Apparently water pump grease is best.

I made an early start on Wednesday so that I could take a short break at nine to drop my bearing races and cups off at Redditch Motorcycles.  The professional opinion was that the machining made them a very tight fit and that a press would need to be used to insert the the bearing races in to the cups that hold them in the frame's neck tube. I left them there and headed home to resume work.

My day went well and I even found a free hour to take the dogs around the Three Miler. I would have brought them home clean but half way around Whiffler found an open ditch and decided to run along 50 yards of it's length … mucky little sod!

By four thirty I had achieved my main objectives which included a modicum of shit stirring on a project where our team were engaged, then ignored. Our collective view is that some Empire Building has got entirely out of hand and it is time to get some management focus on a Programme that appears to be reliant on a bunch of overpaid Contractors with no proven ability to develop anything more complex that a PowerPoint presentation.

As I said, by four thirty I was just about done so headed back down the road to pick up my bearing races. Chris had obviously had a busy day and hadn't got around to pressing them in, so I spent twenty minutes chatting while he sorted them all out. He was also very helpful in suggesting an appropriate grease for the roller bearings and that I should use a threaded bar and metal plates as a primitive press to install the bearing cups/races.

I headed home with this new knowledge and eventually* settled in front of the Enfield's neck tube … Christ it was a pig of a job! I recalled Chris' comments about the machining and, in desperation, ran a mini sanding drum around the bearing cups. That mild abrasion was enough to allow them to be pressed in to the neck tube rather than skewing as they had tended to do before.  They were still bloody tight but they are now in and I hope they never need changing again.

I just need the grease and then I can start putting the damned thing back together again.

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* A hypo and an associated recuperative snooze delayed progress by an hour or more