hi i'm paul brodie we're in my shop myself fabricator mitch filming we're going to do an
episode on the excelsior this this will be the first episode we've done on an excelsior this
is a 1919 overhead cam excelsior board track racer and i think back in the time there was maybe three
or four of these bikes made and then as the years went by they got lost the history either they were
saw the scrap or i don't know i don't know what happened to them nobody really knows so in 2005
i'll just tell you a little bit about what was going on i had a company called aramaki northwest
and i was working on aramakis i was also working on a lot of other bikes as well i was working
for other people mostly and there wasn't a lot of flow so i decided that i wanted a big
project to work on and right around that time my aramaki race bike got stolen and that left a big
hole in my shop a big hole in my life because i've been the aramaki guy for quite a while
so i decided that i was going to focus on excelsior so that's what i did i had a black
and white photograph so i started working to make this motorcycle basically you could call it
i call it financial recklessness i turned away all my regular customers i started living off my line
of credit and i started buying parts to build these excelsiors so that's that's kind of the
story of how i got to be working on these bikes it became known as the excelsior project and i wanted
to build these bikes and i also wanted to build a race bike because i lost my aramaki race bike so
over here is the excelsior that i built i called her ruby ruby racer and you can see there's an
excelsior motor here although it's got a different transmission it's got suspension it's got brakes
so it's a lot different from the board tracker that had no transmission no brakes no clutch
so we did that and i thought what would do today is to look at this excelsior motor this is number
six i've built a few of these and this is number six so we're going to take this engine apart and
you can have a look at the inside i thought that would be a good thing for us to do today
how do you make a motorcycle from scratch well you make up a drawing and then you figure out
the size and the shape you have patterns made and then you have the casting so this is a raw
casting of a cylinder head and it doesn't really have any any any machining done on it whatsoever
over here is a barrel it's aluminum there's no machining done on that i i do all that stuff
on the crank cases i got them cast and then i had them cnc machine but these parts all get
manually machined in my shop here so and then it gets all sanded up and polished and
so let's go over and have a look at the motor this piece here is not standard there's
a drive for the magneto that comes out here this is electronic ignition
there we go that's where the electronic ignition sits on the carburetor it's uh a shebla carburetor
it's inch and five eighths this is known as a ported air sleeve you can you can change the
mixture even on the fly if you want this is the choke there's two positions that's full choke
that's half choke that's run we'll get into the carburetor later because it's
a interesting design it's not like a modern carburetor at all
back in those days pretty crude compared to modern carburetors i built this motor in the fall of 2018
i was working on a project with a young builder a talented builder from the island
and we had a plan to put this into a custom show he was going to build
a frame and the stars just didn't line up i broke my leg and ended up in hospital someone else that
was involved to ride hairy high pipes the next year he died there was a lot of stuff going on so
so this engine has sat for a while and i just got it back it's basically new
so we're going to have a look inside
there we go i had custom wrenches made they were i think they were laser cut and then i sanded them
and had them nickel plated nice this is the is the bevel drive in here you're gonna see that so these
have to be loosened off i designed this motor the inside of them well the inside of the motor anyway
i sat in my shop over there for four months back in 2005 six and i had a 486 computer
autocad 12. pretty cutting edge i know and that's how i design this motor
so you can see in here now that there is the bevel drive it drives off for the off of the
crank see there's a gear there so it's one to two all these shafts are spinning at half speed
so that's for the magneto or the ignition front cylinder rear cylinder i want you to see this
see there's a groove a groove here and here what the groove is for is so that
this wrench lines up it took me a while to figure out this system here i did not have a system
when i first started making these engines and so i had a lot of trouble in talking down the
cylinder heads because i couldn't get a wrench in there so this is this really solved the problem
if you know about old motors the excelsior was inspired by the cyclone motor
and and that was another board tracker that was pretty well respected back in that time
there you go just pops up that's not supposed to happen that should get
locked out of but you see this is all it's all modular can you see the camshaft there
with the lobes so the next step is to get the heads off and to get the heads off you have to
take them up at the same time because the intake manifold it goes into both sides you can't just
pull one head off because the manifold will stop it so we're going to use the same wrench again
there we go
that's the inside of an excelsior head that's never been used
when i was racing ruby i had a lot of a lot of problems with the head gaskets can
you see how they're all deformed and they would blow out i'd hear a hiss
as i was going around the track and i knew right away when i heard that little bit of a ch
head gaskets was going so to solve the problem what i did it's called o-ringing you oh ring
the cylinder can you see here how there's a groove if you look over here on the cylinder
you see that right there that there is a piece of safety wire and i think it's 032 or something
like that in thickness so you take a little parting tool and you set it up in the mill
and you make a slot or a groove that's that's that's two thousand smaller than the safety wire
and then you hammer in the safety wire so the safety wire is can you see how it's raised up
it presses into the head into the copper head gasket the head gasket can't blow out anymore
so that's called o-ringing the cylinder and it works i had problems with the studs
pulling out so i made i made custom inserts out of stainless steel what goes into the cylinder here
is a half inch national fine thread and then it's counter-bored and then there's 3 8 national course
because not only was i blowing head gaskets on the race track i was pulling studs out of the cylinder
so i went through a whole evolution of learning how to build a motor that would work on the race
track and not just on a test stand it's very different when i was racing ruby a lot of the
times i went to the track and there'd be some sort of a problem with the motor lots of problems with
the lubrication system and then i'd come back and i'd tear it down the whole motor and i did that
probably something like 11 consecutive times go to the track do some laps come back rip it
all apart make some modifications go back to the track that was my life for a little while
and i'm not just going to pull it off i want to leave the piston inside inside the barrel
there's the circlip
so it's a a je piston acryla rod for those of you that have heard names like that before
so there we go it's modular all the shimming all stays in place
so can can you see this tube here
how it goes it goes into the pinion shaft can you see how actually i this is loose in there
what i did was i i flared the end a little bit to get a little bit more oil pressure
so this is a modification this this wasn't on the first ones i built so that's the oil pump
so that's return and that's oil feed there's there's actually two oil pumps inside there
this was added later this is the oil oil return line i had a lot of problems with the scavenging
making the oil come out of the crank case and for a lot of the races i did in the
early part the crank case would fill up with oil because the scavenging wasn't working properly
and then i'd puke oil all over the bike once the track that was not good they told
me if i ever did that again the bike would be banned from seattle racetrack that was not good
so anyway this is one of the solutions external oil line it kind of alters the look but
these bikes had a lot of plumbing on them so not the end of the world
there we go that gets torqued to something like 75 pounds
it's pretty easy so there's a little a key here 3 16 key
i had these custom made because i couldn't i couldn't find anything
it's kind of like holly davidson pots except not really
i couldn't buy screws like this so these were all cnc machined
there you go it's free
there we go you can see the loctite gasket sealer i use it's orange
a magnetic drain plug
see when the engine is working it goes around this way this is
this is what what takes the oil off the edge of the flywheel this is like a scraper an oil scraper
then you see here i machine this little piece here and it collects oil and it goes right down there
see do you see the hole in the bottom it sends oil to the outside of the bearing because otherwise
oil wouldn't get get to the outside of the bearing i discovered that pretty early on
it's a true an osborne flywheel set up can you see there it's true and osborne they make a lot of
race parts for harley sportsters whatever so i had the flywheels custom machined it's a custom
stroke and the rods are custom as well these are very long rods to make the engine look like the
stock so there you go that's your that's your 1919 excelsior teardown i hope you've enjoyed
watching mitch and i like coffee if you buy us coffees it fuels the channel very well thank you
see you next time we'll do something else take care