Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/763593
68 nJanuary 2017n www.thunderpress.net THUNDER PRESS The late, great Eight On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the "war to end all wars" ended. About six months later, a different war resumed, on American race tracks. Almost everyone else still battling for supremacy on big V-twins was racing stuff they'd pulled out of mothballs from almost three years ago. Not the Motor Company! Why and how this should be… is a pretty fair back story in itself. You see, when World War I began for the U.S., all domestic manufac- turers supplied motorcycles to our government for service in the confl ict. Excelsior, Reading Standard, and the other small-potato builders sent a few, Harley sent a bunch, while Indian, in a fi t of misguided greed disguised as patriotism, sold every motorcycle they made to the armed services. Two things wrong with that! First, it seems none at the Wigwam factored in the rapid, infl ationary increase in costs of raw materials during a war. So the company made little or nothing on the deal and was broke when it ended. Second, since there were zero bikes made available for sale to civilians, dealers got pissed! Far more than a few jumped ship in order to make a living and supply what demand there was for those few miserable years. No award for guessing to whom most dealers defected. Harley-Davidson was the only major brand with bikes to sell to the public, for that whole time! A shrewd (not to mention prof- itable) decision on the part of the four founders. Now you can understand why Harley was so magnifi cently and maliciously set to become precisely what the founders always intended the company to be. By 1920, the manufac- turer of the most and the best motorcy- cles in the entire world! That corporate strategy included domination of racing as well. The tactics, as usual, were left to Bill Ottaway. By the summer of 1919 the eight-valve racers were back to continue their winning ways. But they weren't exactly the three-year- old stuff. No, sir! No 1916 race bikes and no moth balls in H-D's arsenal… these things were new and different. Modern dyno testing on a couple of eight-valve racers show horsepower in the 60-plus range and a ready-to- race weight of about 250 pounds. No wonder they could hit 130 mph and manage 100 mph averages in races! Do the power-to-weight math… these century-old warhorses are probably quicker and faster than your new bag- ger! Ottaway did it… again! OK, full disclosure… different applies more than new. After all, the eight-valve was still the eight-valve, though eventually offered in four (or more) distinct vari- eties because Mr. Ottaway was what would be known now as a "develop- ment" engineer par excellence. Since the engines were used in several types of professional racing events, it stands to reason they would be tailored to suit each of them. So they were! So were the chassis… come to think of it. That's where "development" nat- urally enters into it. History shows there have only been a handful of men who were superb at this task. Perhaps the best known example is Joe Craig, godfather of the fabled OHC Norton racing singles. To keep 500cc sin- gles competitive for over 30 years is admirable—to dominate with them is legendary. Craig is legendary. There have been others, mostly unknown and unheralded, but leaving an imprint on motorcycle history that's unparalleled and impressive. On our side of the ocean, it amounts to a handful of men over the entire spectrum of American racing. Ottaway heads the list. Not just for the eight-valve either! But the eight-valve, its variations and myster- ies, is what we're here for. So… Patently Superior Hereabouts on these pages is a line drawing you might have glanced at a time or two before. Please look at it closely! (I'll wait here.) It's the pat- ent drawing for design fundamentals of a V-Twin racing engine, applied for in 1919 and awarded to Bill Harley in 1923. These "fundamentals" amount to the method of valve actuation and the layout of the four valves per cylinder head, as well as details peculiar to the entire concept. Damn near all of it, at some point in the history of the actual machines, tampered with, altered, changed, ignored and in short, differ- ent from the drawing! Hey, you've got to expect that with a racer… right? Here we have the illustration for U.S. patent #1,472,068 for an engine. Nowhere in the text does this patent refer to racing, or anything related to high performance. Instead it states the purpose of the patent is to: "insure uniform correlated expansion of the co-operating members of the mechanism. A further objective is to insure regular operation of the engine irrespective of the temperature at which the engine is operated. A further objective is to pro- vide a motor in which the errors of timing of the mechanism due to expansion of the parts are eliminated. A further objective is to provide a lightweight motor." WTF? Some of this language is probably code for early, extensive employment of aluminum alloy in its construc- tion. But… c'mon! First of all we know this engine was developed in 1915. (Some say a "prototype" single- cylinder version was even raced late that year.) The complete V-Twin racer was revealed and successfully raced in 1916. Yet, it was cataloged as the Model 17. The war was over in 1918. The patent was applied for in 1919 and granted in 1923. By 1921, the design had changed signifi cantly and at the end of the year… H-D quit racing! If all this isn't enough to make you curious about what was really going on, the patent refers to a pushrod "hous- ing" (reference #13 in the drawing) intended to "heat" air surrounding the thus-enclosed pushrods, again in the interests of uniform expansion. Yet, these housings weren't used! No surviving OHV race bike of the period, let alone an eight-valve, has them. (Pushrod tubes, as we know them, were added to street machines several years earlier. But that's not the same thing, since tubes were for—ah— "oil control.") And why bother with a patent in the fi rst place, for a machine that was never made available to the public, was only manufactured in miniscule quantities and disappeared from the scene before the patent was even granted? So, to speculate, could it be that the eight-valve engine was a "lab rat" for a potential street version that never happened? The intent of the patent notwithstanding, upsets of war, the post-war negation of Indian as a threat, and the subsequent economic crash in 1921 might have conspired to keep us from an advanced-spec V-Twin engine for generations!