I'd add one potential "gotcha" if you have twin Amals. It nearly creamed me when I was working at N-V Wolverhampton. Amal carbs had the slides individually lapped to the caburettor body, They were NOT interchangeable. One of our projects, on which I did a lot of the testing on my 45-mile commute, was to determine whether a single larger Amal would give better low-end performance on the 650SS.
There was some trepidation at the company that we were really going to piss off our dedicated sidecar types when the Commando was introduced as its frame was not suitable for sidecars. We really should've tested an Atlas, but the 650SS was my commuter ride and was readily available.
After the testing was finished, my boss decided to put the bike back to stock configuration, so we dug out the old twincarb set up from stores and re-installed it. I went out at lunch-time on the bike to pick up some parts from our local dealer. Weaving in and out of traffic, as is legal in England, I did a quick "squirt" to get round a slow moving car and then tucked in behind a double-decker bus. When I backed off the throttle, the power stayed on. Thankfully, the bike had magneto ignition and the kill button was right next to the throttle twist-grip. I avoided climbing up the stairs on the bus by milli-seconds. It was one of the older buses with an open rear platform where the stairs went up.
Back at the factory, after I had limped back using the kill button, we started looking into it. We found that one slide had stuck about 75% open, giving its cylinder a fair amount of power. The other one had snapped closed like it should. After a brief investigation we found that swapping the slides over between the carbs completely solved the problem. When we took the off for the project, we hadn't identified which carb body each slide was paired with, as none of us were aware of Amal's individual lapping process.
Bottom line - check the slide to body fit by dropping the slide into the body to see if it will descend under its own weight in about 2 seconds. Quicker that that isn't a big deal, as it shows that the fit is on the loose side, but slower than that can get your ass killed. On the early rides after a rebuild, you should have a "kill" button in very close proximity to your hand, just in case.
Electronic fuel injection does away with all this crap, but are there any conversions for the Commando?. I've seen a lot of threads on adapting Mikunis, a few on adapting SU's, nothing on Webers or Dell'Ortos, and a total silence on EFI, potentially the best way to get away from all the nastiness of carburettors.
I remember a comment, in the US magazine Road and Track, that "Carburator (US spelling) is a French irregular verb that means "leave well enough alone".
