A V-twin engine is normally a pretty simple affair, right? Well that’s what I thought until I saw Thunderstruck, built by Mark Daily, on display at the World Championship.

The starting point for his build was an Indian Power Plus motor. Okay so nothing out of the ordinary about that unless you count the bank of Keihin sports bike carbs on the wrong side of the motor. Now as you all know, Indians have the carb on the left side but not this one. Looking closer I realised that the inlet doesn’t run to the inside of the V between the cylinders either. Oh no. On this bike the inlet runs to where you expect to find the exhaust and obviously the exhaust is where you’d normally find the manifold for the carb.

My first thought was that the heads had been reversed, as other people have done on H-D motors in the past. I was wrong, the heads are the right way round but the engine has been configured to use the exhaust ports as inlets and the inlet ports as exhausts.

There’s some very clever people out there.

1 comments:

Andy@AmV said...

Looking forward to seeing that from the other side.