Hi Guys
I recently bought a 1950 A7 Star Twin which was a running bike on club reg.
Mechanically it was pretty good but the paintwork was pretty ordinary. it looked reasonable but there were a few bubbles on the tank so I pulled it off to repaint and found that I could just peel the paint off in strips so obviously it hadn't been prepared very well.
This instigated a complete pull down of the bike and stripping it all back to bare metal for a respray.
I resprayed the tank plus redid the pinstripes (not exactly original as I was too cheap to get the tank rechromed as it would have been originally so I just painted it in a similar pattern).
The only mechanical work I did was to replace the steering head bearings with new tapered bearings plus new cables, hoses etc.
I also made and soldered in a couple of gauze filters for the petcocks as the originals were missing (tore off) and cleaned all the accumulated gunge out of the tank and petcocks which were almost blocked.
Found a couple of stripped bolts which required retreading/replacing.
Polished the various bits of Aluminium and chrome which all came up pretty good apart from the plunger covers which had all the chrome worn off them. I decided to buy a new set as the local chrome shop were going to charge me more to rechrome them than a new set cost.
I've just finished respraying everything (4 coats of colour and 4 of clear then a good polish)
The local paint shop matched the colours for me which came out really close to the original - That's original that was on the bike when I bought it not necessarily original from the factory as I don't think the maroon colour was actually available in 1950 - came out in about 1953 or 54 I think.
So here's some pictures of progress so far, All going fairly well just need to finish putting it all back together.
I'm going to rewire it from scratch and add some indicators for safety so still a bit of work to do yet.
Will post some updates as I go along from here.
Chris.
