1920 Harley Model F

[TechNoir]

Thanks for the tips Cotten. I will avoid lapping compounds and try something else, brass polish perhaps.

John

[T. Cotten]

I installed the new float today, set it to the height as per the manual. Unfortunately it is still flooding (although not as much). There is petrol dripping off the bottom of the carb with it just sat on the drive. The needle seems to be a brass cone, is it OK to reseat it? I was thinking of a bit of grinding paste and lapping the needle to the seat. What do those experienced with these Scheblers recommend?

John

John!

I am only a student of these things, but the original floatvalve needle points were not brass, more like something like Monel. Normally the top of the seat is cut flat, and a proper fresh needle is burnished to it, piloted by the floatlever.
Beware that common lapping compounds tend to embed into brass and bronze. Flowers of sulphur is a last resort.
(Tobacco ashes are little more than a burnishing lubricant, preventing immediate galling of similar metals.)

Normally the valve is tested by assembling the float to spec, and then flipping it upside down to suck upon the inlet.
They can be testy.

Beware also of some modern floats that are quite heavy.

Good luck!

....Cotten

[TechNoir]

I installed the new float today, set it to the height as per the manual. Unfortunately it is still flooding (although not as much). There is petrol dripping off the bottom of the carb with it just sat on the drive. The needle seems to be a brass cone, is it OK to reseat it? I was thinking of a bit of grinding paste and lapping the needle to the seat. What do those experienced with these Scheblers recommend?

John

[kiwi tibbs]

Great thread John, can't wait to here it running.

[TechNoir]

Hi folks. Well it stopped raining on Sunday so I had intended to put some miles on the bike and dial in the carb. I did one short run and then couldnt restart the bike because the carb was flooding. It has an original cork float so I guess it was not sealed (no mention of sealing it in the build report) and it now must have soaked up enough petrol to be less buoyant than it should be. A new float in modern material is on its way.

I did a few other jobs and reflected on some of the things I have learnt. I am not the first person to notice these but I thought I would mention them anyway. In no particular order.

1. Not everything in the original documentation is correct. The spoke length is stated to be the same for both wheels in the parts book. No it isnt, the front hub is smaller so the spokes need to be longer.

2. It vibrates. I have already lost 2 fasteners. I need to check them all again and take some precautions against losing any more.

3. Some people say that clincher tyres dont need tyre levers to fit or remove. Maybe those people dont need them but I do.

4. Lots of fasteners have non standard pitches. You need a lathe if you dont want to get held up because of odd fasteners.

5. Most parts seem to be available, you could almost build a bike with repop parts. However the quality is variable. Some parts are great, others are not so great.

6. Buying parts from the USA if you live in the UK is expensive. Shipping plus import taxes can double the cost or even more. Also, because of point 5 above it is often not worth sending small parts back. You learn to just suck it up and move on.

7. Whilst these bikes are not too uncommon in the USA they are much less so in the UK so this forum has been invaluable and I have a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who has helped me out.

John

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Then it was a simple reassembly job. These ball bearings fit into tiny cup and cones and were a bit fiddly. I didnt take a picture of them on reassembly but here they are before I took my original one apart. There is a bearing at each end of the shaft.





I then realised that there is one final difference between the 2 speedo cases. You might not spot it in the first picture below but the second and third should show it.







The clearance between the mounting hole in the pot metal and the end of the trip reset gear is different. This fouls the rest of the speedo when you try to fit it so I had to remove the gear and remove some pot metal. I didnt take any pictures of the other bits going together but it was just 3 screws and then the bezel.



Its a very simple instrument and seems to work OK although I dont know how accurate it is.



Other than that, as I said above all things went fairly smoothly.

Here is the bike a couple of hours ago.



The bike is nearly done. I still have one or 2 small jobs to do but it starts and runs. I need to set up the fuelling and dial in the oil feed. plus finish ageing the new paint on the right hand tank. Repair one of the foot boards and fit a horn. I am sure that once I put some miles on it I will have lots of adjustments to make.

The first quick ride up the road was an adventure. I had not paid too much attention to adjustment of the clutch and gear shift and realised that I could only just disengage the clutch with the pedal on the floor. Couple that with me having never ridden a bike with a foot clutch and hand gearchange before. It certainly woke me up!

John

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

I am told that speedometers were not a common accessory and the Johns Manville speedo was much more uncommon than the Corbin. I have a J-M speedo which I have mentioned before but it is not i great condition.

I am led to believe that it is similar to the speedo fitted to the Model T so probably not that uncommon when not fitted to a H-D. Here is my original one.




Terry Marsh was kind enough to provide a replacement part. It seems to be a car derived part and has a broken drive shaft but thats OK because the guts of mine are OK, its the pot metal casting inside the body that I need. The pot metal is held tightly in the body and I would not want to try to remove it because I dont think it would come out in 1 piece so I need to use the replacement body also.



Shaft removed



And compared to my unbroken one.



These 3 brackets need to be removed because they are not needed on a motorcycle mounted speedo.



You can see here where I have carefully removed the spot weld. Also you will notice the motorcycle body has a drain hole so I drilled one of those.



Another difference was that the replacement body has an odometer reset that is spring loaded. My original one was fixed in one position.



The final difference (or so I thought) was the captive nuts on the motorcycle body for the mounting bracket. You can se that mine was originally nickel plated.



John

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Whilst on the subject of brakes I cut this shape out of some steel sheet



Then filed and bent it.



So that I could mount one of these on it.



Here it is in place. It is fairly unobtrusive and no original parts have been altered to fit it. The microswitch was £2.50 for 10 of them so £0.25 each (about $0.30 each). I will have to see how durable they are but they are so cheap I am not too bothered if I have to replace them occasionally.







John

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

The build has progressed fairly smoothly without too many hitches so I will just highlight a couple of issues that I have had

You may remember that I asked about how the controls worked and it turned out that I had a few parts missing. These bits arrived in the post



I couldn’t get a bell crank bracket so I knew that I needed to make one but I hadn’t expected that the new mounting bracket on the top of the rear cylinder would be wrong so I would need to make one myself.







When fitting the internal brake band the guide pin snapped off. The band had been relined but I was able to uncover the outside of the band and make a new pin and rivet it on.








After fitting the band I found that the new brake drum was binding. When I checked the dimensions of the new drum against the original one the new one was found to have significantly thicker walls than the original so I had to skim it.




John

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Then I looked at the other red tank. It seemed OK but it had loads of old oil inside the oil part so I put some engine cleaner in it and lots of small nuts in it and bunged up all of the outlets and put it in my mixer for 5 hours. Afterwards the inside looked like new.




I then pressure tested it and found 3 leaks. One was where the oil outlet is soldered on and another was on a soldered seam on the back. Both easy fixes.









The third leak was between the petrol and oil halves. I decided to line the petrol part.



I will see how these tanks hold up. If they start leaking again then I will buy new ones.


I will try to do some more updates over the next few days.

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Hello folks. I have not done an update for a while because I seem to have had lots of things going on but nothing finished. However things are now coming together so first I will do a tank update.



Before that though I have a question. How much oil do you put in the crankcase from dry? Is 2 pumps of the hand pump correct?



Now the update.

As you may know the bike came with 3 sets of tanks. The original tanks are like swiss cheese so are not a viable prospect for repair. The 1916 tanks are not so bad although one needs repair it is not as bad as my original 1920 tanks. However I have put them away in the loft for now, if anyone wants them please pm me.

So that leaves the 2 red tanks. I had already taken the paint off one tank, here is a picture from earlier on in this thread



This tank was quite good but had some holes but these were confined to one area. So I decided to see if it could be fixed. I didnt have to worry about paint so I decided to take it apart. In case you were wondering how these tanks look like inside here is mine







The yellow stuff is the gum left from old petrol.

Here is the bad bit.



Here is everything cleaned up.




You might notice something in the bottom right corner of the above picture.

Thats because it is after a new piece has been welded in. I would like to say that I welded it but I am still very new to TIG so I got a friend who is a professional welder to do it because the metal is 22 gauge.




Here is the bit that was removed. The rest of the tank is fine.



Once I had re-soldered it back together I pressure tested it. I had a leak or 2 on a couple of soldered joints but they were easily fixed. Unfortunatly I didnt take any pictures of the re-assembly




Continued on next post due to a limit of 10 on number of pictures in a post

[kiwi tibbs]

Hi John, that would be great.
I'll pmyou my address.
There is no rush as tomorrow I have to fly back to NZ for my mums funeral.

Cheers
Tony

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Thats brilliant John, I'm glad you got the colours sorted.
I have only just seen this, I would have popped up the road to a little paint shop and asked about the colour code for you but it's sorted.
That pea green colour do you have a code for that that the paint shop mixed? I would really like to get some of that.
Keep the progress coming.
Tony

I am glad you liked the thread Kiwi tibbs.

I was hoping to have had it on the road by now but for various reasons i am behind schedule but hopefully not too far off. I have a few things going on in parallel so once I get to a milestone I will update this thread.

Re the Pea Green. I used a small paint shop that I have used before and the guy that owns it used his colour photo spectrometer to get an idea of the paint but then mixed it up and did a sample. Then he compared it to the original and made some small adjustments to get it as close as possible. (I have been told by more than one paint shop that a colour photo spectrometer doesn't always get it exact). So therefore I don't have a specific code for the paint.

If you want I can paint a small sample chip for you and post it to you. I haven't got to pin-striping yet but it shouldn't be too long before I do.

[kiwi tibbs]

Thats brilliant John, I'm glad you got the colours sorted.
I have only just seen this, I would have popped up the road to a little paint shop and asked about the colour code for you but it's sorted.
That pea green colour do you have a code for that that the paint shop mixed? I would really like to get some of that.
Keep the progress coming.
Tony

[TechNoir]

Re: 1920 "F" Project

Thanks Tony, I had seen that site.

I haven’t posted for a while but that doesn’t mean that I have been idle so here is a small update on paint.

Paint colours are a hot topic when talking about old vehicles. However I thought it might be simple for these 1917 and after J's and F's because everyone agrees that they are "Olive Green" but not the military colour.

The site that you mention states that 1920 paint is "Olive Drab 1917-1921 Deep Green Stripe. AKA Military Drab "


What I have also found with a bit of googling is that Steve Slocombe from VL Heaven has posted on this forum that he has found a colour that is

"olive green is the Rover car colour called 'Seaweed' which you might still just find. The ICI paint code is 10C39/P420-0857"

Great thinks I, I can use that. Unfortunately I tried quite a few paint suppliers and they all looked at me with a blank face saying that such a colour was not in their records.

Also I need to know about the pin-striping. Steve has helped out again and pointed me in the direction of 2 books as follows:

"Inside Harley-Davidson by Jerry Hatfield, page 49 says 'The most obvious change to the 1922 V-Twins and singles was the switch from Olive finish with broad coach green striping...'

The Legend Begins' for 1920 says 'All models were finished in military olive drab with a deep green stripe on the tanks, tool box and fenders."

This is useful but doesn’t give me an exact paint colour and doesn’t mention the edges to the stripe.

I looked through the documents that came with the bike and found the following: (note it is in 2 halves because the paper is bigger than my scanner. If anyone is interested I can scan it in one at work and put it on here in one piece)






Interesting stuff, the previous owner seems to have corresponded with Leon Landry in the late 1980's and Leon has replied with his thoughts on colour scheme. (I really appreciate the time that people like Leon put into helping his customers, remember this was in the days before the internet and computers)

Leons document says that the main colour is "Olive Green" and goes on to say "This is a high gloss enamel and a far cry from the army color used in 1917" These comments echo similar comments that I have read on this and other online sources.

The document also says:

"TANK STRIPING. (from 1917 to 1921) is done in PULLMAN COACH for the main body and edged with Pea Green on both sides with a hair line stripe of Black in the centre. This stripe is 3/4" in width when completed."

This document confirms what I already knew but its nice to have it confirmed. The reason that I say this is because there are 2 areas on the bike that have reasonable remains of original pin-striping. One area is on the tank under where the speedo bracket fits and also on the rear mudguard where the rear rack fits.





Also the rear of the original tanks have a great sample of Olive green.



So rather than spend any more time pondering I took my original paint samples to a very good small independent paint company that i have used before and they have mixed me up some colours that should be a good match.

The irony is that I want the paint to cover my right hand tank which is in bare metal at the moment, however once it is painted my intention is to then try to make the paint look old, worn a battered to try to fit in with my left tank (I am not sure how successful I will be, we shall see). The guy in the paint shop went out of his way to give me all of his tips to get a flawless finish which I accepted gracefully even though a flawless finish is not what I need.

John