Vincent 1360

I was a bit surprised to learn that the crank would not fit inside of the cases, though I should not have been.
To get the 102 mm stroke the pin is too close to the outside of the flywheels on a standard dia full round flywheel type crank.
There is not enough material outside the big end pin, so it yields to the press fit.
To overcome this Terry goes to the Bob weight type flywheels at 98 mm stroke. Maughans build great cranks and have run into the same problem, so they do not go past 98 mm stroke.
Terry, being the hotodder he is, just works around the problem. He makes the Bob weight flywheels a bit bigger in dia and considerably thicker. Overall weight is kept the same as standard.

Back to the mill, this time using the rotary table. A stepped pin was made up, one end a push fit in the precision center hole of the rotary table, the other end a push fit into the crankcase mainbearing. This locates the exact centre of the crankcase in the center of the rotary table.
Then it is just a case of cranking the rotary table handle round while the mill cuts.
There is a flywheel oil scaper cast into the cases so the finished clearance is about ten thou.

Crankcase bolt sets are available thru the Vincent Spares co. for about $350. I was tempted then realized that only a few of the stock bolts would be the correct length. The standard Vincent has 3 pairs of engine plates mounted to hold footpegs, front stands etc. This engine won't get any plates as the footpegs are mounted directly on the frame as is the side stand. This knocks off about seven pounds of steel.
So I made a set of stainless crankcase bolts at the required lengths. Here they are ready to go, doped up with my favourite thread sealant, A.R.P. stud sealant.

I spent quite a long time getting just the right width for these two distance pieces. These replace the oil scroll I mentioned at the start of this thread. They fit between the roller bearing and the ball bearing on the primary side. The ball bearing sits tight between two large and heavy circlips which prevent side to side movement in the outer race of the ballbearing. The spacers go between the bearings and the whole setup gets squeezed up tight by the primary side crankshaft sprocket nut. So it all hangs off that ballbearing and the circlips for side to side movement and position. Adding or subtracting from the width of the distance pieces moves the position of the crank accordingly.
The rods need to be central in the bores, so I played with this until they were in the optimum position, one out 5 thou one way, the other out five thou in the opposite direction. This was the best compromise, any movement from here would increase the offset amount for at least one rod.
Five thou is well within spec. Ed Stevens in his Vincent bible "Know Thy Beast" calls for no more than 1/32" of misalignment here while Richardson and Maughans allow 1/64" or about 16 thou.

Finally!

Cases now together for keeps, no more trial fits.
I left out another step. Before the cases went together for the final bolt up, the oil pump was fitted. I was forewarned that this can be a tricky operation and it did not disappoint. The oil pump is a two start rather than the standard Vin single start plunger type pump. So it pumps twice as/much oil as standard, something Terry Prince says is essential with the oversized engine.
The pump housing is a 1" dia bronze sleeve that is a tight fit in a 5" long hole precision bored into the lower right side crankcase.
John Mdcougall advised me to measure very carefully in advance and ensure there was no more than . 0005 interference between the sleeve and the crankcase housing, otherwise the sleeve would not fit in the heated cases, or if it did hammer in, would now be tight on the plunger, which is a very close fit inside the sleeve.
The procedure is to heat the cases to 400 f then install the cold sleeve ASAP before heat transfer causes binding. John also advised me that if much resistance is encountered, best is to stop, remove the sleeve, go in the house and tackle the job on some other day!
That is pretty much exactly what occurred. The sleeve went about half way in then jammed. In the bottom end of the sleeve there is a plug with an internal 5/16 blind hole drilled and tapped in. A slide hammer is used to install or remove the sleeve. The threaded end of the slide hammer rod goes into the blind hole in the plug, that is the attachment. The rod actually pulled out of the sleeve just as the sleeve was nearly all the way out. It took a lot of frantic slide hammering to get the sleeve back out, guess ot was to much for the little 5/16 thread.
I went back at the job the next day and could not figure out why the sleeve jammed. First I drilled and tapped the blind hole in the plug to 3/8", then made a new 3/8" end for the slide hammer.
Next, as a test I removed a thou or two from a piece of 1" cold rolled round stock and tried that in the hole. It went in freely half way then clunked up against something. Using pattern blueing , it became obvious that the outer race of the small timing side outer bearing was fouling the hole by a few thousandths. This was likely the result of a/small machining error in the crankcases bearing housing. It should have gone a tiny bit deeper. A few minutes with the air die grinder and now the 1" cold rolled was an easy push fit.
After spending an hour or so lapping the plunger to the sleeve, ( it had a tight spot after getting squeezed by the bearing race)
it was time to try again. The case was reheated and the plunger went in easily this time. Of course the transmission bearings that had been fitted earlier fell out, so it was a minor gong show reinstalling them before the cases cooled too much.

Next up is the installation of the timing spindles. There are two spindles for the cams, four for the followers , one for the breather and one for the idler gear. The idler gear spindle fits into an adjustable housing which bolts to the crankcase. The rest of the spindles are an interference fit into holes bored into the case.
I was also warned that this can be a nightmare task and it was even suggested that I should pull the cases apart and start again by installing the spindles at the same time as the bearings.
Not gonna happen!
Fortunately I have Dan Smith's magic toolbox filled with his Vincent engine building devices. One item is a slide hammer and sleeve set made up for installing the spindles. The spindles have no inner shoulder but do have an outer shoulder. This shoulder needs to be located between. .419" and. 424 " proud of the case joint, for all of the spindles, which are all different in length and go into holes which are not in plane. Intstalling all of these interference fit spindles accurately into the hot cases with no guide as to depth would be near impossible without some tooling.
So Dan made up a set of temporary spindle sleeves that fit over each spindle. The sleeve is pushed over the spindle, then a nut and washer are fitted at the outboard end. The slide hammer then threads onto the remaining threaded portion of the spindle and tightens down on the back side of the nut. This setup allows the installer to quickly tap in the spindles until the sleeve bottoms on the face of each spindle boss. The result is +- .005 and can be minutely adjusted to final accuracy after the cases cool.

John suggested that my measured interference amount of .0025" for the 1/2" spindles and .0015 for the 3/8" spindles might be too great, especially for the 1/2" size. He thought that I should take the cases apart, put them in the mill and open each spindle boss by one half thou. He was also concerned that reheating the cases to 400 f would loosen up the mainbearings and transmission bearing, which it would.
My plan was to heat the cases to 200 f, so that the bearings outer races did not become loose, but that the timing case was warm enough so that heat would not leave the spindle area too quickly, I would have a little time to work. Once the assembled crankcase reached 200 f ( heat crayon) they were removed from the BBQ and a roofing torch was used to heat only the area around the spindles, keeping excess heat away from all bearing.
To stack the odds a bit more in my favour I sandwiched the spindles between two pieces of dry ice for an hour first. This brought the spindles down to about -100 f, giving a total temp. Differential of 500 f.
Piece of cake after that.

Dry ice


The bolted up cases with conrods poking out would not fit in the BBQ as is, so a little wooden wraparound shroud was used to hold the heat in. Only going to 200f with this, then the rest was done with a torch on the actual spindle mountings


Spindles just installed, cases still hot, sleeves in place. Aside from their main purpose of locating the spindles at correct depth in the bores, the sleeves protect the spindles if the torch is needed to add more heat as the job progresses. You really should not let the open flame touch the hardened spindle surface, which is no problem with the sleeves covering the spindles.

Continuing on the next day, the slide hammer was used to move the spindles in or out a few thousandths until all were +- .002 the
.424" mark.
The tools for measuring this distance were a section of 3/8" precision ground square stock and feeler gauges. The square stock is used as a straight edge across the crankcases timing case joint face, the feeler guages to measure between the top of the straight edge and the underside of a washer tightened down on each spindle shoulder.

I'm surprised these bikes ever ran. :mrgreen:

Well they did and still do!
Last year 8 of us did a 3100 mile round trip to Wyoming. Only problem encountered was a broken speedo cable.
Although the Vincent has a lot of very complicated design, once properly assembled , it all seems to work very well
I think you'll find the compression release design interesting, that comes up pretty soon.
Glen

Glen You're a mad man, brother!! But keep the posts and updates coming, wonderful thread, Cj

Great work Glen, I love these bikes.
An unkind wag once remarked " the Vincent is a technical solution in search of a problem".
Comparing one big pushrod twin to another, looking inside my Norton's timing case I guess he kind of has a point there.

We have to remember that Irving and Vincent set out to build the world's fastest production motorcycle and at the same time build a bike that could easily run 100,000 miles between rebuilds, at a time when this kind of mileage was unheard of.
They both ignored the financial side of it, perhaps that is why Vincents are so good. They did not make money but they definitely achieved their goals.
Complexity can be excused given the results.

Last year after the Wyoming trip we loaded the Oz Rapid (38th Vincent built after WW2) two up plus gear and took off for a Rally at the Gorge in Oregon, I think it was an 11-1200 mile round trip including a day ride at the
Rally.
We took the back road route thru the Park past Mt. St. Helen's. Somewhere in there I made a wrong turn and headed off toward a distant peak and a Glacier on what appeared to be a nearly unused road. When the road turned to gravel I recognized the mistake and turned around. Parked at the side of the road was a Toyota Land Cruiser.

The driver motioned to me so I stopped and shut the bike off. It turned out that his Toyota was not going anywhere, something had let go in the rear dif. He borrowed my cell phone, but there was no service (mountains). He then gave me his AAA info and asked that I phone in his location when I reached civilization, which was about 35 miles away. I had all of the details except the year of vehicle, which I asked. He looked a bit embarrassed and answered " it's old, it's a 98, that's why I have had so much trouble with it"
I nodded and gave the old Vin a kick, off we went to call it in.
The irony of a 1998 vehicle being to old for reliability made me smile.

Glen

With the spindles all set with shoulders. .424" from the case joint, next was to fit the followers and cams along with their thrust washers and distance pieces. The followers get a hardened thrust washer each side, the cams just get a thrust washer on the outside face. The inside face of the cam goes directly against the case, however all thrust on the cam is to the outside so wear on the case surface is nonexistant.
The end play for the followers is to be in the 5 to 7 thou range, cams 10- 15 thou. With all appropriate distance pieces and thrust washers in place I found that some items had correct end play while others were a bit loose. One method of dealing with this is to use shims, however the centrality of the followers on the cams was excellent and shimming one or two items would throw that off, plus I do not like the idea of very thin bits of hardened steel in the timing case ( shims)

In the end I brought the spindle slide hammer out again and moved all spindles to the lower allowable number, .419"
This brought the loose items, both cams one follower, nicely within correct end play spec, but all other followers were now too tight. By shortening the distance pieces for the tight followers a few thou, all was within spec and no shims were needed.
I did not take a photo of this operation, but it was all done one evening when I was feeling quite patient!
Here is a later photo that shows the followers and their distance pieces and also the start of fitting the compression release.
It can be seen that the high lift cam is hitting the compression release dog bone piece. Stock came do not cause this problem. The came also hit on the crankcases and on their special radiused followers! So by building a hotrodded engine, there are lots of self induced problems. Terry warned me about all of this, but I wanted the extra 10-15 HP produced by these cams, gotta pay the price!
Glen

Here are the compression release components along with the new parts book. The original Vincent parts book was excellent, but this new version is even better. It is the result of five years of volunteer work by a retired draftsman and club member.
The book weighs a ton, all pages are laminated. All of the items shown in each drawing are listed in order on the preceding page.
For the timing chest, which was all in one very busy drawing in the old book, we now have Timing chest drawings, 1,2 and 3, along with three parts lists.
A parts book like this is invaluable for assembly purposes, never mind ordering parts. Anyone who has tried to use the Norton Dominator parts book will appreciate the clarity of either the old or better, this new Vincent parts book.

Another try at the photo

I shouldn't ask this but how much does that book cost?

It was 77 gbp of which about 15 or 20 gbp was for shipping. It is heavy as hell with all of the laminations. Sure is a help for assembly.
There is no one big shop manual for the Vincent, just a number of good publications such as Ed Stevens "Know Thy Beast". None of the books covers everything, but by using all of them and this parts book, the answers to most questions can be found.

Glen

Dang, this has to be the best Vincent engine assembly thread I've ever seen.

worntorn said:

............... I had all of the details except the year of vehicle, which I asked. He looked a bit embarrassed and answered " it's old, it's a 98, that's why I have had so much trouble with it"I nodded and gave the old Vin a kick, off we went to call it in. The irony of a 1998 vehicle being to old for reliability made me smile. Glen

Click to expand...

......................Well reading this made me smile and reminds me of a story along the same lines, although not motorcycle related....perhaps , age is relative....anyway here it goes, After my father's recent passing, my mother needed to be admitted into a nursing home. ( that in itself was challenging, but altogether another story). We got Mom settled into her new room and she seemed to "hit it off "with her new room mate , Eunice, whom I guessed to be about 77 or so. Well Mom's been fighting Parkinson's and it has taken it's toll on her. She was always soft spoken, but now at 86 even more so. Eunice is some what hard of hearing, so I'd joked that they should be a good match. Anyway, one night Mom got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On her return to bed, she decided to "park" her walker over by the wall so as to be out of the way (two hospital beds in one room take up quite a bit of space ). When going from her walker to her bed, she somehow got into a tangle with Eunice's wheel chair and fell down and couldn't get up. So she had to wake Eunice up by shouting ( her description not mine---probably just a little above what you or I would call conversation level ) Eunice...wake up, Eunice wake up, I've fallen & I'm on the floor. Fortunately Eunice heard Mom and sat up and said what on earth are you doing down there Doreen ? Then proceeded to lay back down. Mom could see Eunice in the reflection of the curved glass of the old CRT 27" T.V. up on the Dresser. So Mom "shouts " again... Eunice don't lay down, you've got to get help. This went on for a couple of volleys then Eunice managed to get up and out into the hall to get help. A couple of day's later, I met one of Eunice's daughters and related the story. Afterwards I asked how old is your Mother ? I was blown away by the response....98 years old. Mom's doing better now and we both still chuckle when we talk about this together. ,,,,,,,and now back to your regularly scheduled motorcycle thread :lol:

Excellent work and article, but the more I read the more I realise I Havnt a hope in he'll of rebuilding my own basket case engine, especially with everything as flogged out as it is.
Dispite the few hickups you've had would you say your happy with the quality from the different suppliers?