hi i'm paul brodie we're in my shop here i'm sitting on excelsior mitch behind the camera
we're going to do something on excelsior i'm going to tell you a little bit of a story about how i
got involved in this crazy project in a way in the early 2000s i was working on other customers bikes
antique motorcycles and i noticed that often often they would buy a motor for five thousand dollars
they get me to build a frame for handlebars exhaust whatever and maybe i'd charge them
maybe ten thousand dollars for that back in those days and then suddenly they had
a bike worth forty thousand dollars and i'm thinking well if i had a motor maybe i could
make a bit more money like that as well so in 2005 i was coming back from the davenport swap meet in
iowa and i was with a customer we were talking back and forth and i came up with the idea of
building a board tracker because the board tracker was worth more than a regular antique motorcycle
and at first we talked about a cyclone but there are about maybe nine cyclones in existence and so
i'd be stepping on some toes but when it came to the excelsior there basically are no models
which we know of in existence so i really like the look of the motor it was huge looked powerful so i
decided that i was going to build excelsior board trackers so that was early 2005 and at that point
in my life i was being sued by an ex and i needed to get some money the house uh the property values
i'm in the vancouver area more or less a little bit outside and the property values
have started to rise quite significantly so i went to the bank and i found out that
if i got a mortgage on my property i could get a pretty substantial line of credit
so that's what i did and so in may of 2005 i did what i call a bit of a financial recklessness
i turned away all my regular customers i started living off my line of credit
and all i did six days a week monday to saturday was to work on excelsiors from morning till night
on sunday i went trials riding so that became my life and there was kind of a freedom in that
because i was doing exactly what i wanted and if the excelsior project needed something a
tool parts cars things i just spent the money it was a good time i like that so we're gonna
do a couple slide shows now on a motorcycle when you build a motorcycle there's a lot of different
things to think about the frame the gas tank the handlebars the wheels suspension
but for these slide shows we're just going to focus on the motor so we're going to
do slideshow today and then we'll finish up the following episode on the motor so
with that all said let's get going i had five old photos that i found and this was probably the best
photo the other ones there was three of them that weren't so good at all but this is joe walters he
was part of the excelsior racing team and i like this shot so in april of 2005 i did a full-scale
drawing i knew how large the wheels and the tires were so i based it on those sizes they did a
full-scale drawing and this is the full-scale drawing of the motor i had no idea what went
inside the cases or how that would work out i just i'm just going for the outside shape right now i
managed to find through a friend a set of old excelsior cases this is off the street version
and you can see the inside it looks like it's been underwater a little bit there
this is the outside so on the overhead cam motor it didn't have any of this and this part here was
all different as well on the bottom of the cases it it definitely looked like it had been
sitting in the ground or something there was a lot of corrosion so this area had to get re
rebuilt but that was fine because this motor would never ever run it was just for show and the sizes
here's the start this is what i did i i set up the cases on my mill i got an end mill right here
and i started to remove some metal you can see how it's coming off i'm about halfway down here making
a few chips and then what i did is i cut out a quarter inch plate that was the size i thought
of the beveled chest this is what holds all the gears which drives the cam and the magneto and
i glued it on so i have started making a mock-up motor i wanted some cylinders to put on it so i
i grabbed some 6061 this is solid this is just for mock-up you can see how i've got
a little bit of a bore but that only goes down maybe half inch or so so i cut the fins
and this is the end mill now and i i squared off off the base this is on the mill in in the rotary
table that's the rotary table that is the chuck a little bit later on this was my my desk in the
shop and i spent four months sitting in front of the computer this is a 486 computer i did buy a
new flat screen for it and on the computer i had autocad version number number 12. so
old software but that's where i figured out what the motor looked like inside i spent four months
in that chair looking at manuals metallurgy books seals bearing manuals on that computer
i've started to draw what the cylinders look like you can see here i've got the included valve angle
and this is the magneto here and this is the drive for the magneto so you can see how the drive
comes off a little bit above the crank not exactly on the crank because the gears have to drive
he needs space there this is a more detailed shot and the angle is 47.5 i discovered
so these gears here these three gears have to be custom made because you can't buy any gears that
are that that ankle at all this is the bevel drive i came up with and i just talked about
the gears 47.5 so i made some mock-up gears out of aluminum solid because i wanted to see
what the clearance was in between the gears i wanted to see if my calculations were correct
and they seem to be correct so i went with those numbers this is the bevel case a little
bit later on and you can see how it it's built up from the one-quarter inch plate
a plate and i have a hole for the bearing i have a hole so that it can it can breathe
and it's starting to take shape this is the is the bevel drive module which is
held into that case now so there's four allen screws holding it down this is is going to drive
the magneto this is the front cylinder this is the rear cylinder and you can see how the gear
is raised up a little bit above the center line of the crank this is the outside case of the
of the bevel drive and what i did is the is to weld on some on some mesh and then i covered
it with bondo and i worked on the shape because having the shape was a crucial part of having the
bike look right so here's the bottom part of the bevel drive i've got the cylinders on now you can
see the four bolts on each one there's the magneto and this is the drive for the magneto so it's
it's coming together this is the upper bevel drive and i it took a while to figure this out
so what i've got here is i got some shapes made out of aluminum i have i've taken glue and i i
have glued them together and i'm working on the shape i've filled in the spaces with some bondo
you can see that and ultimately i made i made four different shapes before i was happy with this
these ones were were too short this area from here to here i decided was too short so i changed that
that's what it looks like when i put more bondo on and i've i've sanded it down so you can you
can see the final shape that's coming together i haven't started working on the heads yet or
the cam towers or anything but this is the bevel drive this is the lower part these are the tubes
that holes hold the bevel shafts inside it's not push rods and this is the upper bevel drive here
that's the magneto drive finally this is what i got from the from the foundry this is this
was the final shape and i was quite happy with it and it needed a little bit of machining so
i made up a lot of fixtures for all different parts when you're working with a casting you can't
just hold it in a chuck you always got to make it seem some kind of a fixture so here is a fixture
i've got a counterweight right here and what i've done here is i've faced it and now i have to bore
it for the bearing because there's a couple bearings in each of these upper bevel drives
and that's what it looks like that's that's the finished product when it's all sanded and polished
and i think they look quite smart i spent quite a bit of time working on what the left side of
the motor would look like because i didn't have any photos of the left side of the motor and
i i talked to someone on the phone and he had an older excelsior motor not an overhead cam
and he told me that he would never take this thing to shows anymore because he didn't want
anyone taking photographs of it and i thought well that's kind of crazy but it seems like some
owners of this old antique antique machinery they don't want to share anything and so i asked him if
he'd send me a photo and he he wouldn't send me a photo because he said i know what you're doing and
i don't think it's a good idea to make a replica of something even if even if they don't exist so
i came up with this heavy duty webbing here basically on my own and i like the looks of
it because i think it kind of matched the rest of the bike of the motor i spent quite a bit of
money at the pattern makers i did my i did my cnc drawings and this is some of the patterns which i
got this is so that i could take it to the foundry and have the castings made
and having the patterns made this was back in 2006. i spent 45 thousand dollars getting
patterns made and you can see here this is for the left side is here's those webs i was talking about
and this is what goes inside of of this so that you end up with the right size and and
thickness of the walls i used about a a 3 8 wall for this i wanted it to be strong so this is the
patterns more patterns unfortunately what happened with the patterns is i got the castings made and
that was at a foundry in in burnaby and i should have gone there and picked up the patterns but
i was busy it was kind of on my mind but not in the forefront and then the foundry had a fire
that i heard about a year or two later and when i went there there was nothing left and
my patterns were gone so all that money i spent i do not have the patterns this is a pretty happy
day i got back from the foundry this is a whole bunch of engine engine parts i think i ordered
i got well i got 17 enough to build 17 motors you can see all the
all the crank cases here and these are all that there's there's bevel drives these are cam towers
and that these are the pieces so you got the the right side case left side this is the bevel
drive that fits on there these are the cam towers all the cam towers get made off the same casting
and this is the these are for the for the magneto drive i needed to make an oil pump so i went on my
autocad and i i designed an oil pump and it got made by southern cross leon he does nice work he
he also did the crank cases and i thought that the oil pumps worked out really well but what i didn't
realize until we started up the motor much later that the oil pump was actually running backwards
so i had designed it wrong i thought the oil went in between the gears but it goes around the gears
so there went five grand those became paper weights and i gave them away to friends this is
what the oil pump looks like inside you can see how it's pretty simple well this is the old one
those are the gears so it's actually three piece there's the
there's the inlet and there's the return and the middle plate that goes in between those two
and this is what the newer the new the version two oil pump looks like it it's
different this comes around a lot more because everything had to connect so that the pump
went the other way that was a big learning experience for me that's where the oil pump
sits it sits at the bottom of the beveled chest i call this this is the beveled chest
and the oil pump sits at the bottom it's held in with a couple allen screws old piston that's 1919
approximately and this is the new piston i got it's uh a je piston made in california
you can see the difference this one is made out of cast iron this is aluminum
look at the thickness of the rings these are much much narrower and thinner rings
so engine design a lot has happened in 100 years for sure these are the flywheels
this is an excelsior flywheel from back in the day it's you can see it's larger this is the flywheels
i got it's truett and osborne they're aftermarket holley company down in the us and they made up
up custom custom flywheels for me because they had a shorter stroke than stock usually usually
this hole is up here more but i got a bunch made that were custom this is excelsior rods
these are carillo rods these are not cheap but they're beautifully made it's called a knife
and fork you see how this is the knife it goes inside the fork you know some of the v twins like
a vincent the rods go side by side but not these ones these ones are in line with each other this
is a set a a couple sets of flywheels that i've used on excelsiors and you can see the holes which
we use the balance here we're going to do a video in the next little while and i'm going to show you
how to how to balance a flywheel that's what the flywheels look like with the carrillo rods in it
it's a nice looking flywheel i i had to get the shafts all custom made as well
the sprocket shaft and the pinion shaft because i couldn't find anything stock that would work
and here's the motor i've been working on the crank cases the bevel drive upper belt drive
the cam tires but you notice that i've got spaces where the heads go and that's because
the heads took a lot longer than anything else that's a whole other story and so we're gonna
i'm gonna tell you that story next episode that'll be part two of this little series we
hope you have enjoyed learning a little bit about excelsior motors and how i made these motors here
so thank you for watching mitch and i like coffees if you buy us some coffees much appreciated
if you like the video please give us a thumbs up subscribe take care see you next episode stay safe