Of mice and men...

Nope nothing to do with a dead story writer.

No matter how much you plan and work carefully, you have to anticipate the unexpected. Case in point a cracked exhaust stud casting. When removing the exhaust headers (its worth noting that I run Mircon Serpent ones which obstruct the direct line of sight for removing the exhaust bolt!!) its somewhat expected that you will snap off bolts, whats not expected is that it will not just snap bolts but also the head casting too,. This occured as one of the bolts had sciezed into the head and despite welding multiple nuts onto the bolt.... no joy. Fortunately for my I already had planned to remove the current head and replace it with a new one which I have done the porting to, originally I wanted to then either sell this older one or to modify that one too and have it as a spare (or further development head)

What else have I discovered?

Getting pistons out of the crankcase is actually a lot more involved than it would seem. The engine is basically 5 parts, the head, barrels, upper crank case, middle crank case and lower crank case (no not the sump!) and to get the pistons out I will need to split all 5 sections, I was hoping to avoid this.

On another note, I had the original flywheel measured and it was 1056.21g which means the newer one (still needs balancing) is only 14.8% lighter. I did look at the possibility of running the K7 flywheel which is a lot lighter but discovered that whilst the taper is the same, the length of taper is not. Simply it would have forced the flywheel into the stator.

like I said, of mice and men... plans and all that !