classic motorcycle forum

If you ever have to (God forbid) centre the conrod in this way again, stick a piece of masking tape on the face of the rod and measure and mark the centre line using vernier calipers.

Seems universal. Now these old bikes and the old boys who "knew" them recede ever further into history, the amount of published BS seems to grow year on year.
Even worse, BS when published, then becomes the truth when later Googled.

I don't recall ever seeing a BSPT thread on a British bike, they've all been BSP as far as I can recall.
US bikes used them a lot though.

Wicks don't always seem to be fitted to mags, same as the little felt effort that used to be in distributors years ago.
 As the post above says, a tiny bit of grease on the face cam or cam ring is more than enough.

Yes and no. The final colour usually depended on what the paint shop foreman had in the vats that day, and nothing to do with an advertising pamphlet printed possibly months before.
Indian Red is a perfect example; Indian afficionados endlessly obsess over this, but the reality is it's just what old Billy-Bob and Cyrus had available to use.

Let's face it post-war British motorcycle electrics were never world leaders.

They were "of their time" but don't go telling my old girls that they weren't world leaders, as they all work fine even though they range from 90-70 years old.
Then again, they've shared shed space with Spanish, French, Italian and US bikes of a similar age, and their electrics were pretty much identical in operation and reliability.
There was a German TWN for a while, and that had more up-market electrics but cost a more up-market price when new.
They didn't last long..

These bikes were sold as cheapest-of-the-cheap commuter bikes, and if the battery went flat occasionally then just charge it up.
No-one expected anything else before the Honda C50 came along.

they originally gave but wangling a replacement in and out of that headlight clip every month or so would drive me nuts.

You and everyone else, so after the one BSA supplied (if they ever did) went up the swanee doubtless they were never replaced. Just park off-road or where a copper isn't going to visit.
If someone was poor enough to be riding a little two-stroke in the 1950s, wasting money on dry-cells would have been well down the list of necessary expenditures.