thing is nice, but I've run much bigger bikes, so it's just very nice.

As to pressure, well, I live in a place that is very macho, particularly in terms of things with wheels.  Here, everyone is heavily preocupied with overtaking each other from high speed traffic to jostling shopping trolleys to the check-out.  Then there's me rolling along at my speed, sometimes brisk, sometimes very leisurley but always happy.

Exhuming the cold remains of my old friend

I have not long returned from a visit to my home town of Weston – super – Mare in the UK.   The trip was to catch up with members of my family and start getting the Velocette's rolling chassis and fuel tank ready to bring home to France.

I wasn't expecting an oil painting since the bike has been left outside in my Mum's back yard for the last ten years, albeit tightly wrapped in plastic sheeting, it was going to be ugly.  As I peeled the sheets away, having cut off the brambles, I noted that some of the sheets had actually stuck together and my heart began to weigh heavy.  In fact, it took a good ten minutes to free the bike (minus engine of course) from the wrappings and I felt my worst fears were confirmed.  There isn't one area where the chrome plating is saveable, most of the painted parts are in need of a re-paint and I have a suspicion that the plastic coated frame from Geoff Dodkin will need a heavy touch up. The picture says it all.

Oh dear.

The front tyre was flat and cracked through but amazingly the rear one was still inflated. I gave it a tug and it rolled free of the longest parking place of it's existence very easily (allowing for the flat tyre).   Two minutes with a household broom removed the cobwebs, insect corpses and years of accumulated clag and dust, revealing my old friend still has those beautiful lines.

It could be worse, it could.  She is very beautiful nonetheless.

The swinging arm still works, the shocks don't leak and do still damp (mind you, with no engine, so that could change) and there was no play in the swinging arm bearings.   I expect the wheel bearings are shot though and I'd be living in denial if I didn't pull all the bearings and bushes apart for an inspection.  Nonetheless it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.

The exhaust is completely rusted all over, but mine had a strange kink in the end that made the fish tail ground too easily, so I don't mind replacing that part.  It may well be cheaper to replace the silencer than try to re-chrome it but I'll look at that later.

The fuel tank was very bare, the paint having fallen off in large areas, but the metal revealed underneath was in some areas not rusty at all.  Again it could have been worse.  Then I found the five gallon fibreglass racing tank that was on the bike when I bought it.  It's as ugly as sin, but somehow I was pleased to find it even though I didn't bother unwrapping it.

Then a final piece of luck. Amongst a load of old papers was a letter from Geoff Dodkin confirming that he had exchanged my old frame for the current one. I have explained previously how I had an altercation with a Ford Cortina back in 1979 resulting in a written off frame.  This could be a very important document when it comes to trying to road register the old girl.

All in all a fruitful trip.  Transport to arrange and lots of other things to get on with then.  

Trumpets, Papers and Filler

Another month slips by and I have done almost nothing to the Velo.  I am only human and so when the possibility of another bike arose last summer I took it.  It's a '68 T100T Triumph Daytona.  I have bought it, imported it and registered it French.  This took around six months and the arrival of the French log book coincided with the fuel tank leaking.  So that's where the effort for this month has gone, re-welding, filling and cutting back for the re-painting of this bike:

The Trumpet - it's a runner you see.

I'll do a blog for the Triumph seperate from this one, but I have learned an important lesson here and that's the documentation thing.  You see, although I love living here in France, one of the downsides is that you can barely break wind without the correct (and very complicated) paperwork.

To import and register a bike made by a defunct company, you must first have a certificat de datation from here:

http://www.ffve.org/

They need copies of the original log book, photos of chassis and engine numbers, photos of both sides of the bike, copies of the purchase receipts, their own form filled in correctly.  They have a manpower problem that meant it took three months for me to receive a certificate only to find my name spelt incorrectly, so back it had to go for another fortnight!

With this certificate in my sweatty hand I could send it with these other documents to apply for a French log book (carte grise):

Certificate of no TVA (VAT) to pay, Application for carte gris, certificate de datation, original uk log book, marrage certificate recognition (because the edf bill is in my wife's name), the edf bill, the photocopy of my passport, the tax d'habitition bill and the receipt from the previous owner (untranslated).  Nothing unreasonable really but so many bits of paper!

 Once registered, I took it for a blast and as I said, found the fuel tank leaked from the centre weld at the front.  This is usually vibration damage and / or corrosion, so I have had to whip off the tank.  It's been stripped down, had the welding and brazing done, and now I'm getting it ready for a re-spray.  If you've ever done this sort of thing you'll know how much rubbing down and preparation is required.

Tank stripped back around the leak and painted with flower and water (whitewash is better though).  A drop of fuel sloshed about in the tank and the leak shows up as a damp patch - erm...

Removing the old paint... Pffffffff.  I did it by hand because I didn't want to do any more damage to the old metal.  I found more sins that had to be fixed propperly. 

 
While I was at it I popped off the carbs and re-built them too.  Even if the ad says "carbs re-built by a pro" just pull them apart anyway because you'll find something wrong.  For me, the main jets were the wrong size, everything was clapped out, one needle was not straight and there were no 'O' rings in the joints to the head, the slides rattled in the bodies and they were full of muck.  The only reason the floats sealed must have been because of the viton tips on the float needles.

"rebuilt by a pro" - but probably some years ago...

So there goes a month.

CAD vs Drawing Board (CAO vs la Planche) 2

Murphy's law is far reaching and can make you eat your words.  I recently posted a gripe about the downgrading of the engineer in certain companies in the CAD era.

Well, I made up a CAD model of the brake lever in that post and I uploaded it onto the excellent Grab Cad site.  I was very quickly answered by a bloke called Cameron Reid who has already done the engine, gearbox, carb etc. for a Thruxton.  Self- taught, he's done a ton of bloody good work and is happy to share it provided you have the good manners to credit him wherever you use it. 

I still love the original drawings for their style but it has to be said that this stuff looks great on CAD.  That's as near as I'm getting to actually eating my words.

Little things that count

Thinking Juice

I got my oil pump banjo bolt back.  I gave a bottle of very good rosé to a chap I know who has so many machine tools at home that he's got a lathe in his kitchen because there's no where else to put it!  I also gave him a grade 8.8 7/16" BSF bolt to base it on and he has done a lovely job.  

In addition, this week I have received my valve collets (cotters to some).  These came with a nice touch.  In the past I have bought sets of collets for Triumphs and BSAs and I usually got two, four or eight pairs in a little plastic bag.  I suppose they would have been factory original spares.  The new ones for the Venom were not separated, but still unevenly joined at one end with little curls of swarf still attached.  I called Grove Classic Motorcycles Ltd to ask if these were as they should be, after all if they were a couple of pairs of duds I wouldn't be able to measure and check the shoulders so I wouldn't want to fit them.  The guy was out but called me back and explained to me (somewhat impatiently as though I was asking foolish questions) that they were all like that so that they always matched.  

It would seem that making a batch of these and then allowing the same size ones to be mixed up is undesirably risky.  In this age of hi-tech precision engineering this could be smiled at, after all, if you bought Honda ones, they'll be separated.  I would not be so dismissive.  Wherever I come across these practices I usually find there's a good but not obvious reason behind them, indeed I find them comforting because this has been thought about.  My collets can't be mixed up, so then they're a bit like parts for a flintlock pistol.  That's rather a romantic notion to me.  

To the left the banjo bolt story from correct part to re-made upsized bolt to replace the bodged one that snapped.  Looking closely at the "propper" one, it has stretched, so I suppose I'll replace them all.  To the right, the valve collets, old and shiny new "flintlock" ones.

Cad vs Drawing board 1

Having just put down the engine in my nice newly sorted out workshop, I strayed near the computer, so here I am again posting a post.

I looked up "Drawing Office" on google images, an impulse after deliberations earlier today, and quite by chance I turned up this image:

This bloke offers a brilliant service here:
http://owensvelos.co.uk/
where you can buy copies of many of the original Veloce factory drawings.  I shall be ordering shortly.

A veritable blast from the past.  I once worked in drawing offices where we were all on drawing boards.  CAD was an exciting prospect, but not suffeciently developed for normal day to day working.  The drill then was to agree on the design, get the (paper) drawings done, have them checked and when the bits were made / samples in, go and do a 100% inspection on them.  You then had be on hand for when the assemblies were made and sort out problems that arose and if there were problems, then the usual first lament was "drawings must be wrong" even if they weren't.  With all that accountability to all levels of the heirachy from boss to stores ckerk's assistant's mate, you ended up wearing the job as you would a coat and you usually had a lot of these coats to wear.   

What I'm getting at here is that the business of design engineering seems to have been a lot more hands on before the CAD era.  I think it's reflected in the products too.  Take an injection moulded plastic part for example.

These days, we can get a rapid done (say an SLA), that is a model of the final part to-be, and the evaluation is mostly done off of that before the T1 samples (the first parts made from the mould) comes in.  By now the non-engineers from other interested parties have been involved for a fair while and no-one really wants to back off if the money on the tooling has been comitted.  This was once a "backroom boffin" affair that could be "massaged" before it produced a product prototype for other managers to evaluate later on.

In my opinion we made more attractive products under the old system.  We made things that were a more human scale.  Things we could repair rather than replace, more characterful things like these:

As opposed to :

Yes, they're more advanced and arguably better built, but that's the technology.  Imagine what the guys who made the first three could have done with modern technology.  Making CAD models of real things is a skill in its self and I feel it adds a layer of virtual glass between the bloke that should be accountable and his design whilst everyone else has a finger in the pie.  This mindset percolates upwards in the organisation to affect the product it's self.  This is contrary to modern "design industry" dogma and I think it's a shame.

SolidWorks "ultimate CAD Chair project" sponsored by the biggest CAD company and run as an interactive project with young design engineers across the world.  It has a motorised seat, three screens, a sound system....

...and looking remarkably similar is your average cheap Arcade game.

My CAD workstation is now on another table and my own desk is clear.

Why do we do it?

Blokes in sheds, rusty old machines, the smell of grease and hot oil -where's the motivation?  Hard to explain, but this chap puts it well:

Staying on the Plot

Still working away, but not much blogging done.  These are the times that you can become so ensconsed in the workshop that you can lose sight of why you're doing the project.  So here's a tantalising reminder as to the why.

Progress!!!

It's been a while, three months I believe, but that's the nature of rebuilds when your life dosen't depend on it.  It took what seemed like forever to get on with the head and I didn't really want to get started on something else in the meanwhile as that's the route to project creep with me.

Come on Daddy, clear this up and get on with it!

 It would seem that there is no-one in Herault who is prepared to take on blast cleaning of old motorbike engine parts.  That's an area big enough to not want to be bothered driving beyond for the sake of a clean up.  

Herault is number 34 at the bottom on the coast of the Med.  Loads of open country and almost no services for the erstwhile motorbike restorer.

In the end the way you know is the best / quickest / easiest, so I went and dragged the head all the way back to Blighty.

Criterion Engineers Ltd are advertised in the Velo club magazine and website and as far as I can tell that's the extent of their marketing.  Nonetheless, it turned out to be a remarkably trouble free way to go.  As I work for a firm based not far from them in Swindon and I have to go there from time to time, I called up Criterion Engineers Ltd, arranged to drop the head and rocker box off and collected it again a few weeks later.  Whilst I was there I saw evidence of some very sound, well developed engineering techniques going on, mostly concerning Velocettes.  When it came time to pick it up they were going to be out, so the head assembly was left in a coal bunker outside with the invoice.  I simply picked it up and popped a cheque for a pretty reasonable £153 through the letter box.  Very civilised stuff, particularly when followed by an excellent lunch with a pint at the nearby Royal Oak . 

So that's a blast over, new hardened valve seats, new valve guides, a new exhaust spigot and the dodgy threads sorted out and helicoiled.  It looks so nice that I couldn't resist placing the parts together to see what they'd look like.

Oooooh, aaaaaah......

There's a happy final note too.  When it came to grinding the new valves in I blued them up to start off so that I could see how much work I had to do.  The light smear of blue on the valve face left a perfect unbroken ring on the seat.  I know it's logical given that the new seats and guides were put in at the same time, but all the same, nice work Criterion Engineers Ltd.

Rude awakenings part 2

Sometimes you can know too much.  Since joining the Velocette Owners Club, I have used some of their excellent facilities available online.  For example, thanks to their hard work and dedication, I have a better understanding of how the part numbering system worked and most disturbingly (even more disturbing than finding a part numbering system interesting), I have found out when my engine was made - 1958.  Cast your eye to the right and you will see that the basis of this project is to rebuild the bike that was registered on the day I was born in 1961.

I was at first disapointed, to say the least.  How could it be?  Was the market so slow that they didn't sell the bike for three years?  I suppose it's possible.  As I mentioned before, when it came to me my bike was in fact a bitza and not an original thoroughbread.  Could it be that the whole thing is a mish mash of bits from other sources that someone threw together and only one of the wheel spindles is of the original 1961 machine?  This is more likely and the fact that the magneto turns out to be a rare competition type (for which parts are difficult to find) seems to support this.

So what?  My Venom was never going to be museum material (thank goodness), so why should it matter?  I have hung on to this bike all these years because it was important to me and in doing so I have made it into a personal icon.  None of that can be erased and so I suppose it is no less special, in fact quite the opposite now.  I think Terry Pratchet hit the nail on the head when he wrote in his novel The Fifth Elephant:

"This will become in time, the axe of someone's grandfather," said the King "and no doubt over the years it will need a new handle or a new blade and over the centuries the shape will change in line with fashion, but it will always be in every detail and respect the axe I give you today.  And because it'll change with the times it'll always be sharp.  There's a grain of truth in that see."