Called my engine man today and he thinks he will be ready by the end of January. I don’t but did not say so. Asked him for some ideas on exhaust dimensions. Turns out he does not know where to find the info so I have emailed Kenny Cummings at NYCNorton to see if he can help.

Called my frame guy but no reply. Playing golf as usual I suppose. Here is the drawing of the front wheel axle. Got a quote in today from a Swedish metals dealer. He will sell a 1,2 meter long bar, 25 mm diameter for SEK 2000 which is about $300. I only need 250 mm so what do I do with the rest, almost one meter.

Will go to my friend Marcel Gerhard, former World Champion on 1000 meter sand track racing, who builds speedway engines here in town. Will see if he can use a bar of Titanium. As you can see, the axle is stepped, one side having a 22mm dia and the rest 20mm. I don’t know why. The shaft is clamped in the fork leg sliders each side so I figure not much need to tightly secure the axle horizontally. A couple of aluminium washers, grooved to accept the front wheel jack, and a couple of 10 mm countersunk screws to hold it all together. I will use an anaerobic thread locker ( read Loctite) to keep the screws in place and so no need for lock wire or nylon insert nuts or castellated nuts/split pins and other complicated / heavy stuff.

Got set up on PayPal and paid Kenny Cummings. Jesus Christ Almighty is that easy, and expensive. Costs the sender 5%. But how else are the poor bastards gonna survive? Tomorrow I might go and look for some Allen screws to fix the brake calipers to the forks. What is the difference between a screw and a bolt, by the way?

Though many times confused by amateurs, bolts and screws are different types of fasteners. Bolts are headed fasteners with external threads suitable for a non-tapered nut. They require a nut (or some other thread) as a counter – to lock the joint. The bolts are made with uniform threads satisfying the standard specifications such as UNJ, UNR, MJ etc. and are used in most industrial applications – secured with a lock washer or a thread locking anaerobic fluid. To sum it up, bolts are designed to be used as a fastener placed through already drilled holes in the machine parts and require a nut in the machine part to tighten it from the other end.

Screws are headed externally threaded types of fasteners without meeting the standard specifications of the bolts. They are shafts with provision at one end to turn the screw and have a helical thread on its surface, which is capable of piercing strongly into the surface. They do not require a nut and are used mostly in home-based application – such a connecting a picture to the wall. It is actually the simplest example of converting torque into linear force. I stole the above out of Google but it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?