Time to fit that front wheel with its shiny bright new Avon tyre, then. Tyres are not cheap! If I’d expected that a new tyre to fit a 1965 bike would be available at 1965 prices, then I was soon corrected. It is of course almost always possible to pay a few shillings less by buying a tyre online and fitting the thing yourself. Happily, I have a great local motorcycle establishment - Ace Mosickles - and they do it all, including making the crucial coffee. Awesome stuff. Stimulating. Falling asleep is unlikely.
While the wheel is off, I took a good look and a ruler to the brake linings. Why? Because the lever comes right back to the bar, and the cable hasn’t stretched, because a new one does exactly the same. This is a little irritating, because there’s plenty of meat on the linings - a good couple of millimetres before the rivets approach. As these are the original linings, they do actually work, so I set about finding a cable to fit.
This is not easy, even in our interconnected age. Minor snag is that Matchless (and AJS, of course) used more than one front brake on their 250s, and the late ones differ from the earlier models. All the cables I could find were for the earlier variety. What to do? In the end I took the original cable down to Ace and asked Kenny if he could shorten the inner a little, to take out
