Coldplugs - Berkeley Restoration

This section will document the restoration of my 492cc, 3 cylinder, Berkeley. This was the second car I ever owned - the first was also a Berkeley. I sold it many years ago but was fortunate enough to discover its whereabouts a few years ago. When its owner decided to part with it, he was good enough to contact me and the result was that I now own it again. I believe I was the second owner, and now probably about the seventh.

I haven't decided how to format this page. I don't intend to make it a day-to-day blog because of time considerations (and also because it's likely to be painfully slow) but I'll try to include enough detail to keep it interesting. I'll take lots of pictures and maybe supply a complete chronicle later on.


The Berk returns after a 40 year absence.	When I last sat in this car, the interior was in almost new condition. Here, most of the seat foam has hardened and is crumbling. Makes you think, I'll tell you. This is not an original Berkeley steering wheel, but appears to be from an early Triumph Spitfire. Berks and certain Triumphs used some steering parts in common.

My first step was to photograph as much as possible with a digital camera. This will help when I am putting things back together. (Although my experience is that I never manage to photograph what I end up needing.)	Shots like this aren't attractive but should help in the reassembly.

I couldn't stand the crumbling foam so decided to clean the seat up first. Here, it's out of the car. I photographed it from every angle and made notes regarding its construction. Berkeley seats are cushioned with foam and these rubber straps. The straps theoretically can be adjusted to vary the distance from the seat back to the pedals.	I never realized the seat had wood in it. It provides something to tack into. I numbered the with a marker and removed them.

Once the seat was out, the car was pressure washed using low pressure.	I've started buying some things I expect to need, mostly via eBay. Guess what this is.
	The seat frame is in fine shape, so I just wire-brushed, primed,and painted it.

Half of the throttle/choke bellcrank assembly (the "basket") has been cleaned here.	Carbs being cleaned up. The idle jet on one had been broken off halfway and its cap was missing. A small screw extractor helped remove it - fortunately with no thread damage.

The engine on its way out. I was able to tilt it in any direction with this setup. You need to be careful not to damage the fiberglass here, since the nose is pretty flimsy across the top.	My crude arrangement for testing the crankcase seals. I performed a "leakdown" test with air at about 1 psi using aquarium tubing, a cork, and a brass adapter I turned on a small lathe. Cylinder compression was high and consistent in all three.

I made a crude puller from a piece of scrap brass and some small machine screws. Tightening the nuts on the machine screws pulled the sprocket. I intentionally used small screws to try to avoid damaging the sprocket - if it was too tight to pull using this method, then I assumed the threads would strip before any damage was done. It worked fine.	This pictures shows use of a tool made specifically for pulling Excelsior Talisman clutches. I drilled a 2-foot piece of wood to prevent the clutch from rotating.

To remove the engine from the cradle, flip it over and remove the bolts holding the cradle together. The four bolts through the top piece (as shown here) had captive nuts - I don't know if that was standard of if someone tacked them with a welder but it sure helped. The remainder are easily removed but you'll need to hold the nuts from the inside of the cradle. Not all need to be removed. Once you get the right ones out, the cradle comes apart. The side of the cradle away from the camera is split to make removal possible. If you leave the engine & transmission in this position for long, be ready to soak up some oil!	The 3 cyl cradle has been cleaned up. It was slightly warped and needed to be made flat. I ruminated on that for while, then just put each piece in a vice and carefully bent them by hand. You can see how the "center" fore-and-aft piece is fitted - this is hard to see when the engine is in the car.

To pull the heads, I used a 1/4" Whitworth socket, a rubber hammer, and a piece of wood. Two head nuts didn't want to come loose so the studs themselves unscrewed.	Note the dents found in #1 head (at the right). The piston has several also. The cylinder wall has a vertical scratch that needs to be looked at. The other 2 heads, pistons, and cylinders seem ok. Broken ring? Maybe. We'll soon see.

Here's the piston from #1. It's not hard to see a problem here, including a vertical groove matching the one on the cylinder wall. Fortunately, being of a softer material, the piston seems to have borne the brunt of the damage	The problem close up. This piston will now become a desk ornament. I think the scratch in the cylinder will hone out. Piston #2 has some excessive wear - probably from overheating rather than lots of miles.

Splitting the crankcase is a mixed bag - some segments are easy, others require special tools for disassembly and reassembly. Although it looks simple at first glance, this is a complex engine to overhaul. Don't make this your first engine rebuild. To split the first segment - the power take-off end - the tools above will suffice. With the cylinder off, pry very gently using a soft metal bar between the crank webs and just tap the crankshaft end with a rubber mallet. It'll pop off, and you'll enjoy spending the next 20 minutes finding all the little rollers (up to 34) that just bounced around your floor.	Here's the big end with most of the rollers still in place. The 3 cylinder crank journals have a step-up to a larger diameter than the 2 cyl journals (arrow). The rollers in the 3 cyl are smaller in diameter also - about 3/16" vs about 1/4". There are 2 rows of rollers, each about 1/4" long. I had to separate this segment to make sure no debris remained from the broken ring and piston, and to see if there was any damage. Everything looks pretty good so far.

The DynaStart seemed to be in good shape except for badly worn brushes. (I view this as a good thing since it probably means the car has been driven in the past. Harley-Davidson brushes worked perfectly (and were even marked "Siba"). I gave it a good cleaning and reassembled it.	The cylinders have now been bead blasted and painted. The scratch made by the broken ring was too deep to ignore, so they were also bored and oversize pistons fitted. (Thanks to Steve Barlow in Wolfeboro, NH)

Here, the new pistons have been inserted and the cylinders refitted to the crankcase. I don't have an appropriate ring compressor but a hose clamp worked well. The pistons must be inserted from the bottom (i.e., the cylinder is slid down over the piston). The rings are pinned, and you need to be very careful to have the ring gaps correctly positioned (and filed so they close completely).	The engine is back together and I've spun it on the Dynastart. Compression is identical on all cylinders at 155 psi and there are no funny noises. Not much of a test, I know, but I'll take what I can get at this point in the process. I used #400 sandpaper taped to a piece of glass to make sure the mating surfaces of the heads were flat.

An external web is broken at the top of the transmission case. Everyone I talked to recommended against trying to weld it because of concerns about it having absorbed so much oil over the years. A small aluminum plate now affords some strength and gives me something to bolt the clutch case backplate to.	The top photo is looking down on the area shown at the left. The two small bolts hold a piece into which the phillips head screw is threaded. I made a small aluminum sleeve to reduce the backplate hole size since it was enlarged by the break. (This is very hard to visualize without seeing it.)

The clutch did not have the center plate (#79 in the Excelsior manual diagram) and probably functions fine without it. "Just in case" I made one from 1/8" C.R. steel. O.D. is 3.05", the 3 bolt holes are on a .94" radius circle. It does help hold the outermost driven clutch plate in position while the clutch is being assembled. The clutch release rod runs through the mainshaft in a hole about .255" in diameter. I used a 1/4" steel ball to get the length right.	See this bolt? It's for the rear transmission mount. Don't bother putting the clutch, primary chain, and chaincase together until it's inserted through the boss shown here and the mount itself. (Max length that can be inserted after the chaincase is mounted is about 3.125 inches, which is too short to do the job.) What was that comment about giving a piece of metal to an Englishman????

The engine and drivetrain assembly is done. I'll get started on the car itself after I spend some time improving the shop a bit.