Now it's time to finalise the top-end set up. The piston and barrel have, till now, just been sat on.
Darrell had said that he's skimmed 0.75 off the base of the barrel and raised the exhaust port a couple of millimeters to balance the tall transfers. These are also tamed a bit by the 60 stroke. He'd also engraved some instructions on the top face.
We were expecting 1mm out the top which would allow for the fitting of base and head gaskets and some adjustment in the timings if required but even with no gasket there's only 0.7mm out of the top, this I'm putting down to the Indian casing having a high gasket face. Working this out this meant that a 1.7mm head gasket was needed to get a 1mm squish.
I checked the measurements again from the top of the barrel, these came out as -
Exhaust - 32.1
Transfers - 45.9
Inlet - 96.5
Back in the calculators this looks like
Exhaust - 185.6
Transfers - 128
Inlet - 155
This gives a blowdown of approximately 28 degrees, much improved.
I fit the rings, checking the gaps, adding copious hi-temp silicon to the spigot and base area and a slightly more carefully measured amount on the head gasket. Then torque the head down.
Note also in this pic I've fitted studs into the mag housing to hold the cowling in place. Generally it's not a great idea to screw steel in and out of alloy as inevitably it will wear and / or strip. The cowling is on and off a lot and these bolts are vulnerable to vibration, you'll often find them stripped in second hand mag
With everything tightened down I'm using some 2mm solder to check the squish and for once something worked out right
Moving on I fit the exhaust studs and stub.
Up till this point I'd hummed and hawed about carburettors. As I'd said previously I was an old skool Amal kind of guy. I understand Amals, there's not too much you can do with them, there's only one 2t needle for example, however I start to think that I'm building in some inflexibility in the set up by going down this route. I'd been picking a few up on eBay over the winter if they were cheap enough but they were all quite worn or had faults with one thing or another. Some had chambers or power jets blanked, others had worn bodies or slides. In the end I could just about have made one good one out of the lot of them.
In the end I decide to follow the herd and fit a manifold for a PHBH style carb. This I match to the inlet and fit to the barrel.

"Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better."