Refurbishment of all the bits and pieces!

Over the last couple of months I've spent time in short bursts refinishing most of the ancillary bits and pieces. Generally the process was degrease and clean; remove all loose paint and rub down smooth; apply rust converter to any rusty bits; prime and respray. I've been using Simoniz Hard Gloss or Satin Black after a recommendation from one of the Royal Enfield group members. It seems to live up to its name so far and is nice to apply.

Pictures tell a thousand words:

I removed the paint from the horribly painted tank badges and repainted them with Humbrol model paint. Not perfect, but good enough.

Various black brackets etc have been repainted.

The rear light needed a fair amount of work to get rid of scrapes before I repainted it and I also gave the front indicators (that will mount into the fairing) a clean up and repainted the bodies.

 

The number plate looked like it had been jumped up and down on and then holes to bolt it on made with a large screwdriver! But it's a nice pressed metal one so seems a shame to replace it.

I managed to get it near enough flat but then needed to disguise the messy mounting holes. I cut a piece of aluminium can and epoxied it onto the back behind the holes, then filled with body filler and rubbed down. I sprayed the back satin black and used a Humbrol model paint that was almst the right colour and touched up where I'd filled in. 

I then found a cool "Made in Italy" sticker to cover the mess! Again, not perfect but OK for what I need and smartened it all up for the cost of a sticker and a bottle of paint.

Another pleasant afternoon's work had the rev counter bezel, clutch lever and horn looking good again.

The forks were next to get the black paint treatment. The stanchions are a little pitted and I'll probably get them rechromed at some point but they are ok for now. The forks use a sealed cartridge system so there isn't a lot of oil under pressure there to be held back by the seals, as I'm used to. I replaced the seals to be on the safe side though and refilled with oil. I'm really impressed with the quality of the various bolts used on these assemblies - they clean up very nicely.

I've bought some Kawasaki switchgear and when I tested them, the switches were pretty sticky and inconsistent in the connections they were making, so I pulled them apart and gave each of the individual contactors a good clean up and lubrication. Very fiddly work and I was constantly waiting for a spring to ping across the workshop, but all is working as it should now. The bodies cleaned up pretty nicely as well.

Keeping on the electrical theme, the coils and their mounting brackets were horribly mucky so I pulled that lot apart and gave it all a good dose of brake cleaner and wire brushing.

And pretty much the last black bits then were the brake calipers - 2 front and 1 rear. I was originally going to just repaint them assuming that all was well until I could test them connected up to the bike. But I decided that I was better to be safe and bought Brembo service kits to replace the seals and stretch bolts. Expensive but it does give me some peace of mind. I've also bought a nearly new Royal Enfield 350 brake lever and master cylinder that matches the style of the clutch lever really well, so the braking system should be well sorted now.

I've bought various bits of chromeware and most of it looked decidedly second hand. I spent pretty much a whole day applying chrome cleaner and elbow grease to it all but was really pleased with how it all came to life.

Tarnished mess:

Seat grab rail

Crash Bars / pannier protectors:

Pannier frames:

So now I think it's time to sort out welding on those frame horns and then refinish the frame and engine ready for the rebuild to commence.

Gathering new bits

I’ve been gathering bits together from EBay, Marketplace and autojumbles as I spotted them, ready for rebuilding proper to start during winter.

I’ve already got hold of the frame to donate the rear parts that mount the mudguard.

A standard seat came up, with decent original foam, a solid base and a new, but unfitted, cover. That lot was £70 - a bargain, as the covers alone are £50.

Another total bargain from the same source - rear mudguard, light and number plate mount. I needed it all and got it for £50. You can see how much of the original mudguard was cut off in this photo. The combined bits of the two somewhat damaged lights should make one good one.

I wasn’t really looking for this, but couldn’t resist when a NOS speedo came up, with just a couple of small dents on the bezel. I need to fill and spray the rev counter bezel anyway so no big deal to do both and then they’ll match. Everything will look so much better with this, as the replacement speedo that came with the bike was a different size to the rev counter so I was puzzling over how to create a decent looking dash - problem now solved!

In an earlier blog, I was musing about what style the bike should be and I have pretty much settled that I’m going to build it as a middleweight tourer. I do like the California but they are a bit big and in your face for me. Anyway, at the Stafford Show I came across these old fibreglass panniers for £10, which need a lot of work but I'm pretty sure I can do something useful with them. 

I also found a set of old but very useable chrome crash bars, which should fit around these nicely, once I make a couple of custom brackets.

The seat attaches to the chrome grab rail - I found a good condition one from GutziButs, which just needs a good clean up with Solvol. One of the V50 forum members sent me a rusty but restorable seat lock for nowt! 

After having seen the video of the bike running, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to live with the noise from the open megaphone exhausts that came with the bike. They are also way too short for the tourer style I want to create. So I bit the bullet and bought a pair of repro Dunstall silencers. These look similar to original but should give a nice deep burble; plus I can always wrap the baffles if they are too loud for me.

Once I’d decided on the tourer style,  I came across this lovely Mk3 fairing that I think will look great with the panniers. Together with indicators and also a set of original pillion foot pegs / exhaust mounts that I was missing. 

The bike had no handlebar controls with it when I got it, and the Guzzi ones seem to be notoriously unreliable, so I got a set of Kawasaki ER6 switchgear, which has everything I need and nothing I don’t! 

And finally, for now, I was going to repair and modify the beaten up original mudguard that came with the bike, but when I priced up the bits I'd need to make up new mounting brackets and do fibreglass repairs etc, it was cheaper to just get a decent second hand one, so that's what I did! 

In a similar vein, I started to clean up the downpipes, which had been roughly painted matt black. They were chrome underneath but quite badly damaged. I got a price for rechroming which seemed a bit too much to me. However, I do think that the bike will need chrome pipes as the cylinders and downpipes are such a highlight of the design. So I found some second hand ones that I think should clean up nicely and were about half the cost of rechroming. Time will tell if that is a good decision or not!

 

I've been very pleasantly surprised at how cheap the parts have been, relative to what the Crusader parts cost me. Must be a lot to do with the relative scarcity and possibly also needing to remanufacture parts for the Enfield?

 I reckon I have most of what I need now to get moving as and when I have time.

UPDATED 18 Dec: when I said a couple of paragraphs ago “ Time will tell if that is a good decision or not.”, the exhausts arrived and it wasn’t a good decision! The photo of them had been taken from the very most flattering angle and they were generally very tarnished and discoloured. I ended up sending them back for a refund and I have decided to bite the bullet and get my originals rechromed.

These turned out lovely - not perfect, as there were a couple of quite deep gouges that were too deep to polish out, but really nice.

I also found a set of chrome pannier racks that should work nicely with a bit of custom bracketry. The chrome on these definitely will clean up ok!

 

MIG Welder mini-project

So before I can start looking at fixing up the frame, I need some welding kit. And a minor detail is that I need to teach myself to mig weld! I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to do that, as I did a bit of gas welding and arc welding many years ago and was OK at that. How hard can it be?!

I picked up my Facebook Marketplace bargain (hopefully) - £20 but with a wire feed that keeps jamming.

It was pretty filthy so the first job was to strip it down, clean all the accumulated crap from inside it and give the outside a good clean up. I also bent a couple of the pieces back into shape so that screw holes etc lined up properly.

Before:

... and After:

I noticed that the earth lead connection to the clip was hanging on by about half its threads, so remade that properly onto the other arm of the earth clamp.

I cleaned the wire feed mechanism up and gave it all a good lubrication. When I plugged it in and tried to feed some wire, it did indeed jam. But the wire feed mechanism appears sound, so I'm assuming the problem is in the liner down to the torch. This is made of plastic and a known failure point. I removed it and ordered a metal liner which apparently is about 20% of the friction of the plastic ones. I also ordered a new shroud and nozzles for the torch.

This picture shows the plastic (black) and wire (white) liners next to each other.

The original shroud and tip looked past their best - these are consumable items, so i replaced those as well.

Still some fine tuning to do, but we have wire being fed!

I tried a weld and it worked - although not the prettiest weld in the world. I definitely need some practice.

So, it's working but I'm not convinced that I've fully got to the bottom of the problem, as the wire speed can be a bit erratic and twice the motor has just not turned, although I can hear the relay clicking. I may investigate replacing the motor if I can find a cheap alternative.

Updated 24/9/23:

I found a replacement feed motor and mechanism on EBay that was only £10 but coming from China. When it turned up it was nothing like the size of the original! It looked like a big version of the sort of thing we had in Hornby trains whereas the original is about 5 times as big and then runs through a worm drive gearbox. Somehow it didn’t look like it would “cut the mustard” 🙄. I did a bit of research later and found out that the original feed motor and gearbox were truck wiper motors!

So I pulled the motor off and stripped it down to see if I could find anything. The brushes had plenty left on them but were a bit sticky so I cleaned and lubed them. Then I gave the commutator(?) ring a good clean up with emery and cleaned everything with contact cleaner. Put it all back together and it all seems a lot happier, so 🤞🤞🤞. 

I also realised that the tip shouldn't be sticking out from the shroud so much as it is, which will stop the gas protecting the weld effectively, so I need to maybe put a lock nut on behind it. I only have some quite thick scrap steel that I’ve been laying down some weld on so I’ll get hold of some thinner stuff now so that I can experiment with settings etc to get things set up ready to take on the frame 😃.

Electrickery

The wiring provided with the bike was a right mess! The original loom had been left intact but then roughly cut into and hacked about to wire into the moto-gadget unit and non-standard switchgear.

I spent a happy hour or so in the shed trying to disentangle and understand the various different circuits. There weren't many block connectors, with most things being hard wired in. As I'm going to completely rewire the bike, I cut the loom down into sub-sections, clearly labelling everything so I knew how to reconstruct it.

I ended up with this rat's nest of redundant wiring, which went straight in the bin.

But more importantly, I also ended up with a clear set of components and a clearer understanding of how to rewire it all using the moto-gadget unit, when the time comes.

I also used a spare battery to check things like the horn and also how the wiring for the repeater lights in the speedo are wired up. Happily, all worked fine.

Some history.

When I bought the bike, the current owner gave me a copy of the previous owner’s registration document. I wrote to him a couple of weeks later to see whether he possibly still had any of the parts left that he’d removed when he modified the bike.

Yesterday, I got a really interesting email from him with some history of the bike. It turns out that he bought it in a pretty sad state, after it had been left to rot at the back of a garage for 17 years. Lots was missing from it and the wiring loom had been nibbled by rodents!

Seeing that condition, I understood why he had done the build in the way he had. Apparently, I have been quite wrong in describing it as a cafe racer - it's a "brat bike" (whatever that is!)

This was the bike when he finished his project:

He thought the mileage before he changed the speedo was around 35k miles. The compression was perfect, which was the deciding reason he rebuilt it. 

He said that it was in perfect running condition, after fitting new carbs from Italy and electronic ignition, and used to run really well.

The thing that I was most pleased about was that he sent me a link to a YouTube video of bike in former incarnation and that did indeed show it running really well, so I am very hopeful that the engine should need little doing to it.