* One Top Fuel dragster outfitted with a 500 cubic-inch replica Dodge (actually Keith Black, etc) Hemi engine makes more horsepower (8,000 HP) than the first 4 rows at NASCAR’s Daytona 500.

* Under full throttle, a dragster engine will consume 11.2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully loaded Boeing 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate but with 25% less energy being produced.

* A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to merely drive the dragster’s supercharger.

* With 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition. Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lockup at full throttle.

* At the stoichio metric 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture for nitro methane the flame front temperature measures 7050 degrees F.

* Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases.

* Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. Which is typically the output of an electric arc welder in each cylinder.

* Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After 1/2 way thru the run, the engine is ‘dieseling’ from compression and the glow of the exhaust valves at 1400 degrees F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow.

* If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with enough sufficient force to blow the cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half !!

* Dragsters reach over 300 MPH +… before you have completed reading this sentence.

* In order to exceed 300 MPH in 4.5 seconds, a dragster must accelerate an average of over 4 G’s. In order to reach 200 MPH well before reaching half-track, at launch the acceleration approaches 8 G’s.

* Top Fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light!

* Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.

* The redline is actually quite high at 9500 RPM.

* THE BOTTOM LINE: Assuming all the equipment is paid for, the pit crew is working for free, & NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run will cost an estimated $1,000 per second.

0 to 100 MPH in .8 seconds (the first 60 feet of t he run)
0 to 200 MPH in 2.2 seconds (the first 350 feet of the run)
6 g-forces at the starting line (nothing accelerates faster on land)
6 negative g-forces upon deployment of twin ‘chutes at 300 MPH

An NHRA Top Fuel Dragster accelerates quicker than any other land vehicle on earth . . quicker than a jet fighter plane . . . quicker than the space shuttle….or snapping your fingers !!

The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.420 seconds for the quarter-mile (2004, Doug Kalitta). The top speed record is 337.58 MPH as measured over the last 66′ of the run (2005, Tony Schumacher).

Let’s now put this all into perspective:

Imagine this………..You are driving a new $140,000 Lingenfelter twin-turbo powered Corvette Z-06. Over a mile up the road, a Top Fuel dragster is staged & ready to ‘launch’ down a quarter-mile s trip as you pass. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the ‘Vette hard, on up through the gears and blast across the starting line & pass the dragster at an honest 200 MPH…. The ‘tree’ goes green for both of you at that exact moment.

The dragster departs & starts after you. You keep your foot buried hard to the floor, and suddenly you hear an incredibly brutally screaming whine that seares and pummels your eardrums & within a mere 3 seconds the dragster effortlessly catches & passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter-mile away from where you just passed him. Think about it – from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 MPH…..and it not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the planet when he passed you within a mere 1320 foot long race !!!!

That, my friends…..is acceleration.

Some of the mods are a round Mikuini VM carb. You’ll never see one of these on a newer bike because everyone has been brain washed by the Harley dealers. Fact is these carbs have won an awful lot of races over the years and are one of the most tunable carbs out there. Of course there is a top secret mod done to it and it is sized to the engine ports and air flow demand. It’s not intended for top end balls to the wall riding, but it is very good at low and mid range where you do most of your riding. It has no problem with high speed, but the way it is sized you wouldn’t be racing with it. The mentality of almost every shop out there is to sell you a racing carburetor, usually on the big side, and you can’t expect to get good mileage out of most carbs like that.

One of the newest and best modifications are the plasma discharge Pulstar Spark Plugs. Man these babies work. I was searching the web one day and read about these Fire Storm spark plugs, which claimed to put out a plasma discharge and by doing so get you better performance and mileage. They were and still are to this day quite elusive.These Pulstar Plugs kept popping up, but their web site made it really unclear as to whether or not they actually were any different. Fast forward eight months and Jason down the street tells me about some guy coming around selling these plugs. The plugs turn out to be these Pulstar Plugs. The spark these plugs put out is over one million watts. When you have a spark that is that hot,… low and behold it is called a plasma discharge! (at least that’s how I understand it…) The holy grail of spark plugs has been found!

So next I needed electricity and lots of it. That 10 amp generator hanging off the front of the cam chest wasn’t going to cut it. I was throwing up to 200 amps at the hydrogen cell on the bench. That wasn’t going to cut it either, but as time marched on people were doing quite a bit and some good advances are always being made toward coming up with cells that work. In the mean time I still need electricity. Looking around the shop I spot a 60 amp Ford truck alternator. Perfect! Even better is that it can be swapped out for a 100 amp unit if I decided to turn up the juice!
Next was figuring out how to drive it and where to mount it. Once again the light bulb comes on and I decide who needs an oil tank and why is that clutch hub just spinning and working only the clutch??! Then how do you drive it….belt…gear….or chain? After a meeting of the minds with all the head alien engineers….chain it is! Chain is simple, reliable, easy and offers options of changing the drive ratio. Gear would have been best and Indian seems to have used a gear/belt combo to drive a generator off the clutch hub many moons ago.

First glimpse of the new hydrogen dry cell. It looks to be built pretty well. It’s heavy. I need to figure out how to mount it. First I will bench test it. It is supposed to put out enough gas for a V8 if I remember correctly. We shall see. It would be great if things worked according to plan. When ever you experiment with things you should always be prepared to be let down. Unfortunate but true. Although when things go well it’s quite a good sense of achievement.

Mike, MO as I knew him, aka “the hammer” was one of the first people I meet when I moved here to Texas in 1998. He had just got out of jail and needed some help with work and even though I just moved here and business was slow we made a deal.

When the cops weren’t fuckin with him he was a man of his word and showed up on time. He was one of the few people I ever had work with me that was an asset to the business. He really helped out and helped me get my business going and was a true friend. You don’t meet many people like him.

He was riding a 105″ kick only evo in a hardtail frame, 3″open belt, with a jockey shift. A real motorcycle by all means. He was hard on it like everything else he rode.

Unfortunately on the morning of April 10th, on his way to where he worked at the time someone shot him in the back. Chicken shit muther fuckers.

Ride in Peace Mike.

Sick of all the usual bike rallies, Kirk has really gone out of his way to put on a different kind of motorcycle bash.

Check it out here!

Support Ron Paul, Freedom and the United States Constitution and get a Oil Filter for $3.00!!

Just stop by tuesday through friday 3:00pm to 7:00pm with a Ron Paul sticker on your bike and get an oil filter for $3.00.

( If for some reason you can’t stop by with those hours, email me and we’ll set something up. )

Any Year Harley-Davidson ONLY.

1 oil filter per bike, per 3000 miles! Ride as much as you want, get as many oil filters as you need!

Oil filters by HiFlo Filtro. One of the largest filter companies there is. They manufacture OEM filters for many large car and motorcycle companies.

Hats off to Miles for making me think of the oil filter deal! It’s great to see that people still care about this country perhaps more than their paint job!

Then along came the “maintenance free” batteries. These were still good batteries, but the price went up to $45.00. No more having to check the water or have acid ruining the chrome and paint. Not a bad trade off for the extra money. They were still reliable and generally lasted about two years.  The shop you purchased it from still had to fill and charge it properly, meaning they came what is called “dry”, no electrolyte (acid) in them. Batteries that are stored dry have a very long shelf life and as long as it was filled and charged only after being sold, it was “fresh”, meaning that it wasn’t sitting around sulfating because it was filled with acid.

Then around 1998 or so the battery companies decided we weren’t smart enough to fill these batteries ourselves and they started coming filled and generally if you got a real fresh battery now it was already 3 months old. The majority of them are more like around 6 months old, and it was more than possible to order batteries that were already sitting around in a warehouse for a year! Of course none of these batteries were ever charged other than when the factory initially filled and activated them. The price also jumped to around $75.00.  Another feature was they would go dead if they sat over winter and you would now be buying a new battery every spring.  What they did was take a good product and figure out how to make it expensive, unreliable junk. Back then you actually had a date code on the side of the battery telling you in plain english when the battery was filled and activated. With in the last 3 or 4 years you now can no longer figure the date code out and if you call and ask the company they will just act stupid and deny any date code. Yuasa any way.

So as of the past 2 years there is only one reliable battery made any more, and it is manufactured by the same people that make the batteries for Harley-Davidson. They are grey in color instead of black and the terminals are a little bit different than the factory and require the use of a spacer, included when you buy the battery. The dimensions of the battery are also just a hair bigger then that of the factory batteries, sometimes resulting in having to modify a battery cover. There also generally $135.00 plus tax, title and environmental fees! They do last about 4 years though, that is if you know how to take care of them.

Engine blueprinting is the fine art of going through an engine and putting things to your specifications. Stock “crate” engines run, and you can get a really good stock engine, sometimes, but for every good engine there are probably 10 not-so-good ones!. There are thousands of engines being built to a specification, but being an assembly line job, things could be set up better. It would be virtually impossible to build thousands of engines with perfect clearances and other measurements, and keep costs reasonable. Why do you think you pay so much for exotic engines?

It is because of the time spent fussing with everything. Time is money. You get what you pay for. On crate engines bearing clearances could be tighter on one and looser on another, same goes for piston and any other clearances. Differences in castings can result in oddities that are perhaps not so desirable.

When you blueprint an engine you spend the time that is not available on an assembly line, to make sure that the clearances are the way you want them. For people who run their engine hard, you would put a little extra clearance in certain parts and for people who are more interested in longevity you would set things up tighter. You can take the time to make sure each combustion chamber measures out exactly equally. You spend time doing a valve job properly, instead of a stock “get it out the door” job, and so on. You can rebuild an engine without blueprinting and balancing. That really doesn’t happen here. I have to do at least something to make it better than stock. The rebuild you get through the Harley factory is an “out the door” type job that very little effort is put into as far as quality.

Balancing is the fine art of weighing all the rotating and reciprocating parts of an engine, sticking those weights into a balance formula, and then drilling the counter weight area on a crankshaft in order to reduce vibration. By reducing vibration, which can be considered like the engine parts fighting against one another, you extend the life of the engine, especially the bearings which take the brunt of the beating. Balancing, like blueprinting, can be done to various degrees. You can match all the weights up perfect before actually balancing the crankshaft, or you can just weigh everything. A gram here or there isn’t going to make a big difference in most engines and the time required to get everything “perfect” may not be worth the added expense. Normally with today’s modern manufacturing process’s and high tech CNC machinery, parts are real close to start with when it comes to tolerances.

With it’s hemispherical combustion chamber and over head valves, perhaps one of the biggest performance improvements over the Panhead engine was the new intake ports and manifold. Gone was the 90 degree bend the fuel/air mixture had to make before hitting the back of the intake valve and entering the combustion chamber. This added up to much better volume metric efficency, or the ability of the cylinder to fill its self with a fresh charge. The re-designed rocker boxes housed rockers and shafts more similar to that of the Knucklehead engine. From 1966 to 1969 the lower ends were basically the same as the 1958 and up Panheads.

While on the topic of Shovelheads and lower ends I am going to clear up some terminology I have a pet peeve about. It seems a lot of know-it-alls call the early Shovelhead engines Pan/Shovels. This is incorrect. A real Pan/Shovel is a Panhead motor that has had the modern Shovelhead top end fit to it. The cylinder base pattern of the big twins has been the same since the U series Flatheads and Knuckle engines. When you wanted to go fast or your Panhead top end had just seen better days and you were tired of fixing it, you would fit the Shovel top end to it. 1966 to 1969 Shovel engines are referred to as either Flatside Shovels or Generator Shovels. Flatside came from the cam cover that was flat since the last Panhead in 1965, and Generator obviously referred to the fact that those years were the last of the generators. That brings us to the next improvement.

In 1970 the Shovel received a new lower end and an alternator. The cam cover was no longer flat and shaped like a peanut. It was now cone shaped, hence the term “nose cone”. This simplified things inside the cam chest. The distributor gear and idler gear for the generator was gone. The points, aka “timer” was now housed in the end of that funky new nose cone under the points cover. The timer was now driven directly off the end of the camshaft. The only draw back to this was that now the advance weights needed attention quite often because they wear out quickly when they spin vertically, as opposed to when they spun around horizontally in the early style timer, known also as the distributor.

The advance weight dilemma was solved ten years later when the factory introduced the all new mysterious “black box” ignition. By golly your shovelhead didn’t have points or the old prestolite electronic ignition any more, It now had a pickup and steel cup for a trigger mechanism, and a brain!! It was more like it had a mind of it’s own, because the early units used to have this habit of over heating and your once trusty shovelhead would leave you on the side of the road, sometimes permanently, sometimes just until it cooled off and decided to start working again. I’ve personally converted many back to good ‘ol points, and later on after market electronic ignition units that got rid of that damn box.

The first thing to start with here with will be ignition coils. More specifically, voltage ratings. When someone starts talking about high voltage coils and what they are rated at, the advertised voltage is really “peak open voltage”. For example, back in the day of breaker point triggered ignitions, the average peak voltage was around 18kv, or 18,000 volts. Most high performance coils boast 35kv output as a performance improvement over the standard 18kv output. This is true to a point.

Voltage is the electrical pressure that is needed to push the electricity across the spark plug gap, there by creating the spark to ignite the air/fuel charge in the cylinder. The amount of voltage needed depends on how rich the air/fuel mixture is and how much compression is built up in the cylinder. The leaner the mixture and/or the higher the compression, the more voltage it takes to push the electrical charge across the spark plug gap. Keep that in mind as we go back to talking about coil voltage.

So peak coil voltage is simply that, the maximum voltage the coil can output. This is not the real time voltage being used in the ignition system when your engine is running. Average voltage in a modern motorcycle, that is running, is from 6kv to approximately 15kv. Modern fuel injected bikes run pretty lean air/fuel mixtures so they need good high voltage to avoid misfires. So what the high performance coil provides is actually more “headroom” by being able to output a higher voltage when necessary, up to 35kv, but in reality they are normally only outputting around 12kv.  So your really not getting a hotter spark all the time, you only get it when it is needed.

The performance part would be that under hard conditions you end up with a much more reliable spark, when the need for more voltage at the plug goes up. The high performance coil has up to 35kv to push the electricity across the plug. That gets rid of misfires the standard 18kv coil would be responsible for when it could not output enough voltage for the higher demand to push the spark across the plug gap. My guess is that the newest bikes already have coils that output 30kv. So I’m sure someone makes a coil that is a little better, perhaps a little higher voltage and faster rise time, but not much.

CLUE!!—->Some of the biggest misinformation is when some one tells you that you can’t use a modern high voltage, electronic ignition on your old motorcycle, because you will burn a hole in the piston. I hear this all the time, including from companies selling ignitions! Sad. If you read and understood the paragraph above, you will quickly notice that a spark is only as hot as it needs to be. Ignition timing and/or lean conditions are responsible for the majority of holes in pistons.

Other performance coil advantages would be a faster rise, or build-up time. This is the amount of time it takes a coil to build up a full charge. The faster the engine is turning, the less time a coil has to build up a charge between discharges.

The final advantage of a performance coil would be physical size and configuration. That’s just the way the coil is manufactured for a specific purpose. Pretty straight forward. One thing to watch out for is that the smaller a coil is, the hotter, temperature wise, it will run and that might lead to it having a short life. Not always the case, but something to consider.

Next up…. Trigger Units and Processors. A set of points is nothing more than a simple mechanical trigger device that lets the coil fire when it’s supposed to. Back in the day when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous, You actually had to twist the left hand grip on a Harley to retard the ignition for going up hills and starting. You the rider was the advance unit for the ignition system! They used that all the way until 1965 when they finally decided to get fancy with an automatic advance timer and let some fly weights do the work for you.  They would hold the ignition timing retarded at idle and let it advance as the engine picked up rpm’s, or speed. The pull or weight of the advance flyweight springs would gradually do this giving you an “advance curve”

Then in 1975 came the Prestolite electronic ignition. The prestolite unit was the first “hall effect” system used by Harley-Davidson. Just like points, it used advance weights. They were reasonably reliable, although quite cantankerous in many ways. I can think of at least one bike I service that still has one of these units in action and working well.

1979 brought about “the Mysterious Black Box”! Unsure if it wasn’t a commie liberal plot by then president Jimmy “where are my liver pills” Carter, the mysterious black box, with the help of bronze valve guides, left many a Harley rider with a new bike stuck on the side of the road. The only thing to make the day worse would be having nothing more than a six pack of “Billy Beer” to drink, while waiting for your friend to come with his pick up truck!

The mystery of the black box unraveled. So the black box is a two part ignition system, so to speak. Part one is located in the nose cone of the engine, driven off the end of the camshaft like all the other Harley ignitions since 1970. It’s a steel trigger cup and a pick up. Like the prestolite it too is a hall effect switch. Unlike points or the prestolite system there is no advance mechanism. So part two, the advance, is actually located in the black box, which is really a processor. There is an advance curve built into it electronically and it gets some help from a vacuum switch connected to the intake manifold. The switch is known as the VOES. Vacuum Operated Electrical Switch. It’s either open or closed (grounded) depending on manifold pressure.

So the rotor cup spins and the pick up sends a signal to the box. From the signal the box knows how fast the engine is turning and when to fire the coil. The advance is programed into the box and has an advance curve according to engine speed. To make the engine more efficient, the VOES tells the box when the engine is under load and aids in adjusting the advance curve allowing the engine to pull harder and avoid spark knock, aka detonation.

In 1995 things began to get more complicated. The ignition was now triggered by a pick up off of the crankshaft flywheel rim, the left one to be exact. The Crank Position Sensor as it is known, tells the ECM crankshaft degrees of the front piston and engine speed. Up until 2000 you also had a Cam Position Sensor. The cam position sensor tells the system when to fire the coil and front or rear cylinder. The advance curve is programed into the ECM and is modified by the Manifold Absolute Pressure, or MAP sensor. The MAP sensor took the place of the VOES. So now you have four things in order to fire the spark plug.
That old point system is looking pretty good now, ain’t it?

Last but not least…and my personal favorite…the Magneto! Out of the factory it was only used on Sportsters for general production. The Fairbanks-Morse magneto is the most reliable ignition there is. Magnetos are self contained AC voltage units. Meaning that it produces it’s own electricity to get the job done. If it has any disadvantages they would be low cranking voltage and the fact that it has no advance curve. It works the same as the early distributors. Also like anything else that produces electricity they rob a couple ponies from the engine. Magnetos are not for the meek. On the up side because they produce their own electricity you don’t need a battery and if your charging system quits your engine will run just fine. Another advantage is that the faster they spin the more voltage they put out. While all other ignitions start to degrade at higher speeds, a magneto does just the opposite. Because of the magneto’s design they are easy to single fire also. Meaning they can fire each cylinder independently.

Stock, aka, factory magneto companies were: Fair-Banks Morse, the most common, early Harley’s and Indian motorcycles used Edison/Splitdorf and there were racing units manufactured by a company called Wico.

Common to this weather is the ping, knock or gurgling sound your engine makes, especially under load, like as in taking off from a stop. The knocking, if caused by fuel, is one of two things. Pre-ignition or Detonation. Almost the same kind of noise, two different things though.

Pre-ignition is when the fuel mixture ignites before the spark plug fires. The knock is the result of the two flame fronts, or kernels, colliding. This is usually caused by a hot spot in the combustion chamber. Could be a glowing piece of carbon built up on the piston, a sharp edge from a casting, or even valve pocket on the piston, or even in extreme cases, the end of the spark plug glowing.

Detonation on the other hand is when fuel droplets that didn’t vaporize well, get hot on the outside of the droplets and cause it to explode. Low octane fuel, high compression or maybe the squish part of the combustion chamber isn’t set up tight enough. The squish part of the combustion chamber is there for that purpose, and should be between .060″ to as close as .040″. The tighter the better, but you have to make sure the piston doesn’t hit the head.

The grade of fuel you run depends on if the engine can handle vaporizing it well so you get a good burn out of it,  using the fuels energy to power the bike. There is no more power in fuel from grade to grade.  Premium fuel vaporizes better than regular grade. The middle grade is a big waste of money. When Gasoline is manufactured at the refinery, they only produce two grades, premium and regular. That middle grade is a blend of the two grades, mixed at the pump, only the mix is 30% premium and 70% regular, not 50/50 mix of the two.