I'm now the owner of a Featherbed Inter to add to my woes.
It's come to me as a basket case but with plenty of technical support and history from its previous owner.
One problem I have with it is rust and reading the frame number. It wasn't stamped terribly well and really, I only have the "11" and a couple of middle digits properly legible, the rest being 'round bottom' digits. No sign of a year letter but I do know it was first registered in 1956 and has the horrible round plastic badges.
Numbers Game
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That makes sense. I assume…
That makes sense.
I assume both Reynolds and Norton needed numbers for their paperwork.
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Cleaning
I don't currently have a tank big enough to take the entire frame but I can fit ends of it in my plastic wheelbarrow and hook an old smartless battery charger to it. It looks like it's fermenting well.
Note the distinct flat for the long stroke engine's bevel box and the float chamber bracket.
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Grim!
Blimey David looks like Dante's Inferno in there! Definitely worth an article or two in Roadholder, in my eyes the 1954 International 350 or 500 (and Domi 88) must be the most beautiful Nortons ever built! I am biased though as just picked up a '54 Wideline frame to build from ground up...
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I love the wheelbarrow
First of all, I like the wheelbarrow solution! The way people make things work in their sheds and garages never seizes to amaze me. I think it's brilliant.
From what I've heard, gunsmiths could retreive serial numbers with acid etching. However, I had a look on the internet and it seems it's more of a forensical thing. Still, it seems possible to discover numbers that have been rubbed off. If they weren't stamped in hard enough in the first place, I think you might struggle though.
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Reading unreadable engine or frame numbers
I trick I learned from early years in RR was to clean the area where the numbers are supposed to be, position the frame or crankcase where it is best viewable, then get a really powerful lamp to illuminate the area. Move the lamp around full 360 degrees, up and down as well, keep changing your viewing angle, and 9 times out of 10, you find one illumination/viewing setup that will magically reveal the numbers. I saw this done on a very rare and valuable 1920's car engine where someone had tried to remove the crankcase numbers, but we eventually found enough to fully identify it. Took about a half a day to do, but somehow quite satisfying.
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Featherbed frame numbers
Any featherbed frames I owned had the frame and model number on the left gusset above where the swing arm bolt fixes
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Some Featherbed frames had the date of manufacture also stamped on the headstock.