Following a good firkle round on the LE Velo Clubs website and mining the data on their Forum I’ve come up with the information needed for checking the ignition timing.

Apparently on an LE it fires 29º BTDC. Considering that I have another side-valve boxer motored bike and it fires at 42º BTDC this seems a bit retarded but that’s what it says, both motors are just about square so it’s not that one is a longer stroke than the other.

There is also the fact that this equates to 0.26 inches of the piston down the bore as well as dimensions for the flywheel tool so this will help making up the special tools the book requires.

Only other thing needed is the extractor bolt for the ATD unit.

This is supposed to be available through the club spares scheme but is currently listed as “Not Available”, Typical!!.

From the picture it’s similar to the BMW tool for this job but the BMW one is metric threaded and will not fit, again Typical! as I have two of these!

Daft thing is that when I made the BMW ones the difficulty was in getting the correct grade an metric thread, now it’s the other way round as I’ll need a long high tensile 5/16 inch BSF bolt to make the Velo one and no-one keeps BSF stuff on the shelf these days!.

A possible snag here is that the tool has a long, slender tip, it has to be just under the core size for 2BA to go into the end of the crankshaft and that’s about 1/8 inch, it’s probably more practical to insert a suitable drill blank into a 5/16 inch bolt to make it as skimming down a bolt to this size on a big lathe is not the easiest of jobs.