Sunday, 8 February 2015

Rebuilding a Carroll bevel chamber

After welding
-JdK- The previous owner of my Model CJ Norton had made quite a mess when removing the self-adjusting bearing from the bevel chamber; it needs to be properly heated in an oven before the bearing drops out and when this is forgotten, removal with brute force will damage the aluminium and the interference fit of the bearing is lost.

After machining the bearing seat

New bevel chambers are available - but they are expensive and I like to use as many original parts as possible as they still seem to fit much better. Luckily Juris in Latvia could solve the issue by welding and machining the chamber - which was tricky. He needed a very accurate mandrel in the opening where the bronze bush normally sits and using this to clamp the housing in a lathe, the bearing seat could be machined. At the same time the flange - where the housing fits to the rockerbox - was trued by removing a tiny bit of metal. Apparently these flanges are often distorted.

After truing the flange