I had my V3 working reasonably well for a while with thin synthetic oil, but it always dragged slightly. After several hundred miles of this it started slipping. I cleaned off & washed the plates, heated them with a hot air gun & boiled them in washing powder to try & remove all traces of the synthetic oil. Now with the lightest dino oil I can find & even heavier springs fitted it now slips & drags. .... I thought I'd try something revolutionary & fit a Vincent clutch. I spent a lot of time with this before & although the primary clutch worked perfectly I couldn't get the shoes to disengage properly.
I originally built my Rapide with a new multiplate clutch that came with the box of bits. (Not a V3 but the same or similar to the multiplate available from the Spares Co. I found it to be a good clutch when freshly assembled (dry) and using the Spares Co adjuster for extra lift. After some use it became very grabby either due to a build up of dust or a very small bit of oil on one of the plates. Once dismantled, cleaned and reassembled it worked Ok again. Having to do this was a real pain in the bum.
I decided to try the original Vincent clutch that also came in the basket case so I sorted through the bits and found virtually all the required parts except for a few small parts. After lots of studying of drawings to check assembly and experimenting with various adjustments I got the clutch working and was most impressed at how light and progressive it was in operation.
I can not hand on heart say that I have not had any problems as I had the PD25 oil seal go creating clutch slip due to oil on the clutch shoes. This occured again after more miles and the real problem was down to the O/D of the C3 that the PD25 runs on being undersize. (I was in Wales at the time but was still able to ride home to the Midlands on the primary clutch albeit with a top speed of 50 mph.)
How might this help Paul? A while ago Roy Cross wrote a letter to MPH relating to the Vincent clutch. I corresponded with Roy who kindly sent me for a shoe adjustment jig and some instructions for using it. I used Roy's sketch to redraw the jig in AutoCAD so that good friend Tony could accurately bore the holes in the jig using his milling machine.
(N.B. The first drawing below has a typo mistake on some dimensions. See post #24 in this thread for a corrected version. Ed.)