I've had a bit of a blitz on the bike, to make up for the neglect of the recent weeks. The project has reached that point where the amount of visible progress against effort reduces greatly. So you'll have to take my word for it when I say that a lot of effort has gone into it this week (~12hrs)!
The wiring loom is now largely sorted. I spent quite a few hours remaking connectors and re-routing the loom, applying spiral wrap within the frame to prevent any chaffing. Like a lot of blokes I'm colour blind, making the identification of green, brown and red wires particularly difficult. When the wiring loom is over 50 years old (this one has a manufacture date of 1963 on it) and the colours are faded it even becomes difficult to differentiate between the greens and the blues! Fortunately my wife didn't mind spending a half hour in the garage with me working out what went where. In the end it was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. With a new battery on charge as I type then I'm not far off being able to check the lights etc. all work as intended. Fingers crossed the time spent rebuilding the switch gear won't have been in vain. So many fiddly little bits of metal and tiny little springs!
Throughout this project I've spent a lot of time on the internet trying to source some of the more obscure parts. Last week I spent a good few hours looking for a supplier for the indicator bulbs. The bike has 6V electrics and I guess there isn't the demand for bulbs for such bikes any more. In the end I found them, for a very reasonable price, on Paul Goff's site (http://www.norbsa02.freeuk.com/). I've used Paul for parts for my BSA in the past and the service is always good.
I've now fitted the rockerbox and set the valve clearances. With the refurbished kickstart attached I've managed to take a compression reading. It came out at 115psi, after a few kicks, which seems pretty good for a cold engine that needs running in. Hopefully this is an indication that nothing has gone too awry with the rebuild of the top end.
The carb is also now on, nice and clean inside and with all standard settings. Par for the course this threw up a small problem, the thread in the casting of the carb body is stripped on the fuel intake side. There isn't enough material there for a thread insert so I'll have to use a through bolt with a nut on the otherside. Not ideal but it will have to do. I'm finding more little problems like this, which eat up time in the garage, as the reassembly goes on. For instance I wanted to replace the M5 screws that hold the switch gear together. Simple, I've got a large stock of suitable bolts, or so I thought! It turns out that the thread pitch used on some of these earlier Japanese bikes are unusual. Rather than the, now standard, 0.8mm pitch for M5 they used a 0.9mm thread pitch. This has been the case with fasteners in a few places on the bike, the M10 bolts tend to use a less common thread pitch and the M6 studs for the rockerbox are also a slightly coarser pitch. Nothing insurmountable but little details that slow things up.
The chain is now fitted so I can get on with aligning the wheels and fitting the nicely painted chain guard at some point.
Next major jobs are:
Finish the electrics (mount headlight, instrument bulbs and modify the fittings for the new battery)
Fit the exhaust system
Fit the tank
Once these are done I should be able to attempt starting it up.
The stretch objective is to fire it up this week!
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