Well I was doing some adjustments on the Royal Enfield today as I wasn't quite happy with the position of the gear lever and the front brake has been, quite simply, terrifying, since I first received the bike. Tried adjust the cable first over the last couple of short rides but found that the lever, after initial seeming to bring some braking to the table, would then come all the way to the bar and I would be praying to God and stamping the back brake to try and come to a stop and I'm not going to lie, a couple of times going head to head with cars on the single track roads around here, I had to squeeze past them at fifteen or twenty mile per hour as I simply couldn't stop in time. Turned out that the lower locking nut on the front drum was a fraction of a turn from falling off and so the cable was only pulling on the upper actuator of the front drum! Soon as I fixed that I discovered that the front drum is actually reasonably capable after all. Sure it ain't gonna generate stoppies but it slows the bike down quickly enough. On the gear side, after an inital adjustment which, I discovered when I went for a short test drive, left me unable to get it into 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th I got the gear lever position as good as I could get it, a little baggy and requires a fair bit of movement up and down to shift gears, but otherwise no worse really than any other gearbox. After those mods and a little tweaking of the mixture screw on the carb I took the bike out for a spin around my local 'circuit' out to the Rest and Be Thankful, along to the turn for Dunoon and then back into my village via Hell's Glen, and I really pushed her. She is actually a pretty nimble bike, pretty surefooted and by christ that machine gun roar is fun. I'm not sure just what her top speed is as, when the speedo reaches a little North of 60mph, the needle starts to swing wildly back and forwards but, head down behind the screen, and judging by the way the scenery was going past, I would say that, although the speedo didn't go past the 70mph mark, the bike was definitely past it and possibly around the eighty to eighty five mark or more. I can't say for certain all the work that has been done to this motor apart from bigger valves and a ported head but I would guess it's got the sporty cams from Hitchcocks and possibly a higher compression piston. Once you get to grips with the wee monster it actually repays a damn good thrashing and is, without a doubt, a great fun bike to ride.
I must admit that I felt I had paid a bit over the odds for the bike and that it hadn't had quite so much love and affection lavished on it as was claimed but I think I may have been rather hasty in that assessment.
