Norton Commando 850mk3....coming back to life...

Waaaaaaaay heeeeeeeeeey :JB

Doesn't she sound lovely too! Have a beer on me :beerjug:

Andres

Cheers:beerjug:

Bike does sound really good,although it took me a while to get it going ..............Boyer ignition:rolleyes:
Anyway it will still be a little while to get her on the road.waiting for a seat cover to arrive but mainly,I’ve discovered the tank is leaking slightly so need to get it repaired..............I popped the tank and seat on to see how it looked, I was getting excited :D
 

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I’m still getting front disc envy and when put with the electric start envy it’s not a good place to be.

Nice work on the start up, I hope the fuel leak isn’t a bad one and can be easily fixed :okay
 
Looks lovely. Well done that man. Have a bit of nostalgia ...
 

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Well, as you can see she is now pretty much finished:thumb I’ve done nearly 500 miles n it now,so almost run in. I’m very happy with it, runs beautifully, pulls well and ticks over all the time:D
Now, it wasn’t without a hiccup right at the end. The previous pics were taken as I was taking her round the block just to check I had all gears and neutral where it should be:rolleyes: After barely a mile or so it went on to one cylinder :mad I did all the usual checks, leads,plugs, coils etc but couldn’t work out why it was only running on the left cylinder. With the plugs out, and turning the motor over I stuck my finger over the plug hole...................No fucking compression :eek WTF this is effectively a new engine. Whippe off the tappet cover to discover instead of having 8 thou gap I had about 6mm:eek: which meant the valve had stuck in the guide hence no compression! Fuck!
I phoned Norman, the guy who built it, he couldn’t quite believe what I was telling him. In 40 years he had never had an engine fail like this. He told me to get the bike to him ASAP and he would sort it straight away. I dropped it to him a day or two later, he promised to phone me later that day to tell me what he found. He called later as promised but was still dumbfounded by what he’d found. The inlet valve had hit the exhaust valve bending it enough to seize it in the guide and crack the guide............He said he’d only ever seen that on a race bike when you miss a gear at about 7000 rpm.........:nenau lubrication was fine everything looked ok,he said he’d sleep on it and try to work out what happened.
Next day he replaced guide and valves put it back together and it ran beautifully.......................for a mile and a half:blast same thing happened again. After pushing back to his workshop ( the poor guy is 73):blast he stripped again while it was still warm and that’s when he discovered the problem.
He found that the new cam followers had seized in the barrel it sits in. When the engine cools down they contract and move effortlessly in the barrel. These followers are a very new ( this was the first engine he’d fitted them in) design introduced by Andover Norton to replace the older type which wore notoriously quickly.They are made of a new alloy that has undergone thousands of hours of testing and were shown to greatly reduce the wear. They cost £255 per cylinder :eek: more than double the cost of 5he older type. However, I’m not sure they tested the fecking things for expansion in an actual engine. They should have just fitted perf into the original bore of the barrel.........which they did, but obviously expanded more than the original ones:blast.
However, all is good now and a couple of little jobs I had left to do he did while he was there and he even lent me a tank to use while I sealed my own, he then delivered the bike back to me. So all ended well:thumb
 

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Blimey! What a palaver but glad you got to the bottom of it. She really is a beautiful looking bike and so glad you've got her running well.......I wonder if she'd have made Biaritz? I'm not sure the Guzzi would've as she recently shat her battery around the time we would've been there.

Out of interest, how did you cure the issue, did you revert to standard followers?

Andres
 
Blimey! What a palaver but glad you got to the bottom of it. She really is a beautiful looking bike and so glad you've got her running well.......I wonder if she'd have made Biaritz? I'm not sure the Guzzi would've as she recently shat her battery around the time we would've been there.

Out of interest, how did you cure the issue, did you revert to standard followers?

Andres

I reckon the old girl would have made it;) I’m sure the Guzzi would have too. When you say “shat her battery “ was it just the battery or a nasty leccy issue?
I’m up for trying W&W again next year, all being well:thumb

Regarding the followers, yes he reverted to a set of std ones. He had to change the cam too. He said it looked fine but couldn’t take the risk.

She does have an oil leak:blast but again, annoyingly, this is down to poor quality replacement part. The leak is coming from the neutral switch,not from where it screws into the gearbox, but from the bloody electrical terminal on the end of the switch:mad: Easy job to fix though, as long as new switch is better than the last one.....:rolleyes:
 
I reckon the old girl would have made it;) I’m sure the Guzzi would have too. When you say “shat her battery “ was it just the battery or a nasty leccy issue?
I’m up for trying W&W again next year, all being well:thumb
................

Yup, defo up for next year :thumb2

It literally did 'shat' the battery; press the starter and click, click, click, Then the battery whistled (loudly), then smoke started coming from it and it got VERY hot VERY quickly. You've never seen me disconnect and throw a battery in the garden so quickly :D Of course, I made it more complicated than it needed to be and also bought a recon starter/solenoid as I assumed that was the culprit, it wasn't :blast Anyway, new battery & new starter/solenoid and she now starts better than ever.........

Andres
 
Yup, defo up for next year :thumb2

It literally did 'shat' the battery; press the starter and click, click, click, Then the battery whistled (loudly), then smoke started coming from it and it got VERY hot VERY quickly. You've never seen me disconnect and throw a battery in the garden so quickly :D Of course, I made it more complicated than it needed to be and also bought a recon starter/solenoid as I assumed that was the culprit, it wasn't :blast Anyway, new battery & new starter/solenoid and she now starts better than ever.........

Andres

Every cloud has a silver lining and all that stuff Andres ;)

Kimbo
 
I reckon the old girl would have made it;) I’m sure the Guzzi would have too. When you say “shat her battery “ was it just the battery or a nasty leccy issue?
I’m up for trying W&W again next year, all being well:thumb

Regarding the followers, yes he reverted to a set of std ones. He had to change the cam too. He said it looked fine but couldn’t take the risk.

She does have an oil leak:blast but again, annoyingly, this is down to poor quality replacement part. The leak is coming from the neutral switch,not from where it screws into the gearbox, but from the bloody electrical terminal on the end of the switch:mad: Easy job to fix though, as long as new switch is better than the last one.....:rolleyes:

Oil leaks seem to be par for the course with Notruns. Mine had a very small leak that I couldn’t find but in the end it was a tiny split in the oil return and because I was only running it in the workshop if was never wind assisted so ran in a variety of directions before dripping down about 4” from the source.

I had great plans to get back to business and finish both the Monty & the Notrun but I’ve been having one day off every fortnight since early July so they’ve been neglected. The plus side is that the money for an electric start is effectively in the bag and if I can find someone to both supply & fit one I’ll get the bike over to them and just tell them to do it then fine tune the ignition and fuelling and hand it back ready for the road.

It feels a bit defeatist but the way things look if we don’t go back into lockdown I’m getting very little time off in the next 6 months and the Norton needs finishing.
 


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