Anna P rises from her 40 year slumbers!

You may be aware of my restoration of a 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader 250 Sports, that I've been doing on and off over the last couple of years. The full blog of the restoration is here but here are a few before and after photos to whet the appetite!

So she is now all but finished and, excitingly, today was the first ride and the first time that she has moved under her own power for over 40 years, so a momentous day!

After a little fine tuning, we then started doing some shakedown laps of my local village. I have a test route of about a 2 mile lap, which means that if anything goes wrong halfway out I can pretty much coast back home! 

We did just over 10 miles without any big incident. Four main things to address: 

• there is a bit of an oil leak from the valve cover, which should just need tightening a bit.
• the gear change is a bit notchy, particularly going back into first from second. Some of this could be because the clutch is dragging slightly (the friction plates seem slightly too thick) but I'll check the selection adjustment as well.
• the petrol tap seems to be leaking slightly. I'm going to swap it for one with a reserve on it as well anyway.
• one of the indicators is loose!

I was very pleasantly surprised at how nicely she ran; how nimble handling and sprightly, especially considering I'm running in a new engine. She span up to 50 as easily as the Classic 350, although to be fair, she is quite a lot lighter.

I couldn't have hoped for better from a shakedown, after a complete rebuild from essentially a box of bits, so there is just a bit of tweaking to do and I can start building some "confidence miles" locally and start running in the engine. I pulled the plug to see what that was like and it looked pretty good, considering I’m just running locally at low ish speeds.

I’ve fitted some period throw over panniers so I can carry plenty of tools with me if anything needs tweaking while I’m out 🙂.

And of course I am now planning adventures on her! The first big one may be a few days to the Isle of Man for the Manx Grand Prix - it would be immense for her to make that journey after so long rotting away forgotten.