With the end of the semester, things have started to calm down a bit. The mad rush of re-reading text, marking essays, and lesson planning have ceased for a while. But with that end comes new beginnings: substituting for high school, building a new house, preparing our current house for sale, and, of course, the motorcycles.
Last fall, the Norton wasn't running very well. You can see it running to the side here:
Turns out, we had the pistons in the wrong cylinders. Dad installed them without the cylinder-head and wasn't able to line up the valve grooves in the pistons. I'd opened an adjustment cover and noticed that one of the pushrods had come right off the tappet. What happened was, the bike ran fine until it heated up, causing the metal expanded and the valves to actually come into contact with the pistons. Not good.
Now that everything is sorted out, my latest problem is that running the single Mikuni carburetor, which you can see in the above video, doesn't allow enough room for an air filter. One cylinder is already scored from digested dirt. Seems there are two courses of action I can take:
First, I can fit the original Amal Monobloc carbs. The only problems with this are that I don't have the original airbox to fit them, which retails at about $125, and I also don't have the choke slides, which retail for about $20 each, for a total of $165.
Second, I can fit a central oil tank, which would allow for bigger carb. The problems here are that the price of these tanks range from $300-$600, and you can't run a battery.
The good news is that my local guru happens to have an old fiber-glass one in stock and has agreed to sell it to me on the cheap. The only problem is that it lacks mounting brackets, something I'll have to fabricate.
