Wheels & Brakes

As standard the Bullet comes fitted with a 7" twin leading shoe front brake and a 6" single rear. Once bedded in this arrangement is quite satisfactory for most requirements however if you plan on increasing the power output and/or carrying a load (luggage and/or a pillion) then you may want to look at increasing the stopping power of the bike.

Recently Royal Enfield produced a disk kit which can be ordered already on the bike or retro-fitted to a bike with drum front.

Although I did buy of these kits I was talked into working on the existing drum first before resorting to fitting the disk and therefore losing some of the "classic" look of the bike.

The two area's to look at on the existing drum is the brake shoe lining material and the brake cable.

Lining: (01/06/2004: UPDATE)

Previously I wrote about how I had changed the lining of the front brake shoes to a harder material. Well, this wasn't such a good idea after all. Turns out that it was too hard and never bedded in properly. It just glazed up and as a result the braking turned to rubbish.

Recent discussions with Ian Thompson, local Enfield expert has revealed some interesting information.

Seems he had been working on a chaps 350 Bullet which had just come from India. The shoes fitted to this bike were not genuine Enfield parts but were in fact "pirate" parts. They were so badly made that they didn't even sit squarely on the backing plate and as a result braking was horrible.

It appears that the lining being used by Royal Enfield in India nowadays is just the right compound, hard but not too hard. I have since fitted another set of new genuine shoes and now that they have bedded in the bike stops on a penny. No it won't do "stoppies" but then it is a drum after all !

It is still a good idea to get new shoes "radiused" so that they fit the drum properly.

Click HERE to go to the new page which talks about pirate parts for the Enfield.

Cable:

Although improved over the older cables, the current brake cables (and clutch cables for that matter) are still fairly soft and tend to stretch under load. The solution is to have a "heavy duty" cable made. For a reasonable sum a local cable company fabricated a cable with a stainless steel inner and heavier outer which is far more resistant to the inner stretching and the outer compressing. This results in a far firmer fell when you apply the brakes,  the lever doesn't keep moving back when the brakes are hard on.