Sunday night I met Chris aka Goodwill down at the shop to put his Norton Commando motor together. While he has never built a motor before he has a pretty good mechanical knowledge and I get the pleasure of working with him 5 days a week to answer all his questions. He’s been coming down to the shop on Sundays and tuesdays for a few months quietly working away. Ive been pretty busy with my other projects so I haven’t been paying much attention to what he’s been doing. All his busy work of cleaning bolts, fixing threads, and sorting what goes where paid off on sunday.

He will be running one of those fancy superblend bearings on the drive side an a ball on the timing side to control the crank end float.

Chris heating up the cases to accept the bearing race

Crank has been built up and the rods polished by Classic Cycles in frenchtown NJ, you could comb you beard in the reflection of these things. We put the bearing in the “bearing shrinker” aka shop fridge for a while and sorted a few things out. After sufficient shrinking time Chris fired up the heat gun and heated the cases to install the bearing. It dropped in for install with no hamfistery needed.After that, we used sufficient force to assemble the case halves for a dry run on the end float of the crank and camshaft. 2 or 3 tries later we had the float within acceptable limits on both and were ready to jizz them together.We fitted the halves back together one last time and torqued the bolts to: just tight enough in/lbs, checked it one more time and had a Beer. PERFECT SUNDAY