Fitting a kickstart to 250 Mark 3 Diana

[machten]

Just rebuilding a 250 Diana Mark 3 engine at the moment and retro-fitting a kickstart for it as it was not in place. Installing the later bridge arrangement but the case did not have installed the ramp plate to disenage the kickstart gear so we reverse engineered one today without knowing what it looked like. Pleasingly, our design for the missing part was exactly the the same as this...

NC Kickstart casing.JPG

Due to limitations in a home shop this was only fabricated by hand with mild steel as a temporary installation for the 2014 Moto Giro. Is this part available elsewhere produced from harder steel? I'm concerned the hard steel gear will wear it away relatively quickly.

Progress so far...

IMG_1105crops.jpg

IMG_1117s.jpg

IMG_1118s.jpg

The Mark 3 Diana being prepped...

Diana rt side march 15 09s.jpg

Kev

[LaceyDucati]

Hi Kev

I've plenty of those hardened ramps, all used but perfect. If you need one give me a shout.

Nigel

[Rick]

Kev,
If you can get the part, that's the easy solution, but if you have a torch you can harden steel in a home shop. You can case harden your mild steel part with Kasenit, Cherry Red, Hard-N_Tuff, etc- whatever is available where you live- follow the instructions on the can and you can get mild steel to form a hard skin 0.020" deep. Or, the same tools you used to make the mild steel part and a little extra time will make the part from a 'oil hardening tool steel' like O2 or O1, and after quenching you'll have a part that's too hard- use the torch again to 'draw it back' or temper, and the part will be almost through hardened and very durable. YouTube is full of guys demonstating how to harden knife blades using oil-hardening steels- search for 'oil quenching steel' or just 'hardening steel'.
Be careful, but it's easy to do.
Rick

[machten]

Many thanks Nigel. I'll drop you an email soon as I need to order a few things too.

Thanks for the info Rick. I confess I wasn't even aware of such stuff, but have now done some reading about them. Interesting. I think I'll try one of those out just out of interest and possible future use, but will go with the genuine article in this case.

Kev