The rear light unit fitted to my Matchless G3LS when I bought it back in India was one of the common Lucas 564 types found on so many Royal Enfield’s and the like. However, if the 1951 Matchless part book is to be believed, the ‘correct’ rear light for my year of bike is actually …
My bike has been off the road for the last month or so whilst the Lucas ‘N1’ magneto and ‘E3NL’ dynamo were back in the UK being reconditioned. The magneto had started to fail intermittently a few weeks before and then lost it’s spark completely, and the output from the dynamo seemed to be flickering …
I picked up my bike from the mechanic yesterday. It had been in for about 6 weeks now so it’s been a long time since I was last out on the road! The main jobs that needed to be done were that the front suspension forks needed to be rebuilt (the seals were leaking oil) …
If you’ve been reading the previous posts of this blog you will hopefully have noticed that I am very keen to keep my Matchless as original as possible during it’s so-called ‘restoration’. However, there are a few concessions that I have made to modern technology which I think are important to make the bike usable on a daily basis. …
So with the rewiring now complete, it was time to get a new 6 volt battery for the bike. The only problem was that the shop that the mechanic had bought such batteries from in the past had now stopped stocking 6 volt models. A search of lots of battery shops across the revealed the same story in each …
Nothing in India happens quickly, and that includes servicing and repair of old Matchless motorbikes! So I wasn’t too surprised today when I visited the mechanic’s shop again and found that nothing had really moved on much since Saturday. The auto-electrician had certainly done his part of the re-wiring, but there were lots of bare wires still protruding from various …
So with the engine now running the wheels fitted, it was now time to take the bike to the local auto-electricians. The old electrics were in a fairly bad state so I decided to have the bike completely rewired to (hopefully!) ensure reliability later on. The dynamo and ignition systems had already been serviced whilst the engine was being …