Barrels

The orriginal barrels can appear to have liners but in fact are one piece casting . new liners will not have the cut outs for rod clearance and these will have to be formed with care to not leave sharp corners .

Orriginal barrels can be bored and liners fitted . The liners are pretty thin and can leave the spigots on early barrels likely to crack . Some people have good results some dont. I am not a fan of liners in the 600 and 650 engines . I wonder if its possible to fit 88 liners and pistons to a 99 which could  allow much more of the orriginal cylinders to stay. You would end up with an odd capacity but perhaps a stronger motor ?.  Its a bit " out of the box " thinking ,what do the experts think ?. maybe too short ?.

I would advise anyone thinking of buying a new barrel from Norvil not to; I did and returned it due to quality control - got full refund but not until I'd had a conversation with the owner who seems to have perfected an air of bored arrogance.

... Mr Emery arrogant?

That’s not good , where do we go now?. What was the fault with the Norville barrels? You would have thought with an orriginal to copy and modern machinery to hand it should be doable , perhaps they we’re trying to cover too many capacities 500- 650 . 

All the heavy twin barrels were machined castings......no liners.  From the 1950s onwards, Repair shops offered to insert liners into very worn or damaged barrels as a means of bringing the original bore back to standard.

My 650 engine plates are around 3/16" thick. The paint is quite thick  so they could actually be anywhere between 4.5 and 5mm in thickness.

They were half painted - half covered in rust and had heavy, messy grinding marks around the pushrod tunnels.

Got an apology from one of staff - they should not have been sent out like that - but this was not the view of Les Emery - apparently, I could have paid another £200 to have a fully-finished barrel (not listed on website) and there was nothing wrong with it. Grinding marks were from removal of casting for dynamo models - not that there ever was a dynamo 650.

Any way Mrs Emery also told me that there was nothing wrong with it, as I would have to have rust removed if I wished to paint the barrel anyway,and there was no problem because I was getting a full refund - had the morning off work to wait for courier but never mind.

All in all, a lovely experience of how wrong a customer can be.

That sounds like a perfectly normal  Norville "experience" ! ,  I have some sympathy with our suppliers who are stuck in a hard place between incompetant  suppliers and fussy customers , but thats the job.