Crankshaft balancing

Partly prompted by the fact that I couldn't remove the small bearing from the crankshaft (see earlier post) I decided a couple of weeks ago to get the crankshaft over to a specialist to get the bearing removed and to have it all balanced.  When I rebuilt my Vespa engine, I didn't bother to have the crankshaft checked or balanced, and I am rather regretting that now; the poor old thing rattles and vibrates like buggery - in fact after an hour of so in the saddle, I can get 'white finger' numbness! [as an aside, I think i have resolved to get the Vespa engine out again in the winter to get this sorted]

I took the crankshaft over to (the relatively local) PJ Motorcycle Engineers.  It was comforting to walk into their shop and see lots of performance engine bits and not a helmet, headlamp or bit of bling-trim in sight.  They looked like proper motorcycle engineers and appeared interested in my peculiar engine, and although it took them nearly 2 weeks they balanced my crankshaft and supplied 6 new bearings all for the very reasonable price of £45.  Apparently my crankshaft was 3 thou out of true (I have no idea how big a deal this is, but I see on their website that a single thou can make all the difference)  My understanding is that they were happy with the big-end bearing (though I couldn't work out if they had actually taken it apart)

Since getting the crankshaft and bearings back, I have been looking at the transmission shafts and bearings, and I've decided that I am not going to change those bearings this time round (they look and feel ok, and I am worried about how to extract the bearings in the blind holes without removing the end caps and causing all sorts of problems in replacing them)