Swinging arm cover plate

Well George, I would be surprised if they did not have washers. Its funny even though its probably 45 years ago that I sold my 54 ES2 I do remember the same fault but that could have been more down to poor maintenance on my part! John

Hi George ...originally the 2 bolts (2x on either side of the pivot ends) were of the "reduced head" type ....(one spanner size smaller) ...they had washers and yes the chain can touch touch the left hand side bolt heads although when off the stand and rider seated, and with the chain correctly adjusted, there should be running clearance.

When it came to replacing the bolts I used the normal sized bolts and washers. I considered that with the larger size bolt heads the chain might touch a fraction more but I would get an earlier warning of a slack chain and more importantly should the heads get abraded, this is better than the chain stradlling the bolt heads and wearing away the actual swinging arm pivot top surface which originally there are signs that this had occurred. So it seems this was a bit of a design error or oversight when Norton, in their urgent quest to have a swinging arm frame on the market simply tacked on the new suspension onto the old plunger frame without correctly doing the geometry calculations to allow for the downward bowing of the top chain run, especially on the over-run.....Les

PS...Just an extra point...if you have overlong shock absorbers fitted this will increase the likely-hood of the chain hitting the bolts...