Not much new to report

I've done very little on the project of late. I stripped half the paint off the gas tank in search of the little holes for the tank badge. Something's puzzling me: this is a 1957, which is suppost to have the aluminum panels on the sides of the tank, which in turn hold a round badge and some cheesy stick-on knee grips. I don't like that style. My original plan was to make this tank something like the older style, which was chromed, with Norton logo knee grips (assumed stick-on), and silver painted panels with either the Norton logo or the round badges (assuming the screw holes were there to accept them). Well, on stripping down this tank, I discovered to my surprise, two screw holes for knee grips, and no holes for the badges. That's great, I think, because the two-hole with Norton script knee grips are available from British Cycle Supply. Measuring the screw holes on my tank, the center-to-center distance is 4-3/4", not 4-5/8" as quoted on the BCS site. Hmmm... guess I'll have to give them a call and see how confident they are in their dimensions.

Anyway, no new pictures of the Norton this time, but since I feel obligated to post some kind of image, how about a shot of my Velocette? Enjoy!

Back to the beginning

Haven't done much work on the 19S over the last two weeks. I did manage to find a suitable paint stripper, and tested it out on an engine plate part. The plan is to strip all the frame parts and repaint them myself. I'm fairly confident in that. Fenders, oil tank, battery box cover, fuel tank, and headlamp bucket will require work that I'm unable to do to straighten them out. Right now, the main things stopping me from stripping and painting the frame are my inability to extract the steering head ball races with the tools I have available, and work/family time.

So in the mean time, here's a picture of the 19S shortly after it came into my possesion. Note the funny angle of the fuel tank. The original rear tank support is missing, and the previous owner improvised one out of a piece of angle iron. That part (and the center stand) are basically unobtainable. Certainly a suitable (and probably better than original) tank support can be fabricated. Not sure what to do about a centerstand.

The other bike in the background is a 1956 BMW R69. I got that bike at the same time as the 19S, and it currently resides in Montana with my parents. It even runs!

The frame is stripped

I won't bore anyone with a narrative of how I stripped this bike down. Suffice to say that I did it the wrong way. I had every intention of doing it all methodically, sorting and labeling each nut and bolt, etc. Well, I did do it in a sort of organized fashion and separated all the stuff out nicely in a big cabinet. But when the bike was about 95% stripped down, I moved. All my organization went out the window. So at that point I had a bona fide basket case of my own making. Ugh.

C'mon, I was really just making this project more challenging!

Anyway, at this point, the frame is nicely degreased. Believe me, nearly 50 years of grease, gunk, and dirt do not come off easily. I used a whole can of Permatex gasket remover. That did the job adequately, but didn't work as well as I thought it would. The only bits left to come out are the upper and lower head races. I was a little stumped about getting these buggers out. The suggestion from the BritBike Norton board is to use a punch and slowly go around the perimeter. Sounds logical, so that may be the plan for some night this week.

For now... a picture of the degreased frame and the gas tank. Once the aforementioned head races are out, it's on to the paint stripper, and then to fix those screwed up oil tank and batter box support tabs. Sorry about the flash reflection off that license plate (that's the tail end of the Velocette, by the way).

As for the gas tank, there was much more bondo than expected. I dread the metalworking cost that will entail to make right...

The blog begins, finally.

Finally I have a subject worthy of a blog. I've decided to chronicle the rebuild of my old motorcycle, a 1957 Norton 19S, here on this blog. I hope this won't be too terribly boring.
I don't know much about blogging or HTML etc., but I hope to get some pictures up and devote each post to a particular stage of the rebuild. We shall see how it goes.