I have thought that a Commando would be better with 8 valves. But there might not be much in it. A good 2-valve Jawa speedway engine is almost as quick a a 4-valve, The Norton Commando head is much better than a Triumph Bonneville head.
The Commando has tiny valves in comparison to other British motorcycles of that era. I have built an 8 valve Triumph I would be curious to see what they do for the 8 valve Norton.
I don't think Mr Canaga would mind my posting a link to the scanned 8 valve article that he posted a while back. Ken would you have the rest of the article? Rj
I would rather have a 70 BHP engine with a ton of torque than an 80 BHP engine with bugger-all torque. Rod Tingate had a Rickman 8 valve head on his Triumph 650 in the 70s. He said he could not tell the difference.
You can turn a high horsepower two-stroke into a head wind and feel it go backwards. That does not happen with an 850 Commando. Once the heavy crank is spinning high, nothing stops it. The gearbox is a torque converter. The Commando engine needs more gears to go fast. You climb up through the ratios, and if they are close, you don't lose much on each up-change. . The 1950s Gilera 4 had 7 gears and plenty of torque.
When I built my Seeley 850, I did not believe in the motor. I was wrong, it is exceptionally good. You need to see what it keeps up with - they are 1100cc and very fast.
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