TALES FROM THE SHED
Maybe the worst thing about Frank’s BSA is the sad fact that everyone else on the planet knows how to fix it. Himself? Less so…
Clutches are simple things. In fact… motorcycles, especially elderly bikes built in Brum, are simple things. I know this; you know this; everybody and his pet armadillo knows this. Except it is only half of the story. Although motorcycles – here exemplified by a BSA of doubtful parentage – are completely simple and understandable by anyone with an IQ in double figures, it requires something special to fix them. Because although they are simple enough (and they really are) they can achieve hideous levels of imaginative complex wossname when they need fixing.
Take this A65. Its clutch is plainly some kind of catastrophe. At some time in the bike’s past, some previously possibly proud owner did things to the clutch that I have never seen before. And I have seen very many clutches. Many. Some of them have been very hideous indeed. But I have never seen one which was locked up so tight that it was impossible to free it using the handlebar lever and cable. In fact, if asked I would have said it was impossible to do that. However … I have been proved wrong again. Which is supposed to be spiritually uplifting. Huh.
There should be lots of pictures nearby. Take a look. Gaze in wonder. The entire primary drive is a well-developed marvel of simple, basic engineering. Nothing complicated at all. And at first glance I thought it looked to be in decent condition. Then I looked closer. Then I started to strip the clutch once I’d understood that it needed stripping (then staring at in wonder, then consigning to a deep pit somewhere far away), as I reported last month.
Last month! Where does the time go? A frequently asked question. Time was, my friends, that this was always the time of year when guys like me – north of middle age, not entirely impecunious – would stop riding until the weather had done its worst, instead rebuilding our old bike enthusiasms with a little gentle bike rebuilding. This new year so far has seen me riding as much as I can to avoid the fettling. And I enjoy fettling. Usually.
The plates all came out. Eventually. Sage folk of my acquaintance revealed that although the clutch is mounted on a taper it would probably pull loose by stern looks and hand power alone, but the engine sprocket, although mounted on a spline, would almost certainly demand a puller. Which of course I lacked, although I do have a bag of BSA pullers, mostly for clutches but also for timing
gears. I have been down this road more than twice, as the song goes. It’s a very good song, too, all about a vending machine repair man. It is easy to become distracted by music – by anything – while working on a BSA. Is that the time? Think I’ll go outside and get soaked instead…
Meanwhile, stalwart work ethic being my password, I ordered a puller for the engine sprocket – which was of course unmoveable, as predicted. It’s presumably been clamping its crankshaft since 1971, so is allowed to be a little uptight. The puller arrived, bought online for speed and cheapness and because what can be wrong with a puller, huh? Especially a puller which comes with three different bolts for fixing – presumably – into three different sprockets. Variety in all things. At least one of the three sets of bolts will fit, not least because one of the bikes the tool is specifically intended for is a BSA A65.
But I am ahead of myself. Rare when wrestling with a BSA, but forgive me. Christmas was a celebration indeed and my natural exuberance was fortified by festivity. Or something.
Cunningly and indeed neatly wrapped around the end of the crankshaft – outboard of the engine sprocket of course – lives the alternator. I like alternators. Alternators are great. They’re great mainly because they are robust and fairly bombproof. Unless baked. Which this one appears to have been. Baked. Rarely have I seen a better cooked alternator. Nothing medium rare in here. Oh no.
Another reason to like Mr Lucas’s RM21 alternator is because it’s easy to remove. Three nuts hold the stator to three studs. The nuts always undo inside an oily chaincase, and the stator simply pulls off. Just like that.
Except on a BSA. This BSA at any rate. Would it move? And that, gentle reader, is what we call a rhetorical question. Of course it wouldn’t move. However, I have been failing to fix bikes for as long as I can remember (the 1970s were a time of vagueness, of course) so of course I have a small assortment of brutal pullers. Pullers with legs, some two, some three. Except I sawed off part of one of the legs from the 3-leg device … although I cannot now remember why. They were curious days, plainly. So, out with the 2-leg puller. What can go wrong?
Of course it’s not possible to fit the two legs opposite each other while the actual big bolt which does the actual work is over the end of the crankshaft. Of course not. And in
any case you should use a 3-leg puller to pull off an item which is retained by three fixings. No one ever had a problem removing an alternator stator, ever. Not until now. Gentle reader, you are a witness to history in the making.
And there is a reason why the stator refuses to budge. This is because BSA were precision engineers. Not like, for fine example, AMC, whose singles and twins rely on the fettler to be able to position the stator so that the clearance to the rotor is uniform and that there is no contact. This is because imbecility had been at work in the AMC design office and they mounted the stator inside a bulge in the chaincase outer, where the gap between stator and rotor is invisible and inaccessible once the two chaincase halves have been offered up. My, how they must have chuckled down in Plumstead.
Meanwhile in Small Heath, BSA’s diligent dedicated band of perfectionists not only mounted the stator on the usual three studs, but also squeezed it into tight-fitting extensions of the crankcase. This ensures – so says the manual – that a correct air gap between rotor and stator is easily maintained. Which is certainly true. And unless some blithering bozo runs the chaincase completely without lube, thus cooking all within, the stator is easily removed and replaced. However…
However, the thing came off. It will never work again. New stators are of course available and cost around £90. The gentle approach to maintenance is its own reward.
I gazed smugly at the engine sprocket, snug on the splines on the crankshaft. The threaded holes looked inviting (they’re ¼” UNF, you know, demonstrating that BSA were indeed shifting over from BSF / Whitworth threadforms) and my sparkly new extractor had bolts to fit them. Hurrah, and things like that. However (my most popular word at the moment, somehow) unlike the other bolts which came with the extractor these were yards too short to allow the rest of the thing to actually fit. Pause for a pout, maybe two. And a glass of Writer’s Tears … but no, rather than surrender to another delay while longer
bolts turn up, why don’t I strip down the clutch and get it ready for removal? It’ll just drop off its splines, so I’m unreliably advised.
It’s always best to be methodical. Being naturally otherwise has led to vast expense down the years, and to no end of pointless repetition of simple tasks. For example, if you’re intending to remove the clutch (I wasn’t) then before removing the plates (I did) it’s good idea to tighten the springs beforehand so that you can remove the centre nut. Spotted the problem with that? Yes of course, to get a spanner onto the centre nut you need to remove the pressure plate and its springs. See; bikes are simple, but…
But there is of course a special tool. I was whining away in my typical manner on the RC Facebook group, and asked a simple question – more of that in a moment. Discussing the special tool which allows the clutch to be locked without destroying any of the original plates resulted in the typically useful advice. This inevitably revolved around a lathe, a welding torch – both of which I lack, mercifully, and all manner of arcane ways of accomplishing the simple task. The question I actually posed was whether the plates used in the 3-spring BSA clutch are the same as those in the 4-plate BSA clutch. The reason I asked was because one million BSA spares suppliers can supply a special tool for the 4-spring clutch but not specifically the 3-spring. Are you following this? Listen carefully, because I shall return to this later on.
No one actually answered my query, of course, so I repaired to Draganfly’s excellent BSA pages and compared part numbers. It’s a tough life, but someone needs to do it. The part numbers are different, so the plates must be different. OK. So although they may be made of different materials they may be identical dimensionally? What do you think? Why am I asking? Because I want the special tool, that’s why. Endless suggestions that I take two old plates and weld them together, bolt them together, weld on a long lever, so forth were profoundly ignored. Life is short.
I ordered the special tool for a 4-spring clutch from onestopbikebits. It arrived very rapidly. It fit the 3-spring clutch. I removed the centre nut. End of problem. This, gentle reader, is a classic example of where the time goes when a chap’s attempting to deconstruct an unfamiliar bike.
At about this point, sensing my agg and sharing the pain of A65 ownership, a very nice man called Dave Capon (Hi, Dave!) emailed to offer a complete clutch which he’d removed from his own A65 (a wise move)
because he was fitting a belt drive to cope with the extra power of his modest 3-litre overbore kit (an unwise move). Despite the obvious insanity of such a project, a chap should never look a gift lunatic in the nose, so I offered coffee and largesse. He declined one of those (wise man) and instead presented me m with a complete dismantled BSA 3-spring clutch from a 1971 A65, just like mine and dentical in every way. RC readers are the best n the world. No argument. I think I forgot the coffee. RC editors are hopeless.
Meanwhile, the longer bolts for the engine sprocket puller arrived. Can you keep up with the relentless pace of an A65 dismantling? Take a break here, have a chocolate bar or a pint of decent whisky, whichever you consider the more sustaining in times of stress.
Long bolts were united with both the puller and the sprocket and the sprocket just … fell off. No need for a puller, then. Lesson learned, possibly. I have an even more impressive collection c of pullers now, though, which is the silver lining to the BSA cloud. And speaking of pullers…
To remove the clutch from the gearbox mainshaft requires … a puller. Another puller. Despite both Dave ‘massive pistons’ Capon and the BSA manual suggesting that it would just fall off its taper, it doesn’t budge. This is the way with BSA. I have learned this. This is a sort-of enlightenment exercise for ancient hippies. I repaired to the ethers to locate a puller. The ethers are ram-full with BSA pullers. There are more BSA pullers than there are BSA motorcycles. It’s a cosmic thing, I think. Happily, the BSA manual – a fine publication; I know a lot of it by heart – reveals that the puller has its own part number: 61-3766, so a chap can interrogate a search engine with both accuracy and confidence. I do so. I find several. I order one, and then go for long cliff walks to control the excitement of another puller arriving. It arrives. It is a thing of delight. I insert it into the correct place. Its thread grips nothing. There is a certain predictability here.
In Dave’s big box of BSA clutch bits is the inner retaining plate that the puller is supposed to screw into. I find it and gaze in awe and wonder. The thread on the plate looks rather less fine than that on the 613766 puller. I attempt to screw the puller into the thread. Of course it’s a different thread. I repair to a study of the manual. Nope, that is the correct puller. I repair to the ethers and study several pullers with the same part number. There appear to be three different threads although miraculously they all appear
to fit the same clutch. Life is a mystery. This is the BSA way, which is like a Milky Way but probably less fattening.
There is of course a bright side to all this nonsense. Another most excellent RC reader, Neil Walton, sent me encouragement, along with several pics of his own BSA of a similar vintage. Encouragement is always useful, as you know, but Neil’s was particularly interesting, not least because his bike is apparently untouched, and therefore original. This is very good, not least because although the world is packed with spares to fit BSAs, those spares usually almost fit several models and in the case of electrical spares come with a diagram, rather than a How They Fit photo or two. Neil’s Beezer is as it left Small Heath, so I wondered whether he had a few photos showing how the electrics are supposed to fit together – because this is not obvious to a chap offering up miles of wires to a frame. He did. It makes more sense.
Which is the big thing about communication, a big thing which has been improved bigly by the instantaneous nature of modern e-stuff. A kind person can read of my woes online and can reply immediately. Another can read them in the magazine and can offer comment, advice and even bits. All of these are great, and do genuinely make life easier. I try to do the same, in case you wondered, and aim to reply to all queries as soon as I can. Not that I can offer much in the way of actual help, particularly if we’re talking BSA, but I can be encouraging. Which really does help.
Meanwhile, back in the allegedly real world, I have ordered another clutch centre puller, which may or may not fit. And in any case, this being a BSA, I can’t actually see any thread inside my own clutch to which the puller can attach. All good clean fun, as I’m sure you’ll agree. How do you take a link out of a triplex primary chain without removing it first? Surely that would be less of a disaster than removing the entire primary drive? Bring back AMC twins, I say. They had it right. Unit construction? Who needs it...