Little bits make all the difference.

This part is of almost no significance.  It's non-essential.  It's mostly hidden.  Yet, it's the difference between a good build and a great one.  Let me back up a touch to explain:

When a bike is in it's 40's, it has gone through a gambit of personalities, and a lot of different owners.  In the beginning it was an object of joy and admiration.  Somewhere in the middle, it probably got laid down, broken in some parts, serviced by an idiot, and eventually stuck into a corner of somebody's garage.  In the end, it rots away forgotten, until a nostalgic jackass decides to resurrect it.

In all of that time, there's 1 thing that happens, again and again and again - BROKEN STUDS IN CASES!  Every bike I've ever bought (dozens and dozens of them) has had this same issue.  Some dingus has overtightened the stud on the exhaust, the stud on the intake, etc, and it's broken off inside the case.  Sometimes it's a simple matter of PB Blaster and a lot of elbow grease.  Sometimes, however, you just have to drill it out and hope for the best.  That's the last case scenario.

In this case, it was the mounting screws for the tachometer cable to the engine.  One was broken off inside.  It was a lost cause.  It happens.  It took 3 hours to get the machining right, to drill and tap it to perfection, at a new 1/4-20 size.  We moved less than a gram of metal, less than 5 millimeters...

...and it made all the difference.

Top End Pt.2

Big strides were made in the garage last night, the best of which was the complete rebuild of the valves and top end.  Nice.

It's not hard, but it's not easy, either.  The parts go together fairly obviously, and you can see the process in any haynes manual, so I'm not going to jabber on about it.  However, there IS a step that was new to me - lapping in the new valves.  (Yes, Roy, I know how dumb that makes me sound.)

After all of our fidgeting with the head, we've badly tarnished the aluminum, so it's going back to polish again.  After that, it's ready to install.  Awesome.

Polishing Pt. 1

They say the difference between an award winning bike and 2nd place is two things: a patient girlfriend and the extra hours of polishing metal.

With the BSA engine, there's basically 2 big aluminum mirrors on either side that have to be perfect.  Unfortunately one of them is right behind the kick (kick-start only, by the way).  That means that there's a whole lot of guys that tried to hill climb this beast wearing metal tipped boots, scarring the metal again and again and again...

On the left, you can see what the piece looked like "before".  After 4 hours of rigorous work with the sander, it's now smoother than when it came from the factory.  However, that's only 1/3rd of the total polishing work that goes into this 1 piece.  There are 3 pieces total in JUST the engine covers.  30-36 total hours of polishing and I'm just starting.  Crap.

 

P.S. The above 4 hours of polishing were done with 80 grit sandpaper over 3 evenings, since after about an hour of using the electric sander, the tendons in my hand were flexing involuntarily. 

 

P.S. This marks the end on the "dry" sanding.  400 grit, single direction, looks like brushed aircraft aluminum.

 

From here on out, it's a game of polishing compounds and buffing to a mirror finish.

Top End Pt.1

The best part about old iron, aluminum and steel is that you get to work with old fashioned methods and a whole lot of fire.  Case in point: valves.  After all these years, the best material for valve guides is bronze.  You're using a torch to super heat metal to get the old guides out, and new guides in, you're tooling away with brass shavings falling by the wayside, doing things by feel with hand tools...  It's transcendent of time.

This week, we reamed the valve guides to perfection, then added a few sexy bevels to induce oil flow.  It's all about the sexy bevels.  Sadly, the exhaust valves didn't seat very well, so the top end had to go back in to the machine shop for a valve job.  And that's as far as we could go on that.

Also, I picked up the cylinder from the stripper, and dropped that off to be bored out as well, so I'll have everything ready to rock next week.  Hopefully.

So, there were only baby steps happening, but we're inching ever closer to having something assembled.  If there's any question about the cro-magnon, guttural awesomeness to working on vintage iron, look at this top end again, and tell me it doesn't look like a caveman's skull:

Bottom End Pt.1

I had gotten the parts back from Quinlan Automotive a while ago, but due to scheduling difficulty, wasn't able to get a good time to get the motor back together.  Fortunately, tonight the ball started rolling again.

First thing was heating up the case and getting the old bearing race out, and the new bearing race in.  In and out like a glove:

We put the new bearing on the crank with relative ease:

Then we checked to see how well the machine shop did to match the other bearing.  It was perfect, and the crank seated beautifully:

The only issue we're running into is that the side-to-side tolerance is off, so we'll have to go back and forth with the bearing and the shims to get it perfect, but we're VERY close to having the bottome end finished.

Jay Leno's BSA

You don't find a lot of them in this condition these days, but Jay's 650 Lightning is a peach.

http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/motorcycles-1/bsa/

Still Alive

It's been several weeks since I last posted, because the bike was in a hiatus for a moment, due to my getting extra work and being extra busy from the Super Bowl.  Then, Mark was sick, which sucks, but it looks like we're getting back on the horse tomorrow, so stay tuned!