Norton 650SS

congrats on the 650 SS purchase - it looks familiar...

I wonder if that's my old 650SS.

I bought one while in college in 1975, and rode it through many adventures before selling it to a friend in Toronto in 1981. He sold it a couple of years later, but I don't know where the next owner lived.

In any case, I sure can't recommend a 650SS for any lengthy rides. I think I did 3 or 4 semi-long distance rides (over 150 miles) and had problems every single time. Each problem was vibration-related, from minor things such as mirrors falling off to:
- carburetor shaking loose at 60 mph
- one exhaust header pipe popping off, scaring the shit out of me as flames shot out (also at 60 MPH, and at night, for special effect)
- tack drive shaking loose, thus spitting oil over my foot
- headlight frequently shaking itself loose, so it ended up pointing wherever it liked, depending on the nature of the bumps in the road

I could go on and on, but you get the point. It shakes. You'll find out. Maybe this one was put together with plenty of Locktite, so you'll have better luck than I did.

Now if only I had my engine serial number written down from all those years ago, I could even find out if it's the same bike.

Despite the headaches of holding the thing together, it is a sweet looking bike

Good luck with it.

This bike was first delivered to a dealer in Toronto. I don't know the name of the original owner, however an Amway dealer named Joe Reicke owned it for 11 years before it was stolen and wrecked.

I've been warned not to call Joe as he will talk forever and probably try to sell me some Amway products. I'm still tempted to brave it.

I'll post some photos of the bike as soon as it gets here.

I'm expecting some vibration. One of my growing group of Norton 650SS advisers has suggested that if I want to really ride the bike I should pull it down and have the crank dynamically balanced for $125. The balance is cheap enough, but I have a feeling that if the engine comes apart, a couple of thousand will go into high performance stuff.
It seems a shame to pull apart an engine apart that is freshly rebuilt and not yet broken in.
i'll probably just put up with the vibration for now.
Besides, I want to spend at least a month just looking at it from various angles!

frankdamp said:

My structural testing was bare frame, and I was measuring torsional deflection between the headstock and the rear shock mounts on the seat loop and also to the lower Iso mount location. The engine/transmission and swing arm were not installed.

In retrospect, maybe we were'nt really comparing apples to apples, as we should really have checked rear wheel spindle to front wheel spindle, with the front forks installed too.

Click to expand...

Frank, it's fascinating to hear that the factory went to such lengths and the Commando spine undoubtedly has good torsional stiffness. The team did their work well. As you imply though, a pity that the focus wasn't on at least headstock to rear wheel stiffness because I am more and more convinced that the poor head steady triangulation is a major part of many Commando stability problems.

Good luck with the new bike worntorn. I've heard several people say that a good 650SS is like a Featherbed International only faster, smoother and more reliable which must put it up at the top of the Norton tree .

Read thru the posts again and realized I missed wrench's question as to whether the bike I bought was the one from Bradsbikes that he posted the photo of. It isn't that bike, mine is completely stock (more knowledgeable members may correct me) in appearance.


I really like the look of the bike in wrench's photo though, so I might consider sweptbacks and Dunstall type megaphones as opposed to stock headers with the cigar mufflers.

Am I correct in thinking that Paul Dunstall discovered the Dominator bikes made more power with smaller dia. exhausts? I also seem to recall that he was heavily involved with the development of the early Commando engines, maybe that is why the Commando was such a hotrod in it's day. It could explain the relatively small bore of the stock Commando headers.
There are lots of large bore aftermarket pipes out there, but perhaps the factory had it right with the small bore setup.

ETA for the bike has been moved up to this Monday. Only two more sleeps!

Pix please

Congrats, you will like the bike very much if it's as good as my 650 Manxman was. I had a couple of mods done at the time, one was higher compression pistons and the other was a Ravesi cam. The bike only ran right with Sunoco 260 (102 octane if I remember right) so when that fuel was discontinued, it would ping on full throttle. Being very difficult to time, I put the job off to later and later until one day on the freeway when a con rod gave way and sawed the right hand case in two and knocked the nice Lucas competition magneto off it's base and also cracking the cylinders. Major damage. I rebuilt it with a 750 Atlas motor.

My café racer project is using the very same frame of that Manxman so in effect it still lives

Post some nice pics as soon as you get it, the bigger the better.

Jean

Jean, did your manxman look like this http://www.classicmotorcycles.org.uk/bi ... _650cc.jpg or like this http://www.cybermotorcycle.com/gallery/ ... advert.htm ?

If I have it correct the Manxman was available for one year only (61) then in 62 the 650SS was sold alongside the Standard and Deluxe model 650s. From the advertisement, which I assume is correct, the Manxman appears to have the downdraught head which the 500cc and 600cc Dominators did not have. I'm not sure if the first bike is even a manxman, it looks more like an earlier bike.

I believe the main dfference between the ss and the manxman would be the higher compression, hotter cam and twin carbs of the ss. With the changes you made to your Manxman it must have been quite similar to SS performance,only lacking the twin carbs.

#2 it is

Mine looked like picture #2. The main differences that I could gather at the time, was the gas tank which was smaller than an Atlas tank, it looked sleeker and less "bulbous" than the Atlas. When I rebuilt it as a café racer, I gave the tank to my brother for his Norton chopper (what a shame but I'm sure everyone has skeletons in their closets ). My Manxman also had twin carbs, two 26mm monoblocks with a single float bowl on the left hand carb. It also had a Lucas competition magneto which was cool since it could run even if the battery and the electrical system was toast. The downside to a mag was the time it took to time it and the somewhat weak spark (0.015" gap maximum on the spark plugs).

I think the Manxman was available in Europe too, but I could be wrong. Mine was a 61.

Jean

I stand corrected, the Manxman was a twin carb model. Looks like the main internal difference between the Manxman, (which seems to be a 61 model only) and the 650SS is the use of a new hotter SS type cam on the SS bike.. This cam was also used on the Atlas and later on was used for the early Commandos. The CR was also raised on the SS with the Manxman being at 8.3 and the SS at 8.9 to one. Carbs were bigger as well. The listed carb size was 26 MM for the Manxman, as yours were Jean, and 28 MM for the SS.

I think there were some cosmetic differences as well, apart from the different paint scheme. I'm still looking into that. When Roy Bacon's book gets here I'll read up on it. The SS also had a 150 MPH speedo and a tachometer instead of the 120 mph speedo only that was on the standard and deluxe. I think the Manxman also had a 120 MPH speedo, not sure if it came with a tach.

Overall the two bikes are very similar, the Manxman was clearly the forerunner of the 650SS.

Mine had both a tach and a speedo, both Smiths Chronometric, but my brackets are not identical which leads me to believe the previous owner installed a tach after buying the bike or it could have been a dealer installed option for the american market, my Maxman used to belong to a guy in New Jersey and he broke down in Québec city and left the bike as trade in for another one. I bought it as a non runner for $175 in the mid-seventies.

Jean

My N-V company bike definitely had both speedo and tach, but I don't remember whether it was a 120 or a 150 speedometer. I was using it in late 1967/early 68 and it already had abpout 90,000 miles on it. I don't know what year it was, as it had never been registered and we ran it on trade plates (001 JW).

As far as I know, it was part of the sell-off of equipment when the Villiers Marston Road facility was liquidated, along with a rather battered P-11 we had been testing.

I'd still like to know what happened to the ISDT AJS and Matchless Starmaker-powered bikes from that time, but even the old hands don't seem to know!

Yes, one wonders where all of these specials and prototypes go.

AJS is rumoured to have made at least four roadgoing 1936 500cc double overhead cam aircooled V4s, yet no trace of any of these bikes has been found.
My friend Dan Smith wanted one badly and looked for years, to no avail. He finally decided to go down in his machine shop basement and build one
http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2006/ ... v4-engine/

Right now he is building a plumber's nightmare prewar series A Vincent rapide. Of the eighty built there are about 40 or so still around, but prices are in the $200,000 range, so Dan is building his own, probably for under $5,000. It will be beautiful and most likely a lot faster than the original.

I'll have to get him interested in building me a roadgoing Manx!

I got the bike yesterday and it is beautiful. I seem to have misplaced my camera at the moment, so I haven't any photos yet.

I spent yesterday afternoon and all of today on it. I started by polishing alloy and chrome and general cleaning. The bike wasn't all that dirty, it just hadn't been really cleaned and polished for a few years.

The previous owner (mechanically inert by his own admission) hadn't ridden the bike for three years. He said that it had been running progressively worse each summer and he was not up to fixing it, nor did he want to spend any money to have it worked on. He is just not interested in motorcycling, which is great for me!

I put fresh oil in the bike and started it up. It only took a couple of kicks, but it would only run on one cylinder. I put new plugs in and the bike fired up in one kick and ran pretty nicely on two cylinders, but would not idle. I checked the idle mixture screws and they were turned out 5-6 turns each, so I guess the owner had been playing with them in an attempt to solve rough running problems. I set them at about 1 1/4 turns and the bike settled in to a nice idle. The bike revved up quite nicely sitting in neutral, but out on the road it ran horribly. It would misfire, bang and pop then shut down altogether. Then it would restart fairly easily only to go thru a repeat performance.

I took the carbs off and boiled them in soapy water. When they came off I noticed the bolts were just a little over finger tight. This was probably due to gasket compression over time with no routine maintenance. I thought I had found the problem, air sucking in at the carb to intake connection!
That will definitely make for all sorts of rough running and low power.
I put the carbs back on expecting great results, but there was no change.

Then late this afternoon I started to play with the Boyer. While fiddling on the left side of the bike (too lazy to get up and look at the right side where the key is) I pushed the bake pedal down to make sure I had the key in the on position. This bike is wired so that it requires the key on for the brake light to work. With the pedal down, there wasno brake light. I reached over to turn on the key, but it was already on!
I fiddled with the key some and the brake light came on, but got dimmer and brighter as I wiggled the ignition the key. Then I removed the ignition switch and replaced it with a jumper wire.

The bike started in one kick and sounded different immediately. Cracking the throttle brings a response I could only dream of on my Commando, which is no slouch. This is one fast revving engine.

I took it out on the road and was completely blown away by the power level. It does not have the low down pull of the Commando or the Vincent, but once in the power band it just wails! I now see what all the fuss is about with the 650SS.

Unfortunately it also vibrates, and I'm not accustomed to many vibes with my other bikes being Vincents and the Commando. At 60mph it is tolerable, at 70 and beyond it gets a bit much. A friend who is quite knowledgeable on these bikes suggested that if I really want to ride the bike I should pull the (fresh ,1500 miles) engine down and have the crank dynamically balanced.

All in all, I am very impressed with the bike and I haven't really got into the featherbed handling subject yet. I haven't ridden it enough to say one way or the other on that, but the power is much greater than I was expecting. One other thing I will add is that the bike feels very light and tiny compared to the Commando. I have read listed dry weights between 390 and 420. In pushing it around the shop it seems noticeably lighter than either the vincent or the Commando, at least that is my take on it.

The thing is way too fast and noisy for a machine that is forty years old, and I guess the same could be said of Commandos.

Continuing my comarison between the 650SS and my 850 CommandoMK111, the vibrations of the SS have really put me off any thought of riding it long distance. Several people have told me the 650SS will vibrate quite badly and this one really does. Others have claimed that the nice thing about the 650SS vs the Atlas was the relative smoothness of the 650.

Today I took the bike up to about 80 mph then pulled the clutch in.

The vibrations at this speed are awful, however they remained unchanged with the clutch in and idling at 80 mph!

Clearly most of the vibration I'm experiencing is in the wheels . It feels like they are out of round, or crooked or both. I'll check both with dial guages, I'm hoping to find a big run out. Wheel balance may also be causing the problem, that will get done as well.

I report my findings. It's not going to be as smooth as a Commando, but it might be close.

Interesting! Keep us posted and show us some pictures.

I left my Camera up at our Cabin on Sharpe Lake last fishing trip.

I'll see if I can borrow one and then figure out how to post photos.