Hitchcocks Forum

Hi I seem to be getting on top of my bikes many oil leaks since owning it and they are now not so bad. After a long 4 and a half hour run around all the country lanes in the south downs I had quite a leak under the bike in the garage well more than normal so have been trying to track it down. I thought it might be the breather hose as its around that area but it seems that I have quite a bit of oil dripping from the points cover. I think there must be a seal in there or a bushing that's gone is it a hard job to replace?

Yes and no and maybe easier not to.



If there's oil coming out of there, it's finding its way up from the timing chest by splash and creeping along the shaft or the dizzy shaft has been overgreased at some point. There won't be a lot. I suspect if you too the points backing plate off and wiped any excess up, it would be a long time before you saw any more.

There are two sorts of distributor. One is on iron bushings, the other is on ball bearings so you'd need to know which sort you have. To mess with either, you'd have to take the timing chest off and detach the distributor shaft drive sprocket. Which brings me back to the first point of you might cause more oil leaks by trying to fix that one.



The bushings are easy to service once you've taken the timing chest cover off, detached the dizzy drive and removed the shaft, they just drift out. I think you can replace them with bronze ones too. However, it's a faff and you then need to start from square 1 with the ignition timing. Not sure about the ball bearing ones, never worked on one.



So yeah, probably easiest to give it a wipe out and see how long it takes to come back.

cheers probably best to leave it as is then, the bike tends to leak a little oil from all sorts of places and only after a long run it builds up enough to start dripping. Will clean it all up with a rag and see how long it takes to come back, also before the last long run I gave my chain a really good oiling with gear oil from one of those pound shop cafe style sauce bottles so could be some of that too.