Flywheels 101
07. Nov, 2008 
5 Comments
While perusing the December issue of IronWorks there was a story that really caught my eye. The story is about flywheels, rods and pistons and the crankshaft and how they all work together to create the power to move the motorcycle. Normally I give such technical articles a quick glance over because I am what they call now-a-days, mechanically challenged. I’m not a wrench. I can change the oil and the spark plugs and that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong, I do know the basics and with the help of a service manual can perform some things but I would rather let someone who really knows what they are doing do it.
So why did I read and reread this article? Because for part of the make-over of my bike S&S has installed an 89 ci Stroker kit in my engine. Some of the paper weights I got back from the rebuild was my old rods and crank assembly. So I figured this was a good opportunity to learn just what had been done to my engine and why. I learned more from reading this one article than I had during the previous thirty-some years of riding. Thanks Neil Taylor for a very informative article.
If you want to learn more about the guts of your engine or just brush up it’s a great article. you can find it in the December issue of IronWorks which goes on sale November 11th. Of course all of you who subscribe are already enjoying it.
Note the photos by Karen Brown. Normally, photos are nice. But these photos made me look for the credit. My very best compliments to Ms. Brown. Her photos are so appealing to me that I am probably going to cut them out of my mag and frame them for my shop.
Kudo’s to IW’s Editor Dain for not printing such great pix across the binding/crease making retrieval essentially impossible.
I hope Sam, Marilyn, and the IW staff will relay my comments to Ms. Brown so that she doesn’t miss my gratitude. There was no edress to directly express my appreciation to Ms. Brown.
Mr. Taylor’s accompaning text was so elloquent that I hardly needed to move my lips at all while reading it.
Wow Quesy, impressed by parts shots? I have a whole shop full of parts you can oogle over if you want.
No offense. Just having fun at your expense. The article was well written and taught me a thing or two. I’ve always enjoyed the mechanical articles and how to sections by Neil and the rest of the Ironworks staff. I actually wish there were more of these kind of stories in the magazine. Or even on this site.
Quesy,
You’re right Karen Brown’s photos are great. Hopefully the two of them will corroborate on future technical features for the magazine.
No offense taken, roadrat. We are all here to have fun.
Having tried to take a few technical pix, it’s harder to get it right than on might think. Just think of all the pix on a “How to read a spark plug” chart. How often have we read that the ‘spark plug guy’ at the track can look at a plug and tell that the mixture isnt right, the spark is a couple of degrees advanced, and the clutch is slipping? Not only can’t I read a plug that well. But I can’t even find a decent pic of a plug for that kind of demonstration.
I thought that the lighting of the crank (opening pages) was especially good allowing all the curves and surfaces to show up real well. So often such pix look flat and dull. Nearly all the B&W pix in a service manual look terrible in comparrison to the IW mag shots.I don’t think that the blue and the orange at the crank pin would show up without the effort to go to color.
And like all great art, the pix look good to me still. Longetivity counts. The longer that I look at them, the more I am inclined to cut ‘em out and mount ‘em up in the shop. I must be one of ‘those guys’ that have a wide variety of stuff in the shop. I might be the only guy I know to have an artsy-fartsy mobile hanging in the shop as well as a renaisence pic. Naturally, I have the obligatory ‘hot babe’ calander too. But its Vargas-type art rather than straight cheese cake.
I spend a lot of time in the shop. It ought to be beautiful as well as functional.
A great pic captures and holds the eye. Page through your mag and see how many other pics grab and hold your eye.
Heck. The color at the crank pin doesn’t show up on the Blog pic like it does in the mag. I wonder if the S&S parts are really that color or if its a function of the photo lighting? Anyway, it shur is pretty to my eye.