MacKellar is a great reference and it's in the pile. I also have a thick pile of KC article photocopies from that snow machine magazine he wrote, can't for the life of me think of the name of it right now though. TONS of great info there. That was sent to me by Lyn Garland, a respected 2S tuner I used to race with/against back in the '90's. He was friends with KC and because of that KC would stop in to the garage we shared at NHIS and chat quite often. One of my favorite memories of that time was when I was doing a quick teardown and rebuild on my RD 350 after some mishap, and Kevin walked over to my pile of parts on the bench and picked up one of my cylinder heads. My rider and I had machined it earlier that winter in a last minute attempt to get the CR where it needed to be before heading south to Daytona and the end result was quite different from what the usual RD race head looked like, with a much narrower squish section in comparison to the bowl area. I had read one of his articles a year or two before about some new thinking in sguish band design so I decided to leave the odd looking head as it was as it looked like the then current TZ heads shape. Anyhow, he picked up a head, eyeballed it, looked at me and asked something like "did you do this?" to which I said yes, and he raised a bushy eyebrow, smiled, nodded approvingly, and wandered off. I was thrilled. A bit later I bought several TSR programs and that head off the cuff head design turned out to have a near perfect MSV for my porting and overall engine design. It never detonated or gave any heat related troubles and was fast as hell on that track. I then started to replicate them for customer engines I built and they all had similar results. But anyways, that guy has forgotten more than most of know. I also used to talk to Gary Shumake at Spec2 a ton back then. You either love or hate that guy, but he took a liking to me and we'd talk theory and practical aspects of RD building for hours on the phone. I learned a ton there too, and I always took notes. I still have most of them and that was over 20 years ago. Hung out with Harry Barlow several times as well and learned from him too.
I have digressed, but I guess my point is read all you can, look for sources outside the MC industry, and when in the presence of people who know more than you who are willing to speak....listen, ask questions if appropriate, and let them talk more than you do.
And I almost forgot, my copy of Foales book is inscribed with little best wishes by Tony, It was a present from my rider Pete Furkey who has met him several times. Pete also used to work with Rob Tuluie often at MTS. Talk about in the presence of greatness.
teazer said:
I also used to drag stuff off various snowmobile websites and Kevin Cameron had a column there that was a great read. Two stroke guys used to test a bunch of mods and post the dyno charts including BSFC and it was interesting to see what mods worked and which ones didn't work as well on different motors.
Shoeman, that's a nice library. I had forgotten about that book by racer Ray Knight. I see AG Bell and Jennings and two TDC ( I only have the first), and CrashKart and Macauley. Do you have the Mackeller (sp?) Yamaha twins book? It's a good history book, as is the Suzuki racer book by Ray Battersby that was reprinted a couple of years ago.
Can't get enough of that stuff.