hi i'm paul brodie we're back in the shop we're still working on excelsiors i'm not actually
doing anything but we're giving a slideshow so mitch is behind the camera thank you mitch
i'm going to talk more about the excelsior motor we're going to talk about how the cylinder heads
got made working on the barrels and the cam shafts so if you're interested in motors
let's go for a little journey back in time most of this was happening back in
about 2006 that kind of a time so we'll get on with the slideshow thanks for hanging out in the
shop last episode we left off i didn't have any heads any cylinder heads so we're going
to talk about heads and how they got made i'd never ever made cylinder heads in my life when
i worked in a machine shop when i was a kid after leaving high school i did a lot of valve jobs and
working on hedge changing valve guides things like that but to actually make a head out of nothing
never done that before this is what i did i've got the barrel here i made up uh i don't know what you
call it a fixture that came up i knew the included valve angle of the two valves inlet and exhaust
so i mounted a plate to hold the valve stem in the groove where the keeper goes and you can
see here i've got i made up some valve seats i've got spacers got the spark plugs the valves and the
valve guides so this is looking on the side now and you can see how i've got both of the valves in
what this is on the bottom i got this laser cut and it's made out of eighth inch mild steel and
it's the shape of the head gasket so that's got a firmness that i can weld onto the post this
is how deep the cylinder head is i i already knew that these are the exhaust ports so i've got some
valve springs there so i'm figuring it out as i go this is the inside of the combustion chamber now
inlet valve is larger than the exhaust and there's the spark plug thread so you can see it on on top
now i've got the spark plugs in not sure why see the r that's the rear head that's the front head
so the front head is not the same as the rear head the exhaust port comes out here on the
rear head and the exhaust port comes out here on the front head and the inlet ports
they're kind of y-shaped and the cob sits out here it's kind of marked up here this is the right side
of the crank case you've got the bevel drive and i'm just looking to see how things match up
because there's going to be a cam support here which allows the bevel drive to bolt on
that has to be a pretty secure connection there here's the mesh that i talked about earlier when
i discussed the bevel drive so i've i've filled it in with a bit of mesh the mesh is going to hold
the bondo so i can work on the shape these heads will never work but i need to get the shape to
know where the ports are and things like that what the actual head looks like on the outside i don't
know at this point i'm just working with what i have so i've taken away the plates on either side
i've made a support that comes up i've taken a piece of rod i've bent it and i've
got these two half pieces of tube you can see it here and here and then while that support was
was still on there i used some bondo you see the bondo there that's what holds this and once
once the valves got held in place then i can take off the two side supports so it's
a step at a time here's the exhaust port now i've got the exhaust port on there this is the is the
bronze exhaust port nut this is a neat project because never done anything like this before and
just one step at a time here's a carb that i got loaned it didn't actually get used on the bike but
it was good for the size of of the manifold here you can you see there's a slight angle i think
it's it's 10 degrees so this is the inlet port and these nuts are what holds the manifold onto
the intake stubs i'll call them the stubs okay i've got the manifold on the bike it's it's in
place so intake manifolds are in exhaust manifolds so this is the rear head here obviously that's the
front cylinder i've got a header pipe on there now and i'm sure that the other header pipe's on there
what i need to do now is to work on the cam towers so here we are i've taken some i think one
quarter inch cold rolled flat bar i've welded on some tubes these are going to hold the bearings
because the camshaft runs between this is the right side this is the left side this
is also the engine mount up here there's going to be a hole drilled
these get mounted on a face plate and centered up i bore the hole and now you can see it's
up on the engine where these bolts go i'm sure i got a spacer between this side and the other side
that's where the camshafts run overhead cam and i got both headers on now i've got the bearing in
there and you can see i've got a mock-up camshaft there's the end of the cam shaft right there and
i'm boring it out to hold hold the bearing i think this is another one and if you look there's a red
sharpie there's a shape there and this shows you the shape of the left side there's the hole
and a bolt goes through there and holds this onto the frame so this is the top
engine mount on top of the cam towers and i'm starting to get a shape i took some rod and i
i bent it that's where the spark plug goes on on each side this is the right side cam
tower it's got a completely different shape this shape here is what holds the bevel drive
and it's also got an arch on the bottom this is another shot i've got a valve spring sitting there
actually two valve springs so it's coming along see there's bondo here and bondo there
i'm starting to work on what the shape looks like for the casting because these will be cast
out of aluminum see this rod that goes across there i've figured out where that's going to go
that is that's going to be the rocker shaft so i've tic tacked on a little piece of steel here
because that's where the rocker shaft is going to go it's going to connect the left
side to the right side it's going to be one two three four you can see the cam shafts there
let's just mock up i got very light valve springs on here these are springs out of
a carburetor because when you want to turn over the motor it's very easy i had to start working
on the rocker arms because i i needed those for the mark-up motor so you can see i've taken
pieces of cold rolled flat bar i've tic tac them together got four of them they're basically all
the same and they and they dovetail with each other that's how they fit together then this
is later on i did up a autocad drawing i went to i went to southern cross machine shop talked
to leon and he machined these he cnc'd these out of 4340 which is a beautifully hard steel
and did a really nice job on these rocker arms never had a problem with the rocker
arms themselves i've got a a piece of aluminum i think it's four inch four and a half inch what i'm
doing is to making more fins for the mock-up cylinder head you can see i'm started to make
some some grooves those actually ended up going in quite far and there it is i've drilled four holes
so those four holes go on top of that i'm going to bore this out and then i hack saw it
in the middle of the hole so what happens is it adds to the fin so i've put on a segment here
that's one segment that's the second segment and you can you can see there how it's
those are fins there i still need to do the third segment and the fourth segment and
that's the fin after it's put on so you can see how the head is starting to to take
shape i've welded on some on some tubes here that's where the rocker shafts go into
and i still have the light valve springs on that those are just off a carburetor
i still have to shape the inside of the combustion chamber you can see the mesh
there and that's kind of the top view i got head gaskets made this is made out of a sheet of copper
i found a local guy who i think did water jet cutting i don't think you can laser cut
copper sheet because it conducts the heat too fast and i think the thickness was
0.042045 something like that so i got a bunch of head gaskets made they turned out
quite nicely this is the finish of the markup head so you can see i've done i've got the outside
shape i put bondo down there these are the fins i added and you can see the bondo inside the port
so this is about the time when i got contacted by kevin holland
he's a pattern maker he lives down in ammo i think ammo is missouri and he'd been watching
what i was doing on my website and he wanted to be a part of the excelsior project so
he very graciously and kindly offered to help out with the pattern making on the cylinder heads
and the cylinders because i didn't have anybody lined up for that so i paid for materials and he
did all the cnc work i sent him down the heads that was a bit nerve-wracking because i only
had these two mock-up heads i didn't have any backups and he made up a drawing off those heads
and this is his autocad version his version was more up to date than mine there's another
side view of it this is the spark plug hole here and then he started working on the patterns this
is the cylinder head it's upside down that's part of what gets cut off you need that much
mass so that when it shrinks it pulls the molten aluminum down from this there's a name for that
i'm not quite sure of it anymore this is working on the pattern for the cylinder
there's the cylinder from here to here that's the excess again and this is the part of the cylinder
head i'm not quite sure how this works but this piece fits into here and locks somehow so he did
an amazing amount of work so i'm i'm very grateful for how he helped out this is making the pattern
for the cylinder head you can see what size of i think this is some kind of a special plastic
you can see the size of the block so i spent quite a bit of money on materials and then finally
i got my cylinder heads so that was a big cause for celebration because for some reason i waited
months for this whole process to happen so there's a batch of unmachined cylinder heads this is the
barrels and this is a fixture i made up it holds the barrel and on the top is some drill jigs
and that's how i put the four holes in into the top of the cylinder this is a batch of six
i've got the studs in you can see how the bores come down a little bit so they need to be final
board and then they get sent out for nicosil nicosil liner i want it to be high tech this is
working on the cylinder heads every time you have a casting and you want to do something you usually
have to make up a fixture so there's a fixture here and there's a thread here and there's an
allen screw that bolts right through to hold the head because you can't hold the head any other way
i've got my radius tool and the lathe that's the 3 16 radius and it faces it and it also
does the inside of the bore of the of the combustion chamber to match up with the size
of the head gasket so that's what's going on there there's some heads that have been faced
and i've i've cleaned up the combustion chamber they have no valve guides yet no seats and they
need to be machined on the inlet and the exhaust this is a front head and that's the exhaust port
so because there's a front head in the rear head i need four fixtures to work on the ports this
is a counterweight because the head has to spin in the lathe and so if i don't have the counterweight
it's out of balance you can see the tool bit there i'm facing the exhaust port right there
and when you switch on the lathe this is action shot i'm actually machining it down to put a
thread on there that head is spinning around at a few hundred rpm working on the camshafts so
these are the bearings which go into the cam support there are circlips to hold the bearings in
this is some a blank i call it a cam blank so the lobes get made on these here and one of the
exhaust of the the cams goes clockwise and the other one goes anti-clockwise i can't remember
which one's which now so i had to figure out the cam timing so what i did i made a camshaft which
comes apart this is an allen screw right here and this is the shaft this is where the bearings go
here and here and see see there's a lobe there and so the lobe goes into the allen screw and
i can bolt it together on the cam profile what i used was an early sportster because
the early sportsters were pretty lumpy we're talking like early 60s i believe that they were
pretty lumpy cams and they were a rollercam as well a rollercam has a different profile
than a regular cam so i put it together and i've assembled it and i've got
a dial indicator and i'm not sure i'm not sure what's going on here this looks like
a sprocket off a bicycle but there's got to be a degree wheel somewhere maybe down on the case
i can't remember what was going on there at that time and so i i figured out where i needed those
lobes to be and to to make really incremental adjustments i made up a fixture here so
this piece of aluminum holds one lobe and this holds the other lobe so what i could do is to
loosen off the allen screw and this fixture part got hauled with a c-clamp and then i could move
this other lobe incrementally while this lobe stayed in place that's how i figured out the
cam timing i didn't read it in a book or anywhere i just figured it out this is a
bunch of of the blanks and they got machined up i forget what metal it is but it's a nice
very hard metal well not that hard because it had to get machined and then after
after this i tried cutting away the excess of the the lobe so it could be ground i couldn't
do it on my mill it just wanted to chatter and move so i sent it back to leon and leon
did that cnc and then i think the cams got hardened and then they got it sent
out for out for grinding i think we left on eight to ten thou for where the bearings go
and then after that it got sent out and the lobes were ground so it's quite a process making your
own cams out of nothing this is what it looks like with the rocker arms the rocker arms are
basically all set to be installed these are the rocker shafts on the adjusters i used honda i
think it was a six mil fine thread so those are just stalk honda on the rollers i used a regular
bearing and that didn't last they just blew up after a while they didn't last very long at
all so i found a guy down in la he makes rollers for the nhra dragsters so he made me up a set of
of custom rollers and shafts and even even ground the needle bearings which go inside those rollers
so i got that all figured out so basically got the motor assembled this is for motor number one
and on a fine day in june of 2007 we fired up excelsion number one and it was loud it vibrated
i hadn't learned how to balance the flywheels yet and it burned a beautiful hole in my lawn from
the rear pipe that was quite a day that was back in 2007 and that's the shot of the right side of
excelsior number one we hope you've enjoyed this slideshow talking about excelsior motors and all
the little engine details mitch and i like coffee if you buy us some coffees we appreciate that very
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see you next time and we'll do something else in the shop here thanks for watching take care
you