I guess I need to complete the thread - it's done. I managed to fire it up, adjust the timing and carbs and put about 100 miles on it. No smoke, good power, no weird noises - it seems good. 

A few minor issues - I had a leak from the primary and the clutch wouldn't disengage fully (making finding neutral impossible). When I pulled it down, I found the infamous circlip behind the clutch basket deformed and out of position. Yes, I did only torque to 40ftlbs, but it still failed. When I replaced that, and the seal - the leak went away. 

I also found the neutral light switch was screwed in too far which also screwed up finding neutral. This adjustment seems kinda touchy. I think either my switch is going bad or the bump on the shift plate is worn. I managed to find a workable medium.

All in all, I'm very happy with the bike and hope to get many miles out of it. 

UPDATE: Replaced the neutral switch and also opened up the tranny. I gently smoothed out the neutral light "bump" on shift selector plate and spent a lot of time with the switch adjustment. I also shimmed the Hyde shift pedal (it was kinda sloppy on its pivot shaft). Now it finds neutral better, but still not as nicely as my other '75. I suppose there's more "fettling" to do...

Since I mounted the vintage Hyde rear sets AND decided to delete the electric start components - I kinda got myself into a corner. The stock kick start lever fouls the Hyde foot peg such that you have to mount it rotated underneath the peg. This would severely limit the total throw you'd get to kick it over. I didn't feel that would be very successful. 

Anybody into Commandos will tell you that the bike was apparently built around the horn. The stock location is deep in the center of the bike, difficult to get to - not the greatest place for a horn to make sound. My original horn ended up being bad, so I needed to replace it. Further the original Lucas horn was probably everything Lucas thought it should be, which as it turns out, is pretty much the same as how they designed and built everything.  So I wanted to upgrade to a pair of Fiamm Freeway Blasters located in a more strategic position .I also needed a place to mount my new fuse block,  the Fuzeblocks FZ-1. 

I decided to mount all this stuff aft the air cleaner, but in front of the battery. My first goal was to model the space in Fusion 360, so I could design a way to get everything located. Once I had that, I designed a sheet metal mount. It took about 5 iterations to get it to work. 

Once I had a design, I used Fusion's sheet metal tools to create an unfolded 1:1 plan of the part. I glued this to a piece of sheet metal, then cut and bent it along the lines. Once I had it bent up, I welded it together and painted it.

Everything pretty much fit as I hoped it would. 

Here's the thing partially wired. In order to mount it, I welded a could of pieces of angle to the battery tray and then attached some captive nuts to be used with some horizontal bolts to secure the horn mount (you can see a couple of slots in the picture above - bottom of the front rail). So the horn mount slips down on top of the rails and 4 bolts are inserted horizontally to secure it. 

And here it is mounted up. I'm pretty happy with the way everything ended up. The horn relay is a bit cramped, but normally not a service item. Now on the the next part of the project - the wiring harness!

I was in the process of reassembling my long disassembled '75 Norton 850 and found that one of the rocker spindles was a sliding fit in the ol' RH4 head.  Another one was almost as loose. They're supposed to be more of an interference fit to the point you need to heat the head to get them installed. Among the host of issues that loose spindles can cause is allowing the spindle to rotate (it's supposed to be held in position by an absolutely poorly designed stop plate) and will allow a lot more oil to enter the rocker cavity. This, in turn, swamps the valve guides allowing oil to get sucked in and burned which results in massive amounts of smoke and plug fouling. 

One of the better fixes is sold by RGM in England (https://www.rgmnorton.co.uk/buy/one-piece-rocker-spindle-locating-plate_4062.htm). It solves two problems actually, it'll keep the spindle from rotating, and it allows you to really lock it in place with the grub screw which should help keep it much more stable over the long run. 

Since I am impatient, had some stainless bar and a CNC mill, I decided to whip up my own version of these. I think they came out pretty good.  ​

And here's the final result. I think they're going to work very well. 

This project started as the result of a failed earlier project. I had attempted to build a motorcycle logger - i.e. a platform to record as many things as I could manage during a ride. I had rpm, gear, head temp (left and right), oil temp, oil pressure, speed, GPS location and ambient air temp. I was hoping to add the AFR. Although I got it all working, it would crash often. I tracked it down the way I was capturing rpm - by using the coil negative. I was getting some sort of noise, either RF from the spark plugs or maybe back EMF from the coil or something. I could figure it out and it made the project unstable. 

Roll forward a few years. I ran across some info on this and found a reference to someone having a similar problem. They solved it by making sure the ground from the coil negative interface circuit went back to the battery, not the circuit board as the voltage spikes from the coil collapse and subsequent ringing would cause the processor to crash. 

I wanted to play around with this, but I didn't want to do it on the bike. So I thought I would create test bed for running ignitions. 

I came up with an Arduino that drives a DC motor. The motor is connected to a shaft that has a taper bored in one end to simulate the end of the cam. On the other end I mounted a magnet on a cross shaft. A hall effect sensor triggers when the magnet goes by and I use this to determine "TDC". I then cobbled together a couple of stock Lucas 17M6 coils, plugs, a motorcycle battery (as I need about 3W of 12V to drive the ignitions) and my trusty Tektronix TDS2024 scope. 

I ended up using a circuit published by MegaSquirt for ignition pickup - basically using a 1N4001 and a 4N32 (optocoupler). It’s simple but seems to work pretty well. I used a simplified version of this circuit  (no “John” Zener, no C31, C11 or C12. I may add the C11 and C12 in as I do get a bit of noise):

This circuit seems to work well. I think the key is making sure XG1goes back to the battery, not to the ground plane the uC uses  (i.e. don't jumper to XG2).

​The basic procedure is to mount an ignition, set it up so the spark happens before the magnet triggers the hall effect sensor and run a program I wrote on the Arduino. The program uses PWM to increase the motor speed by 1 (the Arduino allows 255 steps) and then determine the rpms and the amount of time between the spark event and the TDC event. This is converted to an angle and is the advance. By running from around 600 rpm to 6000 rpm and taking advance measurements, you can plot the curve. 

I happen to have a small collection of ignitions I've collected over the years. A Boyer MicroMKII, an Old Britts PowerArc,  an older and newer Trispark, and an ancient Lucas AB11. I have a decent AAU, but setting it up was a pain so I didn't test it.

​A note about the reported values. The RPMs are crankshaft RPMs. The Advance angles are crank angles. You also must realize the advance angles are somewhat arbitrary as they are offset to the manufactures spec. In other words, when I run my setup I really don't know where TDC is in relation to the spark. (I didn't have an easy way to accurately determine this in the test rig.) I just set it up to be somewhere before TDC using my scope to verify. After the test run, I take the raw data and look for a "calibration" point - i.e. I know the ignition should be set to 28 degrees BTDC at 3500 rpm. So I simply find my closest 3500 rpm point, calculate how "off" my raw number is from the spec and then subtract that from my raw data. This seems to work pretty well. 

HOWEVER - as DynoDave would probably point out, it's more meaningful probably to use cam shaft angles and absolute advance data. This effectively eliminates this attempt at aligning the advance with TDC. 

Here's the data I used to set this up:
Lucas 31 degrees @ 5000 rpm
Boyer  31 degrees @ 5000 rpm
Trispark  28 degrees @ 3500 rpm
PowerArc  35 degrees @ 3600 rpm (taken off the Old Britts Web page).

So in order of evolution:

Lucas AB11 - this is an old analog ignition. What is interesting is the coil is on - i.e. energizing - almost the entire time. The only time this isn't true is when a spark happens and it's briefly grounded to get the field to collapse. I would guess this uses the most power due to this. In the following image the yellow trace is my hall effect sensor. When it goes low, that's TDC. As you can see about 2.7ms before that on the blue trace is the coil negative line. It goes low for 0.1-0.2 ms. 

Next up is the Boyer MKIII. Another analog unit. It's coil on/off times are better, probably something like a 50% duty cycle (I forgot to take a picture). 

What's very interesting to me is the Lucas and Boyer curves are almost identical. 

I then tested two Trisparks. This is a digital ignition. I had an older one and a new one. (Apparently it was redesigned to better tolerate the heat in the timing cavity with more robust components.) They ended up with basically the same curve. You can clearly see the idle stabilization effects in the 1000 - 1500 rpm range. The Trispark seemed to manage the coil on times to minimize current load, but maintain a good spark. It seemed like they were trying to keep the on time to around 8ms. 

Last up was the Old Britts PowerArc unit. It used a completely different pick up method - optical instead of magnetic. It also used a very different approach to managing the spark. This unit actually sparked three times for each cycle. In addition the coil on times were managed for each segment of the advance curve. In this picture you can clearly see the 3 pluses in the blue trace. 

You can clearly see the digital nature of the ignition in the following graph. The increases in advance are very discrete. Since there 3 spark events per cycle, there are 3 advance curves. Four, if you count the coil on event. 

Of course, being digital means you can have more than one mapping, so Old Britts supplies a "sport" curve meant to be a bit more aggressive. 

It looks like the real difference is the 2nd and 3rd sparks are more advanced in the Sport version. ​ 

Here's an overlay of the two. Sorry about the jumbled legend ( I couldn't get Excel to sort it...)

I though it would be fun to overlay them all. I used the first spark event for the PowerArc curves, but as you can see  - it looks a bit fishy. Perhaps someone with more experience can suggest a better way to compare apples to apples.

Conclusions:

Well it's pretty clear to me which one is best. Although the analog units have been around for a long time and seem pretty reliable, they really don't offer the best curve. It's well known the Boyer has issues with low battery voltages (I even saw this during my tests when my test battery went low.). The Lucas is no longer being made so it's more of a curiosity I suppose. The PowerArc I found to be very fiddly getting it set up (i.e. getting it timed correctly and fooling around with the optical wheel). You have to set it's version of TDC to your bikes. However when you strobe it, there is no easy way to adjust this and it's very easy to be off a couple of degrees. I also found mounted on the bike, it was susceptible to kickback when starting - there is mention of a start procedure on the Old Britts site you'd better follow if you want your ankles. This leaves us with the Trispark. I think this is an awesome ignition. It's easy to install, easy to dial in, makes the bike run great, seems to have a nice curve and you get idle stabilization that literally transforms your bike. 

Here's some links to information on curves I found around the net on this:
 http://www.accessnorton.com/commando-timing-advance-curves-compiled-reva-t6488.html
 http://atlanticgreen.com/boyerexposed.htm (also has Lucas Rita!)
http://www.pazon.com/files/PDF/info1/PAZONvBOYER3.pdf
http://www.accessnorton.com/electronic-ingition-that-maintains-idle-t14273-15.html
http://www.norbsa02.freeuk.com/goffypazon.htm
http://s699.photobucket.com/user/654cc/media/boyer_graph_2.jpg.html
https://www.oldbritts.com/51_150111.html

Finally in 2015, I decided on a paint scheme. I decided to use Vintage Vendor (Brent Budgor at http://vintage-vendor.com/) in Vermont as recommended by several folks on AccessNorton.com. I slightly modified one of his Commando themes and I was not disappointed. Here's the result mocked up:

Sitll in 2014, I guess I got the idea from Hobot (a frequent contributor on accessnorton.com) to drill holes in my Z plates. I ended up creating a pattern I liked and tested it out on my mill with a pen to make sure I had it correctly registered. Then I ran the program. I like it.

But things never go exactly according to plan. I sorta realized a bit late that there was a mounting needed for the rear brake pipe support that I just happened to have milled away. Oooops. I had to create a solution. 

I realized I had left a very small part of the original hole that I decided to use. I then ginned up a sort of spacer to hold the bolt in this depression further aided by sandwiching it between a couple of washers. I first mocked it up with my 3D printer, then once I liked it, I machined one out of aluminum. I think the final product came out pretty OK. It holds the bolt securely and I think it looks interesting. 

While I was on a roll in 2014, I got the idea to modify the speedo and tach to use LED strip lights. I found some red lights that were in strip format and rated for 12v.

I had to develop a way to remove and install the bezel. I ended up making a fixture to mount the tach or speedo to my lathe. Then I created a tool that I could mount on the cross slide to either unroll or roll the bezel on. I spun the chuck by hand slowly to accomplish the task. I don't have any pics of this process, but might update this with a few pics fo the tools.

I was interested in incorporating a diffuser of some sort so the light would be a bit more even. I ended up machining a couple of rings out of plexiglas to act as a diffuser. 

 Once I had that figured out, I mounted the strip - it's got adhesive on the back - added a electrical connection and closed 'em up.

The final outcome. I plan to add a dimmer knob somewhere for these.

Several months after the frame was done, I stared in on the wheels. I wanted to replace the rims with shouldered alloy rims and SS spokes. I also wanted to learn how to lace a wheel. So I ordered everything from Buchannans. 

My first step was to measure the wheel offsets which I documented here rim-offsets-75-norton-commando.html .

​Once I knew that I pulled the hubs, rebuilt them and laced up the new rims. Here was my quick and dirty method to measure the offset when I was building them. I used the flats on the hub center as a reference. 

Next up was the forks. I chose to go with the Lansdowne upgrade from Madass www.tritonmotorcycleparts.com/(I did this on another bike and really liked them).

Decided this would be an excellent place to store my rim offset info before I tear down these wheels. I referenced from the disc rotor face to the outside of the rim. 

Front Rim Setup

Looks like 32/64 to me

Rear Wheel Setup

​Looks like 57/64 to me

Front: 32/64 = 0.500 in
Rear: 57/64 = 0.891 in
I also measured the width of the rim from outside to outside at 2.690.

So the dimensions from the disc face to the CENTER of the rim would be
Front: 0.500 + (2.690/2) = 1.845 in
Rear: 0.891 + (2.690/2) = 2.236 in