$50 says Gregor has some sort of German/Italian, hand crafted,heavy duty, mil-spec bags to sort all his pieces during breakdown.
Now just to spite you he is going to upload pictures of festool and starrett stuff packed in used walmart bags...
Actually neither. I reuse the zillion McMaster Carr zip locks that I keep stuffed in a drawer. Despite the appearances I try to reuse as much as possible. The lead up to this project has been a near constant stream of parts though.
So I took the head to Baisley High Performance to have them open the exhaust and match the intake port to the intake. Ryan said that they've been super busy and they have a 1 year lead time on full engine builds but he was happy to help me out and squeezed me into the queue.
The intake was matched up perfectly and he did a bit of clean up on the port as well. I was told that the Kitaco exhaust port was the same on all their heads regardless of displacement and needed to be opened up for the larger engine and Ryan said he'd look at it and possibly make the port D shaped.
Much to my surprise when I went to pick up the head he said he didn't want to touch the exhaust port. He spoke to his dad and they both thought that the smaller port was an advantage. I was confused as the stock head (100cc on the right) has an opviously bigger exhaust port but Dan remarked that it was a pretty bad design. "Most of the time on these sort of small heads like CB160 race bikes we're actually welding the intakes up to make the port smaller. You want the higher velocity of the smaller port. It's up to you but if you're planning on racing this you want the throttle response that the small port is going to give you."
I get the theory but it's hard to wrap my head around an engine being 50% larger with an exhaust port that is almost 50% smaller. I asked about header size and length and they did some quick calculations and said that I should run 1" straight out of the head for 6" before turning and for 8" total, 14" at 1.25 and then finish at 1.5" for a total length of 40"
Since there's no specs, no baseline or anything else I'm going to go with as close to that as I can until I can get the bike on a dyno. I'm going to make the sections slip fits with springs so that I can easily lengthen or change them.
Another point which was interesting was when I asked if the port should be blended to the larger exhaust tube, "No, you want that step there - you want to do anything you can to disrupt any reverse pulse to the head so the step helps that"
I have a lot to think about but the exhaust will be fun no matter what. There's no chance it will work great out of the box but after the bike has been run on the dyno we can start to figure out what works and doesn't.
This is Kyle - he works for a company that restores DC-3's and was following me on IG and messaged me to see if he could donate paint to the project. He suggested silver metal flake and black and he had me at flake. I have a thing for metal flake. I've toned down my love of flames but flake is something I just adore so I was all about that. We bounced some ideas around and I shared with him my concept for a design that I thought would look cool and be a subtle nod to the bikes purpose. So between our combined ideas we came up with a plan.
Kyle also saw the seat pan and asked what I was doing about that. I said I had no time for a seat and was just going to do some glued down foam. "Well, I can do upohlstry too - you want me to make you a seat?" Seriously? So the seat will be some diamond stitched leather from a DC-3 interior restoration which honestly is about as cool as I can imagine.
It's a little scary to hand off the seat and tank to someone you've only just met and haven't seen anything from but I tend to trust people and my gut. Besides, my only option was going to be rattle cans on the driveway. It's got to be better than that.
So with the tank, seat and subframe gone with Kyle I pulled the engine and set about welding the tacked up mounts.
And with the frame welded up I headed down to
TFC Plating to drop off the frame for nickel. They use an electroless nickel coating and while it won't damage the frame they said that the welds can sometimes be porous or not perfect and that can affect the quality of the nickel. Well, you pays your money and you take your chances so I'm crossing my fingers.
Paint and the frame should both be done by Friday. That gives me maybe 5 days to assemble the engine and bike and account for mistakes or errors. It's a long shot that it will work first go but I'm doing everything I can to make sure I have every nut, bolt, gasket and part I'll need to put the bike together. I'm basically out of time to order any parts after Saturday so fingers crossed I didn't miss anything.
Gregor
