What I found
“Without rose-coloured glasses”
By the time I had reached the age of 50, I had played around with several repairs on Japanese bikes and built up a café racer from a sad 500 AJS single, but had never done a “restoration.” So when I saw the advertisement, “For sale Velocette”, I just had to have a look. After seeing the LE I was somewhat down hearted but said to my wife “the bike is very different so I would like to try and restore it.” I knew absolutely nothing about the LE but established fairly quickly it had a stuck clutch but the motor ran and it sounded OK. I thought it was worth making a low cash offer. I mean how hard could it be to fix the clutch? Forward thinking in design, maybe, but my 1951 LE showed a lot of backward thinking from an engineering point of view. My background was in medical equipment repair, so starting every job with a blank lined book and a camera was second nature. This proved to be my saving grace. The dry clutch sandwiched between a wet sump and a wet gearbox behind an exhaust box, rear swing arm, wheel and shaft drive, required the bike to be first sat on a support under the motor. Next the front wheel and forks removed, the rear wheel removed, side foot plates, knee protectors, electrical wiring, dash boards, battery, gear lever, and then chassis removed. Now you can remove the exhaust box, radiator and remove motor & gearbox from the engine frame. By the way you will require a spare set of hands on more than one occasion. I challenge anyone to lift off the chassis with it standing on its stand as shown in Velocette literature. On subsequent strip downs I managed to make a jig that enabled me to leave the forks in place, but damaging paint work was very easy. • A very wet clutch. • Oil leaking into the clutch housing due to the open splines passing right through and under the inner bearing race. (Velocette’s assembly instruction included slivers of cork to resolve this.) • Hole punched through the clutch housing under the start lever. (No stop to prevent this.) • Alloy head on iron barrel with copper gasket. Eddy currents helped corrosion in the water ways and they were all completely blocked. • Only one of the two white metal bearings on the output shaft from the motor had positive oil feed the other was showing signs of white metal picking up. • New clutch plates & springs fitted. • New rings & re-hone. • Re-core radiator.