Keith1069 said:
Somewhere I read that Steve Maney was getting 100 hp from a 920 but that's for racing with limited mileage.
The bike there is road registered. And roughly 108hp/l as Maney claims is already quite a lot for a two valve air cooled engine. IMHO that's just whishful thinking or the use of an engine dyno with a slightly flattering read-out.
I especially don't like sentences like this: "it is Totally redesigned with the latest engine technology as to the power claims." No, it's not. A bolt-up inline-twin crankshaft with two main bearings is antique. It was already antique when the Commando was introduced and we all know the reason why Norton continued to use antique technology.
Mind you he doesn't use titanium rods...
Well, because there is no need to use Titanium for Con rods, steel is a very good material for these items - especially if you use the material properties nicely to get rid of the small end bushing like JS does. I don't agree with all the things on JS' homepage - he should especially pay attention to piston wear, it's not a particularly good idea to run turned pistons - but this part I can fully agree with and that's the best way to design a conrod and piston.
and the Village cases look even thicker in some places. Village cranks are similar to a German tuner currently building some special performance parts in that they use bolt on balance weights.
Hartmut does it in a better way as he places the counterweights as close as possible to the mains and uses the flywheel as inertia mainly and not for balancing - both reduces the stress on the cranktrain and cases.
http://www.britishclassicbikes.de/image ... C03643.JPG
Makes far more sense then the village bike which is more like applying better production methods on better material to produce a better version of the original - and not by a proper redesign as he claims.
Don't get me wrong though, it's some nice work on details and a nice bike and certainly better than a 70ies Commando but far from being the one and only answer to all our Norton prayers. What I don't like is the bragging and disrespect to what others have achieved - and the boring claim of "latest engine technology". E.g. he claims that he finishes the pistons himself. If that's done on a std lathe as JS pistons are obviously done they're far from applying "latest engine technology".
Tim