Some parts need more than others. Its an interesting thing, these old v-twins have a design which requires a flow system versus a pressure system. There are no plain bearings in these engines, and plain bearings (like the lower reciprocating in a car engine) require a film of pressurized oil to exist between the parts to survive. These mills have needle bearings, roller bearings, or plain bushings throughout and really only need to have oil delivered (or flowed) to them, but pressure is negligible.
An interesting thing to think about it is that you can have a bunch of pressure and no flow. But you can't have flow without some pressure.
So one of the things that I have been fretting about is feeding these HotDock rocker boxes. The creator of these had a way of doing it which was complex and caused some issues with parts occupying the same space along with cosmetic detractions as well. So I decided I would make the flow path on these mimic the original flowpath Shovelheads originally had, but make it a little more visually apparent to where the oil is, which involved overly complex machining and processing...but I digress.
Bitch was, I had to make some mods. I decided that a tandem fitting banjo would be rad, so it started with me getting some steel balls. But those are bearing grade and required me to anneal them first to machine them. Then with a little mill time, the balls were drilled, reamed and faced. A little more time on the lathe and some JIC plugs were modified.... A light press fit, a touch of TIG time and then these little bastards are starting to take shape.
The rocker shafts needed to be made. These are waaaay different than what the factory ones look like.
I decided to go with A2 for the shaft material, and decided to add an O-ring to the oil receiver end of the shaft to ensure the oil will be ported correctly through the shafts into the rocker arm exactly like they are lubed in a factory set up. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the factory's back-to-front oiling path on the top end. As long as the oil is present and flowing, the parts are getting lubed. So the shafts were turned to mimic the factory shaft profile. This engine was originally planned to be operated with roller rocker sets, but some issues arose with time constraints and it was decided that the best bet was to remove a variable with the different rocker ratio afforded by the roller rocker sets and just stick with the known rocker ratio from factory forged rocker arms. Nothing wrong with these, just not as whiz-bang as roller rigs....
Set up in the boxes there is a nice endplay present for the rockers and doing a cursory flow test with some solvent there is a consistent flow present on both the valve side and the pushrod side.... I'm pretty stoked.
And of course, I had to mod the rockerbox castings to become full red-blooded Americans and made that stinking metric thread get....re-educated.
...thanks for again for reading. Sorry you cant have the last five minutes of your life back.
