Could be a lonely thread but anyone here have a Sunbeam ?
Could be a lonely thread but anyone here have a Sunbeam ?
There was one on the Classic Motorcycle run on Saturday. My English shaft bike cuz .
DeMyer's Laws - an argument that consists primarily of rambling quotes isn't worth bothering with.
I have a mate in Tauranga with one with sidecar.
It was on trade me a while back but he chickened out & withdrew it.
He's not on here, but i can put you in touch.
We have an S8, much the same thing.
There was an S7 at the National rally a couple of weeks back, and I spotted one at the Greymouth street races while down there to. They are around but you don't see them on the road much.
Please don't feed me lines like that.....
My limited experience with them based on one quick ride was 'nice but.......' Mind you I was a wild eyed youth wanting excitement...
'tis a shame they never stuck with it though as there were a LOT of really good ideas in those bikes...
That seems to be part Sunbeams doing when they recommended the wrong oil from the first model, oil that dissolved bronze over time.
Hopefully a brand new worm wheel and worm screw is close to being delivered, over 50 days wait so far, they were purchased some 50 years ago in the UK and never used so the story goes.
The ones in the bike were not to bad though.
Worm drive diffs in trucks (Leyland, Foden etc) and cars (Peugeot) used SAE30 castor oil, if not speced for the Sunbeam, it might be worth looking into.
In and out of jobs, running free
Waging war with society
Some of the old man's leyland buses with worm drive in the '60's used a 140 gear oil. It was slow moving grease basically.
Being the optimist, when I got the bike it was going to be change the fluids, a going over and that would be it for a while.
There are quite a few documented area's to check and some got the cross so that was that.
I had found a distributor for Morris Lubricants in Victoria so had got a 5 litre pack of 20/50 for the engine and gearbox and 140 for the final drive as recommended by Stewart Engineering in the UK.
http://www.morrislubricants.co.uk/scripts/default.asp
The fork tubes arrived back from hard chroming this morning, should have sent them to New Zealand is all I can say.
They should work out OK with new bushes and the set of BSA A10 springs from Paul Goff in the UK.
The front 140/90/16 should make for sporty handling.
Just waiting for some 'bits to finish the Kubota alternator mod, it came out 4 mm longer than stock so shouldn't look to out of place once I figure how to weather the outer case a little, oven cleaner perhaps.
I served my time with a guy who used to work for Fodens NZ, they had problems with the worm drives, chunks would be sucked off the brass crownwheel. They used thicker and thicker oil, 140 I guess. Fodens head office told them that was wrong and to use SAE30 castor, and their troubles stopped when they did. They had a hard time believing that such a thin oil could do the job, but it does.
I remember my father scoring a couple of brass crownwheels, he brought them home to sell for scrap. They must've been out of Dales Freightways Buffalo as he worked on that a lot. Dunno what oil they used, I was to young to know that stuff.
In and out of jobs, running free
Waging war with society
I'm quite fond of this stuff. Have had a lot more "luck" with the race bikes since I started using it. http://www.powerupnz.co.nz
Just before I left New Zealand in 2007 there had been a complete but in pieces S7 on Trade Me that went for $5200 iirc, in Huntly.
Somewhere out there.
Going by the internet they built quite a few S7 Deluxe's and S8's from 1949 on, the earlier S7 from 1946 to 1948 seems to be the rare one.
There may very well be merit in the thinner oils, there are few modern synthetics recommended and they are no where near 140 viscosity.
A case of try and keep an eye on it perhaps.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Bookmarks