12. BSA A10 Blood Sweat & Gears

Time to strip the gearbox and see what secrets lie inside. Having removed the gearbox earlier, it has laid untouched since the original bike strip back in February. Now is the time to do an inspection.

I drained the oil and to my relief there was no metal particles in it and so the strip began. Removing the outer cover revealed the kick-start mechanism and the clutch actuating lever mechanism. Apart from the clutch lever itself, which needed cleaning and chroming, the rest of the clutch mechanism seemed in fairly good condition. Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same for the kick-start parts.

Both the quadrant kick-start gear and the ratchet gear that it mates with were both in pretty poor condition. I decided that, as this would hopefully be the only time I would strip the gearbox, to do it properly.

I got in touch with lightning spares and ordered a new quadrant and ratchet gear along with a new return spring, adjustment plunger housing and nut, side plate, bearings, oil seals and all gaskets.

I then set about polishing the outer cover and inner cover, with the hope that I could polish the main gearbox housing without having to remove all the inner gears.
Once the parts arrived, my idea was to rebuild the outer casing with the new parts, assemble the gearbox and then polish the whole thing. As usual this turned out to be impossible and so the next stage was a complete strip with all gears and gear-selector parts out on the bench.

But first I had to remove the main final drive sprocket. To do this you need a special spanner as the nut holding it on is round with just two side notches in it. I could not find a tool that fitted or find one for sale on the Internet. Having secured the sprocket in a vice by rapping the old chain around it and then clamping the chain in the vice, I tried knocking it around with a hammer and drift. No luck!. So I set about making a suitable spanner out of an old 27mm open-end spanner that I already had. Lots of sawing, filing and grinding later, the spanner fit and with a couple of sharpe knocks on the end with a lump hammer, the spanner did its job and the nut came loose.

More gearbox tales on the next blog

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 Copyright K. Hopcroft  30.09.12 All rights reserved
 You can contact me on: hopcroftscoot@gmail.com

My Other Blogs:

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http://60sclassicmotorbikes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/1961-aerial-golden-arrow-restoration.html

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http://karmannghiarestoration.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/1-karmann-ghia-retoration-project.html

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