Electronics
Boyer Bransden has all sorts of ignition kits suitable for a variety of bikes and engine configurations, and tech guy Kevin was most helpful, suggesting a number of things which would ensure a decent spark. The key suggestion was the conversion of the distributor to electronics, which requires a little modification. A slight sticking point is due to my predilection for riding off road, I want the bike to be able to run without a battery and sometimes without lights.
This cuts out whole swathes of parts in the system which seems a good idea to me, especially as many years of problems with batteries on British bikes have left me cold on the idea of them. Still, it looks like with the application of a few folding restoration coupons, I should have a reliable ignition.
There are of course always other options and thanks to the competition world, there is a simpler but much more expensive option of a crankshaft-mounted electronic ignition kit. This sits on the end of the crank where the alternator would have been and powers a coil under the tank and has the facility for lights to be plugged in too. Maybe in the future this option will happen, I don’t know, all things are possible in the future. What I do know is things are moving along a little more and the expenditure on this machine isn’t out of this world, which proves it is possible to do such things on a budget of next to nothing.
As I was on with this bit of the bike the temporary plastic oil tank kept getting in the way so it went the journey… Its demise was helped by Autohose in Stafford having something which, while not being the exact part I was looking for, was pretty close. If we’d had autojumbles to go to, this bit would have been spotted much earlier in the proceedings, and for under a fiver it has
done the job. The fitting I had been looking for would have screwed direct into the oil tank, which is being welded when the welder has time; this fitting has the required rocker feed take-off but will need another bit of tube and a fitting to screw into the tank boss. For the moment, though, I’ve connected the return and feed to either end of this little union and for the moment it will suffice to do away with the plastic oil bottle.
In theory – in practice too, actually – the engine could run with this type of lubrication system; no, I don’t intend to run it like this, but there are/were a number of British sprint bikes which used a longer length of tube and did run just this way. Okay, a quarter mile sprint isn’t a long way and even if the bike is ridden back down the track, the chances of it running for more than a mile without being back at the support truck are slim, so it is unlikely to run out of oil, so for testing purposes it could happen, though
I’m assured my oil tank isn’t too far away from being ready. Though with this fitting and piping in place, there is a certain elegant simplicity to the thing.
All this mucking about with electrical things has taken my eye off the other bits. There’ve been things to sort out on some of my other bikes too and it was deemed sensible to make sure the BSA B40 actually ran before being delivered to its new owner. This of course meant a quick going-over with the spanners, and the poor Triumph was left to its own devices for a while. This actually turned out to be a good thing as if I’d carried on fretting over the oil unions, I’d never have looked at Autohose’s site and seen the T-piece which solved the problem. Such is life.