RICK’S FIXES
Rick digs out an Enfield project that never quite returned to the road – and finally finishes it off
Remedies for your many maladies
Um... a few people – most recently Allan Hitchcock of Royal Enfield specialists Hitchcocks – have asked how my partner Judy’s Continental GT, my CB project a couple of years ago, is going. So now is probably the time to confess. It isn’t. Well it wasn’t... you see, when I took the concluding pictures for the feature it wasn’t quite finished and sadly that’s how it stayed.
You know how it is; Judy didn’t need the bike right then and I was a bit worried about filling the fibreglass tank with fuel until the sealer had had a long time to set... but the truth is that the bike soon got buried and fell off the radar. Anyway, after all these questions I decided to dig it out again. Somehow there seemed to be more to do than I remembered... Oh yes, the front mudguard was too long at the back, the brake cable didn’t fit properly, the rocker cover wouldn’t tighten down, there was no wiring to the rear light and what am I going to do about a stop switch? I don’t want to bodge the universal one back on. Still, I’d promised Judy, so on the bench it went. And, silly me, it really wasn’t a problem. An hour spent removing and trimming the mudguard, an evening wiring up – including sorting out an original Lucas stop switch I had spare. I made a cable and an extended rocker-box sleeve nut on the lathe and the next day it was running. Usually I’d say press on to the end or you easily lose impetus and a project grinds to a halt. But maybe sometimes you need a break and will come back refreshed. Still, I was right about one thing – the fuel tank’s leaking already. Sometimes you just can’t win.
‘MAYBE SOMETIMES YOU NEED A BREAK AND WILL COME BACK REFRESHED’