Hi there everyone!
My name is Scottie and I'm new to the forum and LSR, but here's what I got!
A few months ago I was looking for a second motor to build up and drop in my '58 Enfield/Indian Trailblazer that I restored last year. Upon my searches, I ended up coming across a nearly complete '59 Chief for a smoking deal, I basically got the whole bike for the price I was hoping to pay for just the motor and trans. The motor had spun a crank bearing and the PO didn't want to invest the time or money into the bike. I made him an offer over the phone and the next thing I know I have a 7' crate full of bike parts showing up at work. Which brings me to my first serious question...... Has everyone on this forum told their significant others just what exactly they are building and what speeds they are attempting? My wife is clueless, and I have no idea how to tell her I plan on breaking 200mph on a 54 year old motorcycle. Anyways.....
I started researching doing a performance build on 1 of these Enfield 700cc twins since I picked up the Trailblazer last year. From what I've been able to research, the weakest links is the factory connecting rods and low valve lift coming from the heads/cams. The crank itself, from what I've read, is actually one of the beefiest motorcycle cranks ever built, particularly at the time of production. It is a 1-piece forged crank with massive 45mm main journals (which was unheard of at that time) with roller bearings. Unfortunately the connecting rods were made out of some experimental "pot metal" which were notorious for grenading under serious load which then gave these motors a bad reputation for having a weak bottom end, when in fact it was just crap connecting rods. That should not be an issue for me as I am going to have custom CP pistons and Carrillo rods made and then I am having the entire rotating assembly balanced at Falicon Cranks to 10,000 RPMs and plan on actually redlining somewhere between 8500-9000 RPMs. The pistons are going to need to be pretty damn big, somewhere around a 16:1 static compression ratio, so I can get dynamic compression up to around 13.5:1.
I sent the heads to Tom Lyons at Ace Cafe in Tennessee. He specializes in building performance Enfield Bullets and works closely with the guys at Mondello's. I'm hoping they will get a chance to flow the heads sometime this week and get the baseline flow reading. We are also talking about fabbing some custom built high ration rockers to get some more valve lift out of the heads, but were not exactly sure how to as there is limited room in the vlave cover/rocker area. But, based on rough figures, Tom is pretty confident that we can achieve what I'm hoping to accomplish, and that is to break 200mph on a single engine under 1000cc on a Royal Enfield bike. I know one gentleman did 205mph on an Enfield, but that was with 2 - 750cc Interceptor motors chained together in the same chassis. I would
REALLY like to hit 210mph so I can crush every Enfield record out there, plus earn the bragging rights to The World's Fastest Indian. Plan on reading a lot of "dumb" questions from me in the upcoming year or so as I put this beast together. As far as I know,
NO ONE has ever attempted to build an Enfield motor as wild as I am building this one. Hopefully a little luck will be on my side.
Scottie