These are the bearings I have used
The second hand bottom yoke I had, arrived with the bottom race still attached.
Removing it was as simple as tapping it with a hammer and drift.
The original bike doesn’t come with the little gold coloured dust seals, so they don’t appear in the Haynes manual.
It didn’t take long to figure out where they go, and I visualised it by putting the parts onto the stem in the right order.
In an ideal world, I’d have a metal tube of the correct diameter to go over the stem, and hammer the bottom taper race into place… but this is not an ideal world.
CAREFUL tapping with a drift saw the bearing driven into place, checked by seeing if I could insert a feeler gauge under it.
Frame
Ideally, I’d use a press to insert the bearing faces into the frame, but in the absence of such a thing, I used the rear wheel spindle, some old ball races, which I ground a fraction off so they wouldn’t get stuck in the seats, and a selection of spacers and washers. Using this Heath Robinson contraption, I was able to pull the bearing face into its seat in the bottom of the frame.
It didn’t quite seat, possibly as a result of my weakened aged arms, or maybe I was just overcautious with tightening the nut.
It was an easy job to finish it off with a hammer and drift, now that i had the slightly undersized old bearing races to use as something to hammer on.
