Misc: Everything Else Complete Restoration of a Black Shadow

Martyn Goodwin

Well Known and Active Forum User
Non-VOC Member
I think any thread you posted on this site through the “regular” process would still be accessible (and useful). You would avoid the blog fees and the comments from the regular internet trolls.

You’re right that the search function can be overwhelming, with many entries and discussions being indistinguishable in the results. You can try certain unmistakable/unique keywords in each new thread for each new stage of the process (“magnetoman shadow rebuild, part 1,” for instance) which the users here would learn and recommend to others. Anything you write here you can also quickly copy/paste to a Word doc you can then PDF and post in installments, or as a set. Copies of the OZ Vincent Review are passed about in the same way.

I’m thinking selfishly with respect to the advice above, but from your perspective I would think you’d also benefit from the wisdom of the users here. No forum is perfect but this one is the best I’ve encountered.
Could even be co-published in OVR in serialised form - now that would be something!
 

Magnetoman

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
The average time for me to restore a Black Shadow to near original spec is around 300 hours plus........
For what it's worth, when I looked into this issue shortly after I bought the bike 29 years ago, five people who presumably should have known gave me numbers ranging from 145 hours to 1000 hours for them to restore a Vincent twin. Based on my discussions, my notes show that my "estimate" (more like a guess) at the time was it would take me a minimum of 500 hours plus $6500 (~$12,000 in 2020 dollars) to restore it.

It's not like it matters whether or not 500 hours turns out to be anything close to correct because I'll be going forward with this. The estimate was to help me decide how to allocate my time back when I was working full time, when scraping together 500 hours would have taken a few years of "full time, spare time" work. However, I'm retired now so it represents only a year of 10 hours/week in the garage. I certainly waste that much time now working on BSAs...
 
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litnman

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
I think a restoration thread done in segments similar to Whitakerpedia would be real helpful. It would
be easy to find and follow. Maybe create a "Build' section into the VOC website.
If all else fails, publish a book.
 

vibrac

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
Simple solution send the text and pictures to MPH on the understanding that each months instalment is placed in the archives that way we can read it non computer people can read it and when the inevitable EM pulse bomb goes off we will still have hard copy
NB magneto equipped originals will be the only transport!
 

timetraveller

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
If this is to be done it should be done well and lessons could be learned from Mike's efforts. I mean no offense to Mike but particularly in some of his earlier postings there were errors which detracted from the general ease with which information can be picked up via this medium. You are clearly an intelligent and highly educated person but consider if you were to be writing a text book on your speciality. I have done this and know that it pays to check and recheck sources and facts. If this is to be your first Vincent rebuild then no matter what your intellect there will be people. Greg is an example, who have more experience in the practicalities of the process than most other individuals. You also need to access more than one source. I will not mention the name but I have seen a video produced by a very well thought of Vincent specialist that contained a serious error. Because of his status that error will be repeated. I think that this would be a really useful project and should aid those who come after us to prolong the useful life of our bikes. My suggestion would be to try to find a few people who have a lot of experience and get them to review each section/chapter of the document before finalising it. This would not be an onerous task for each individual as the 'bite sized' sections would be relatively short, and there might even be some disagreement among these experts, which might indicate that there is more than one way of successfully tackling each process. Good luck with what should be a very worthwhile project.

When it comes to longevity of the final product; a few years ago I renovated and modernised an 1860 manufactured telescope that was one of the highlights of the Victorian era instrument makers art. This was fifteen feet long and weighed many tons. Without destroying the appearance I manged to incorporated stepper motor drives and computer control. This meant inventing a totally new type of telescope drive. The final task was to produce a 'users manual' which could be used for centuries. The telescope was already about one hundred and fifty years old when I did the work and there is no reason it cannot last for more time than that into the future. So how does one try to ensure longevity of the documentation. In my case there was two printed copies, one copy on DVD and another on a USB stick. There were also instructions in the handbook that the content should be copied to updated formats roughly every ten years to ensure that machine readable copies were available to whatever future technologies occur.
 
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Cyborg

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
The first question I have is why are you wasting time working on BSA’s when you have a Shadow?

Thought that was worth repeating.

Vibrac.... those vacuum tubes the Slovaks make aren’t just for audio equipment.... and folks laughed when they saw them in MIGs.

MM. some good suggestions in this thread. Whatever “forum” you use.. given the time, effort and skill required to do this, I think it would be appropriate to have some control over the content. There will no doubt be rabbit holes with sidebars with more rabbit holes when discussing things like bearings, what finish to use on fasteners or what modifications could/should be included in a restoration. As you well know the list of tools and equipment required to do a proper restoration is lengthy. Your BSA thread has been rather enlightening when it comes to the subject of torque plates and cylinder boring. Personally I think those sorts of discussions must be included in the thread (assuming you do a thread) and not siloed elsewhere.
 

MarBl

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
Having read and used your extensive documentation about the restoration of Lucas Magnetos, I would find a similar description of a Vincent Twin restoration tremendously helpful.
Having dis- and reassembled a Rapide this summer, I often had to spend more time searching for an information than reading and using it. Of course it is all out there somewhere in the already very helpful books and the forum, but a Haynes Manual-like step by step documentation with a lot of high quality pictures would have saved me a lot of time.

Mikes Videos have been of great help too, since they delivered many of the pictures to illustrate the sometimes difficult to understand descriptions in the books. Actually they have been my main motivation to go for a Vincent at last, after I considered it for a long time, not being sure, what complexity (and fun) to expect from working on one.

A dedicated website for a detailed restoration would be a very good thing. You might even consider to present your other material there as well, since it also took me some time to find your magento restoration guide. Such gems get easily lost in a forum.
 

Magnetoman

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
Having dis- and reassembled a Rapide this summer, I often had to spend more time searching for an information than reading and using it.
An expression I learned many years ago is "half of knowledge is knowing where to find it." My original post in this thread mentioned my concern that, while a thread already may exist on the VOC Forum doing exactly what I asked about, the search engine made it impossible, not just to find it if it does exist, but even to determine if it doesn't exist. I consider that to be a major downside to posting my rebuild here. However, as someone suggested, this easily might be solved if Graham added a "Major Projects" section (as opposed to minor projects, like rebuilding a head, adjusting a clutch, relining brakes, etc.).

If all else fails, publish a book.
Anything you write here you can also quickly copy/paste to a Word doc you can then PDF and post in installments, or as a set.
Having had experience with web sites crashing, or the internet connection dropping and losing what I had written before I could hit 'send', for years I've done it the opposite way. I write and edit on Word and then upload the final content when I'm happy with it.

Simple solution send the text and pictures to MPH on the understanding that each months instalment is placed in the archives
As an indication of the scope of what I'm discussing, the thread about rebuilding the 1928 Ariel mentioned in my first post is a Word document that is 278 single-spaced pages long in 10 point font with only small thumbnails of the embedded photographs. The folder containing images (most of which aren't in that thread because of the site's 5 images/post limit) has 1972 photographs.

consider if you were to be writing a text book on your speciality. I have done this and know that it pays to check and recheck sources and facts. If this is to be your first Vincent rebuild then no matter what your intellect there will be people. Greg is an example, who have more experience in the practicalities of the process than most other individuals. You also need to access more than one source.
My graduate students and postdocs working on a given project were, almost by definition, truly the world's experts on whatever the topic was of a given manuscript. But, the final published result always benefited by having been critically read by the others in my group who were working on related projects. That's why the idea of a blog, which because of internet realities would have to be locked to outside comments, isn't reasonable.

As an aside, I've had a lot of experience with writing, having books and manuscripts published, maintaining web pages, and posting motorcycle restoration threads. Despite that experience, the question I posted at the start of this thread has resulted in a number of valuable suggestions. Which is exactly why I posted that question. If I didn't expect there to be a number of excellent suggestions to the content of my Vincent restoration thread that influenced how I proceeded with it, I certainly wouldn't take the time to write it.

As for access to more than one source, immediately after buying the Vincent I compiled a bespoke shop manual consisting of tabbed sections with every piece of technical information I could find in my collection of books and magazines.

040ShopManual.jpg


The tabbed sections in the four binders of that manual roughly correspond to chapters and sub-chapters in Richardson and KNB.

As I've done with similar manuals I made for other bikes I restored, I don't try to edit material before adding it, so each tabbed section contains a mix of correct, incorrect, redundant, and obsolete information, as well as alternative approaches to achieve the same end result. I mentally edit the material in real time as I work on whatever is covered by a particular section.

Whenever new information has appeared since I first set up that manual, I added it, causing it to swell to its current size. For example, some years ago I acquired a fairly complete set of 'MPH' dating back to the first issue in 1949 which, in addition to having articles with technical information that I added to the manual, also had articles describing useful special tools, all of which I then made. Also, I should mention '40 Years On' and 'Another Ten Years'.

When it comes to longevity of the final product;..
I should say I am interested in "reasonable," not perpetual longevity. The problem is that web sites come and go so even seemingly-robust ones have disappeared overnight. Even where a web site hasn't disappeared, often software upgrades have caused information to effectively become unavailable. A few years ago Photobucket abruptly changed its policy on hosting images, with devastating impact on a number of other sites that relied on it. Interestingly, nearly 600 years after Guttenberg, paper copies produced in multiple copies still are the gold standard of 'permanent'.

a Haynes Manual-like step by step documentation with a lot of high quality pictures would have saved me a lot of time.
Don't set your hopes too high. While, ideally, my restoration would proceed in a step-by-step sequence like, say, the chapters in Richardson or KNB, somehow that's never been quite the case for any of my previous restorations. The 278 pages of my Ariel restoration contain everything needed to be, by far, the most complete restoration manual for a 1928 Ariel, but to reorganize the contents into a step-by-step manual would require a lot of time.

As you well know the list of tools and equipment required to do a proper restoration is lengthy. ...

Personally I think those sorts of discussions must be included in the thread
That's an important point. Given the considerable effort creating such a restoration thread represents, part of the implicit (or explicit) "contract" with wherever I post it is that my judgment of what constitutes reasonable content has to prevail. As an example, although I barely mentioned the word "motorcycle" in the following post, I consider its content to be reasonable.

 

vibrac

Well Known and Active Forum User
VOC Member
You should not discount the MPH route just consider the total data contained in Ian Hamiltons "How to wear out a Vincent faster" another fine example is "know thy beast" pre internet but an MPH series long before a book. Another aspect is that quality is the watchword not quantity My book the Vincent Black Shadow was far longer before I had to pull it back to the publishers size requirement and is I think the better for it
 
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