One of my favourite events of the vintage and classic year, the VMCC’s Taverners Section’s rally, takes place on the 21st of July. The venue is Stanford Hall, near Lutterworth in Leicestershire, as usual.
The London Douglas MCC will have our usual stand there, so please come along, have a chat and admire the machines!
Apart from being a good day out, the Founder’s Day rally also features an excellent auto-jumble – I invariably come home with more ‘stuff’ I didn’t know I needed! Fingers crossed for the weather …
Sunday 12th May is the diary date for a social meeting at the Royal Armouries in Fareham, PO17 6AN. Bike parking, the cafe and the Armouries are all free of charge, so it’s a good opportunity to fire up the Douglas* and enjoy some Spring sunshine. Meeting time is 12.00 and we look forward to seeing you there.
One of my regular tasks as webmaster is to update the Douglas Spares lists on this site – click pre-war and post-war if you haven’t looked at them recently. Recent additions to the post-war list include battery carriers for Mark Series models and crankcase breather valves for Dragonflys; new parts are added regularly, so it’s worth bookmarking the page. The Club’s spares scheme is open to all members, and the unsung heroes who run the pre- and post-war schemes deserve a vote of thanks for helping the rest of us keep our machines on the road!
I was asked recently where one could buy a battery for a Dragonfly. My answer was that I didn’t know; I presume motorcycle shops still sell lead-acid batteries but clearly one cannot order them on-line to be sent through the post! I haven’t bought one in years – not since I discovered sealed AGM batteries. AGM stands for Absorbent Glass Mat and is an advanced type of lead acid battery that is sealed, spill-free, and maintenance-free. I have them on all my older machines – they are inexpensive, unaffected by vibration and appear to hold their charge almost indefinitely! Ebay offers a wide range of sizes and capacities. The only change needed is to the connectors, which are generally the Lucar spade type found on modern vehicles. So, if the Douglas is laid up for the winter and you’re wondering if the lights will still work come next spring – I can strongly recommend an AGM battery as the way forward!
Now, I expect everyone with a pre-war Douglas has thought of this already – but I was quite pleased with the idea! Some of the smaller pre-war models, such as my A31, do not have a plugged drilling in the cylinder head to allow a marked rod to be used for measuring piston position, so setting the ignition timing with a degree disc is the only real alternative. Fitting a disc to the end of the crank, however, would involve removing the flywheel and primary drive, which felt like a lot of extra work. The alternative was to cut the centre out of an old degree disc and attach it to the flywheel with self-adhesive velcro pads. Clearly, it won’t fit anything else in future but it saved a lot of work!
Timing Disc on Douglas External Flywheel
The next challenge, of course, was to establish top dead centre (TDC). Again, in the absence of a drilling in the cylinder heads, I had to improvise, using a long blunt rod through one of the valve caps to establish when the piston ‘rocked’ at the top of its stroke. After a few attempts, I think I got pretty close.
Close enough? Ultimately it’s a low-compression side valve. Accuracy is limited by the keyed drive pinion on the magneto, so it will always be ‘the closest tooth’. And, if, my crankshaft is typical, TDC differs from one piston to the other! I think it’s close enough …
The London Douglas Motor Cycle Club 