Drag Racing with Wild Things™ Street Parts!
As often seems to happen, this story started out with a plan to do a simple hone/re-ring job on my 2000 Softail drag-bike. Well in this case, let's just say thank goodness even the best-laid plans are often wrought asunder.
After two and a half seasons running my 2000 Fatboy in All Harley Drag Racing Association's (AHDRA) Super Eliminator class (a 10.90 index class), I figured my Twin Cam stroker engine could use a little freshening. The plan was to re-hone the cylinders, go with whatever oversize pistons and rings might be necessary, and run it for another year. The bike had run mid 10's (10.56 @ 123 MPH was the quickest run of the 2004 season) with the S&S 116", and I had been doing fairly well learning the ropes of the AHDRA drag racing scene. I had gotten good enough to qualify regularly in the top 10, and in a side series to the AHDRA run by Hannum's Harley Davidson here in the Northeastern US, I had won one event and come in runner-up in the season points total This work was to be more preventative than anything.
Once the top end was torn down, however, my friends and sponsors at Black Hills Custom Parts in Rockaway, NJ found concerning evidence of the months of street and track abuse. The worst issue was a measured .036" runout on the right side crank pinion, so the cases had to be split to re-true the wheels and weld the crank pins on the press-together Twin Cam crank, in hopes of avoiding this problem in the future.
Well shoot, since the cases were apart, and performance guys being performance guys, there turned out to be no logical reason (at least that we could come up with) to put the engine back together as a 116". I mean, we'd already done the 116" deal, hadn't we? So for about a day, we decided the good plan would be to bump the cubic inches up to 124", and go with a stout-running bike which might make it into the 10.30 index class for the 2005 season. But again...we'd already done 124" Twin Cam engines. They're a dime-a-dozen. So what else is out there for B-Motor HD cases?
As luck and my empty wallet would have it, I read a lot of magazines and spend too much time on the Internet, and soon Ken Puzio (owner of Black Hills Custom Parts) and I were discussing a 131" B-motor option, using the 4.25" bore, nikasil-coated cylinders from Revolution Performance and my soon-to-be-repaired 4 5/8ths stroke S&S crank. I mean, the engine's all apart, right? Black Hills is a cutting-edge performance shop, right? I'm getting sponsored with parts at cost, right? What's another few hundred for these gargantuan cylinders and set of CP pistons to match? So a couple phone calls, a new dealer relationship, and soon we've got some nice, new jugs and pistons for the monster build in our greedy, eager hands. I mean, who wants an entry-level 116" or 124", when you can go "really big"? Plus, Ken offered, "Man, there's just too much aluminum left on those cases between the spigot holes and those cylinder stud holes. That's all extra weight, ya know." Performance addicts can rationalize anything.
Soon after their arrival at Black Hills, the pistons, rings, and wrist-pins were re-shipped to Falicon Cranks, so they could balance the crank to the new piston weights. Next, the cylinders and cases were cleaned up and shipped off to Zippers so the cases could be bored to accept the larger bore jugs. But what would we do for cams and heads? That's where the Internet, Mike Roland, and Küryakyn/Wild Things™ Performance come into play.
I first got to know Mike through an Internet discussion board called Harley tech Talk on MSN Groups. This is a 17,000-member tech board, on which I am an assistant manager and moderator. Mike had joined the board in 2004, and was letting us know of a new line of cams and other performance parts that Küryakyn was going to carry, which he had designed and which seemed to break a lot of the conventional "rules" of the Harley performance industry. Later that year Mike and I met in Sturgis, had a great time talking about his theories and laughing at some of the hand-wringing they were causing, and discussing my various builds and his drag racing past.
We continued these conversations over the next few months. He was nice enough to send me a set of his WT TC-5G Cams to try in my 106" FLHT road bike, and those cams had worked quite nicely with that build; reducing valve-train noise, lowering cranking compression and hot-start kickback, widening my torque curve, and increasing overall horsepower. Being that Mike is a former Top Fuel Harley drag racer with many national records to his name, I naturally had been picking his brain about my new plans for the 131", and about my mild dilemma regarding head/cam choice for the new build.
Again, Mike stepped up and offered to help me out if I'd agree to try his street products on the new engine, in an experiment to see how much power these off-the-shelf street products would support, and what kinds of elapsed times my bike might produce powered by Wild Things street components. Never one to turn down a gift-horse, and actually quite excited about having a set of those beautiful Mike Roland/Wild Things Billet Heads on my track bike, I immediately accepted.
Mike took a set of Wild Things Heads, decked them to give me a final static compression ratio of 13.8:1, machined in a set of compression releases, and added a set of titanium valves. Valve sizes, port size/shape, all else are exactly as the heads would ship to any customer.
He also sent along a set of WT TC-6G Cams, which were an experimental set of "stroker" cams he had designed for the Wild Things line.
In February of 2005, all the parts from all over the country started arriving back at Black Hills Custom Parts, and the assembly began. Mike, Ken, and I were all like kids on Christmas Eve, waiting to see if everything would fit in the stock frame, what the clearances would be with the decked heads and the experimental cams, and-due to the extreme bore of the stock cases for the 4.25" bore cylinders-what the thing would actually do (run or grenade) once it was together and fired for the first time.
Surprisingly, assembly was straightforward, with the only additional work being a need to open up the valve-reliefs on the flat-top pistons a bit, and adding a bit of clearance to the cylinder fins to clear the carb support bracket for the S&S Super D I planned to run. So all was together, and firing time was here.
It's a horrible sound, when a high-torque starter commits suicide.
Two 1.4 kw starter repairs, a 1.5 kw starter, and a 1.8 kw starter later, and the high-compression, 131" beast fired up and rocked the shop at Rockaway. What a sound!
After three heat-cycles, and a break-in on the Black Hills DJ250i dyno, we were finally ready to tune the thing and see what kind of numbers we could get out of it with these "street" parts on an engine really much larger than was ever contemplated when these parts were designed.
Over the next three days, I tried various combinations of pipes, carb-spacers, velocity stacks, elbow/filter combinations, coils, plug-gap, timing, jetting, and fuels. Consulting with Ken and Mike, we felt that we pretty well wrung out the best combination of torque and power we could tune. Final SAE numbers were 155.30 HP and 157.95 TQ. STD-corrected numbers were significantly higher. Not too shabby for street cams and small-valve street heads!
So the tuning was done just a week before the first race of the year, and it was time to pack up and head south out of the Jersey snows to sunny Gainesville, FL. Man, if I was nervous about just starting the bike and then wringing it out on the dyno, I was near frantic about what would happen to this large-bore/stock-cased engine at the drag strip. But hey, at least I'd be warm.
Got to Gainesville Friday, March 4th, in time for their incredibly pricey test-n-tune session. Good thing too, as the first shakedown run was anything but fun. Let me say that a non-counterbalanced 131", 155+ HP Twin Cam vibrates parts loose a bit quicker than a counter-balanced 135 HP beginner 116" Twin Cam does. A broken air-shifter linkage, broken tail-light mount, and a few tightened bolts later, I was ready for my first "real" pass.
As stated, the best previous run on a very quick, well-prepped, fast track, on a bike I was fully knowledgeable of how it wanted to be tuned and shifted, was a 10.56 @ 123 MPH. The first run down the slick, cold, Gainesville quarter mile on a brand-new build was a 10.37 @ 127 MPH. Well that's certainly a step in the right direction! One step up on the main jet, and the next run was a 10.32 @ 128 MPH. Lower the shift point from 6200 RPMs to 6000 RPMs and bike ran a best ET of 10.24 @ 128.7 MPH (best MPH of the evening was 128.99 during a subsequent run). Again, not too shabby for a new build on what was a pretty bad track. After that, I went back to getting ready to run the index of 10.30 and stopped trying for max numbers, but I'm comfortable saying that this bike now has easily a 10.teens run in it, if not a high-9 second run. This on a former Fatboy that still tips the track scales wet at 635 lbs, with a 235 lbs rider in the saddle (okay, so the 9's will be attainable more easily when I finish my Atkins routine).
The following two days of qualification and eliminations exemplified what a relatively docile/consistent engine this is to setup and tune. Qualifications were 10.287, 10.293, and an on-the-brakes 10.399. All of those runs were short-shifted and coasting thru the speed traps, which tells me the bike would have run in the 10.10's pretty easily on the much better prepared track. I won the 1st round of the day on Sunday with a 10.377, (then red-lighted in the 2nd round) so all the runs were within a tenth and right on the index. Certainly gives me hope for a good season to come.
I can't express enough how much I appreciate the help from Ken at Black Hills Custom parts, and from Mike Roland at Küryakyn/Wild Things™ Performance. No way in the world I could have done this on my own, and part of the fun of this whole season has been getting to know Mike better and picking his brain, which is stuffed full of drag racing knowledge and stories, and Harley Davidson performance secrets. I hope to do them proud this year, and hope that this bike will be a worthy platform through which Kuryakyn can showcase their parts and educate new customers to their ways of thinking.
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