OLD SKOOL 150-175
Our friend and back up driver for our charity world record tour of every motorway in England called by – remind me again why we had to drive on every motorway?
Pete brought a box of bits and said pick the best I want another stage 3 175 conversion! ‘Another? I said’ ‘yes you did one for me a few years ago and loved it, so I want another’!
Surprising really as everyone on the Motorway tour was either on a Race-Tour Reed kit or got one after they saw how good they were!
But he said he was quiet happy plodding around with the missis on the back with loads of power and didn’t want top speeds!
Ive done hundreds of these over the last 40 years. I could tune 2 or 3 of these a day.
Im now very much older and age creeps up on you without knowing and at the end of the 4 hours tuning I knew all about it, I could hardly hold the cylinder in one hand and use the other to tighten the vice.
I walked home utter and completely drained and collapsed in my chair to start again on another 5 hours on the new website!
When we checked the costings of old, we realised how much times have changed and costs have gone up. From now on these oddball tuned kits will be charged at an hourly rate.
Ive done a few kits for oddball motorcycle cast iron cylinders and they’ve paid the hourly rate and remember one costing £1800! All based on time!
This kit took 6 hours! Plus piston, rebore and manifold!
Anyway all in a days work!
And without the tooling and know how you can’t do these things!
This kit needed a conversion 57 – 62mm rebore, it needed a cylinder head machine, shape and compression test, 4 hours of tuning, honing, bead blasting the faces and it needed 2 stepped repair studs fitting!
And I won’t be bending over backwards to take these on! And blow me! That night an email – can you tune me a 175 cylinder ………. argh.
