EW Gearbox under frame mounting plate

[oily bloke]

Hi all

I am in the process of rebuilding a 27 EW350 and am missing the cast ally plate that mounts the gearbox to the frame tubes and I am having one made . I have a pattern and all the ones I have seen are either cracked or have been welded so I am going to have it milled from billet alloy. If there is any interest out there I will have a batch made as this will reduce costs per unit. I intend to increase the thickness slightly between the frame cup and the bolt hole bosses to increase the strength in this area. If anyone is interested please let me know. If I have 20 or so made the cost will be approx £40.00 each.

Cheers

Andrew

[Doug]

Andrew,

Good idea, they will be much stronger than the weak originals. They will end up looking something like this:





-Doug

[oily bloke]

Hi Doug

Thanks for the reply. That is exactly what I am aiming for. I presume that the ones in your pictures are available to purchase and I am simply reproducing that which has already been done? I searched for ages on the web to see if it was available and could not find reference to it anywhere. The machine code is being completed so I cannot stop the ball rolling now, it would be unfair to the guys doing the work. The engineer concerned has decided to do some destructive stress testing on the prototype to see where and at what stress level it fails. He designs and makes prototype parts for the aero and motorsport industry and, for him, this is normal procedure, although the mighty 3.5hp EW would struggle to break a clamp on a good day. I think they break due to the ally being stressed as the upper webs act as a fulcrum and the thickness around the bolt boss is too thin. Yours, however appear to be just right. Function and form. It can be done.

Cheers

Andrew

[Doug]

Andrew,

More a case of I needed one myself and came to the same conclusions you arrived at. And while at it I made a few spares. I had one person interested in one and figured $120US, but it must have been too much for them. I reckoned that covered the material and machine time (both sides in about two hours finished), but not the programing and tooling (which I provided for free.) I have not made any other effort to market the extras. I could probably rework the program and halve the machine time (roughing is only about twelve minutes and does not allow much improvement, but I could probably double the pitch on finish pass and turn up the pressure on the bead blast cabinet instead!) but it is not worth the trouble to revisit.

I long ago came to the conclusion that if you want to make money manufacturing vintage motorcycle spares, make Vincent or Brough Superior parts where the owners are use to spending serious money and forget Douglases! My suggestion is only bother manufacturing what you need plus a few spares and eat the high average cost. As for making enough extras to subsidize the project cost, it can be a looooong time before you recoup your outlay unless you can get the price so low folk will buy on speculation just to tuck away on the shelf. How much and how long do you want to tie up your spare cash?

If your on project does not come to pass for some reason and you still need a 350EW clamp, you know where to find me!

Regards,

-Doug