- 6 weeks ago
All we've ever wanted is complete control of combustion in our motorcycle engines and we are closer than ever. Find out how cleaning up emissions has enhanced power, running quality, engine life and more as Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer discuss the combustion process and all the tricks used to move ever closer to stoichiometric. What's that? Listen and find out. Also, there's a chance someone might say "Velocette" or "TZ750," so don't miss it!
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00Welcome back to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, the Editor-in-Chief. Kevin Cameron's our technical editor. He's here today, as usual.
00:00:07The topic today is, well, it's ignition and combustion, yet again, in some form.
00:00:12But this is related to emissions regulations. We're going to go on record and say it was a good thing for us,
00:00:19both from the atmospheric sense, having grown up in the California, Southern California area in the 1970s,
00:00:25and having smog alerts, stage one, stage two, can't go outside at school, lock you up in the classroom
00:00:33so you don't breathe the air and burn your lungs up, get that terrible feeling.
00:00:37In about 1977, I was descending in a Cessna P210 retractable gear, pressurized 210, with a turbo, that's what the T's for,
00:00:47at sunset in the evening to Fullerton Municipal Airport, and I asked my parents,
00:00:56what are those colors? And we were going through layers of gases, yellow, purple, brown, green.
00:01:02I mean, it was a real variety pack. And we've, gosh, we've had such a journey.
00:01:08You know, the stutter install days, as Kevin Cameron calls them, where we had 800 miles of vacuum lines.
00:01:17Like, I've looked at, like, a 74, 77 Jaguar V12, for example.
00:01:22Like, the whole engine is covered with vacuum controls, trying to do things in a largely analog way.
00:01:30But look at us now. Clean, power, efficiency. Knowing Kevin, we're going to start with the discovery of fire.
00:01:41So let's see what Kevin has to say.
00:01:45Well, I just want to put in a note here, which was that the great London smog of 1952
00:01:57had a prompt death toll of 4,000. And the public health people reckoned that over the next year or so,
00:02:08another 8,000 died from it. It was such that people experienced it, said, I'm walking home.
00:02:17I can't see my feet.
00:02:20But people went to lectures in closed lecture halls and could not see the speaker.
00:02:30And the pollutants in this case were particulate, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,
00:02:40and considerable overlap with the automotive pollutants emitted, which created such a flap in the middle 1960s
00:02:53as the science was being done to work out what's happening.
00:03:00But I didn't want to get too far off track because this is really about ignition and combustion.
00:03:11But we want to show that emissions problems are real and that we've been through a series of ever more clever
00:03:27emissions reduction schemes, which have taken us away from the complexity and unreliability
00:03:37of miles of miles of black hose toward the sunny uplands of digital fuel injection and mapped ignition and fueling.
00:03:49That is, if we treat the engine precisely, giving it the fuel mixture that it wants,
00:03:56and then apply the cleanup measures, the catalytic exhaust and so forth,
00:04:02we have a lot of leverage and can still have strong performance.
00:04:09Anyway.
00:04:11Well, the EGR era was one Band-Aid.
00:04:15Maybe I'll talk about that, my experience with that on my 460 Ford.
00:04:19Yeah, you bet.
00:04:24Today, there are riders who've never seen a spark plug.
00:04:28Here's one.
00:04:29This thread screws into the cylinder head.
00:04:35And this part here.
00:04:37Oh, yes.
00:04:38I was ready.
00:04:39This is a...
00:04:39Ducati.
00:04:40Yeah?
00:04:41Ducati.
00:04:41This is for a Ducati.
00:04:43This part, the end, is exposed in the combustion chamber.
00:04:48And it has two electrodes.
00:04:50The curved one is the ground electrode attached to the outer shell, the part of the plug that is steel and threads into the cylinder head.
00:05:01The center wire, which is right at the center, at the tip of the insulator, is the hottest object in the engine.
00:05:11And there's a reason for that, but we'll get to that.
00:05:16There's a gap between these two electrodes.
00:05:20The ground electrode and the center negative electrode.
00:05:24How do we get a spark to jump across there, which is miniature lightning?
00:05:32Lightning, we can hear its effect as thunder because the discharge of such a rush of current down a conduction channel heats the air such that it expands explosively, producing thunder.
00:05:49We don't hear the ignition as we cruise along, but it's at work.
00:06:02We don't want to anyway.
00:06:03What happens is this, there's a device, the ignition system is a device for causing electrons to enter into the center insulated part of the spark plug, which terminates at the center wire, which is so close to the ground electrode.
00:06:25And we have to cause that electric charge to accumulate very rapidly on the center electrode because if there is leakage, the electrons may leak away before there is a strong enough field to ionize the gap and produce the spark.
00:06:51So what's happening in the gap, there's a strong electric field that is rapidly increasing in intensity.
00:06:58That electric field drives any loose electrons that happen to be in the gap.
00:07:03When I asked my physicist friend about this, he said, oh, there's always some electrons around, you know, cosmic rays, showers, things like that.
00:07:13Oh, yeah.
00:07:13Okay.
00:07:14Good.
00:07:14Oh, yeah.
00:07:14Sure.
00:07:15Good to know.
00:07:16So the electrons in the gap at first are mildly accelerated away from the negative center electrode to ground.
00:07:26I was waiting for you to say that because you said that previously, that we have a particle accelerator on our motorcycle.
00:07:34Yes, that's right.
00:07:35The electric field is accelerating electrons coming out of the negative center wire and going toward the ground electrode.
00:07:46And the electrons collide with gas molecules that are in between and it's sort of, oh, excuse me, excuse me, as they make their way.
00:07:56But as the field strength gets stronger, the electrons are accelerated to higher velocities.
00:08:03Soon the velocities are high enough that those electrons striking the atoms of which air molecules, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fuel molecules in the mixture,
00:08:16hitting those things hard enough to ionize, that is, knock electrons off of them.
00:08:23Those electrons in turn are in this electric field and are violently accelerated toward the ground wire.
00:08:30This becomes a self-generating avalanche of electrons, which is an ionized conduction path.
00:08:43At this point, the spark in old times had two phases.
00:08:50The first, or capacitive phase, was the extremely rapid and high current discharge of the capacitive part of the spark,
00:09:02which is the electrons that are sitting on the conductor.
00:09:06The reason they're sitting on it is that they repel each other and they don't like to keep company with one another too closely.
00:09:18And those rush off.
00:09:23The gap ionizes at some voltage, 15,000 volts or so.
00:09:30And you get this capacitive spike.
00:09:34And in a modern motorcycle or automobile engine, that is all there is.
00:09:39Because the next part of the spark, which you would have in the case of a magneto or a coil and battery system,
00:09:49is the inductive part of the spark.
00:09:51And that is, there's energy stored as a magnetic field in the coil's iron core.
00:09:58And when you shut off current to cause that magnetization, the magnetic field collapses.
00:10:07And as it does so, it cuts through all those wire turns in the secondary, generating an extremely high voltage.
00:10:16Once that voltage jumps the gap, the conduction path is established.
00:10:25You don't need 15,000 volts anymore.
00:10:28So like one of those easy strike welders, arc welders, the voltage across the gap falls to about 40 volts.
00:10:36And that large inductive energy just keeps rushing across for as long as 1,000 microseconds.
00:10:44Well, my TIG welder has that easy start on it, my Lincoln.
00:10:49It's a miracle.
00:10:50It really is nice.
00:10:51Yeah.
00:10:52But they found that the spark plug wire and the discharge caused the plug wire to become a radio frequency antenna.
00:11:03Oh, big time.
00:11:04Yeah.
00:11:04Well, we saw that.
00:11:05I've seen that in practical terms on the dyno with an Indian with a very hot magneto.
00:11:11And iron, you know what I mean, copper, solid, you know, Packard, 9mm wire or whatever, 8mm wire.
00:11:19And the screen of the computer when we were running that, it would wave.
00:11:26And it was not getting clear readings because, you know, you put the clip on the plug wire and it just was so overwhelmed.
00:11:36Also, just for you automotive types out there, if you have a Petronix ignition, which is a points replacement, you drop that inside your distributor and it replaces the points and it's a little magnet and stuff.
00:11:49But if you have one of those and copper core wires, watch out.
00:11:55Particularly, I know this from Jaguars because it's surrounded by metal.
00:11:59The distributor's low, be under the intake manifold right next to the block.
00:12:05I had a car break up at 3,000 RPM and I couldn't figure out why.
00:12:09Just gone.
00:12:11And it was the copper wires.
00:12:13You switch to the long bags of carbon, the suppressor wires that have a suppressor built-in suppression, doing what Kevin says, killing that RF after that and just getting that capacitive part.
00:12:28Now, the thing that can happen is they put a gap inside the spark plug that the 40-volt discharge stands there.
00:12:35Where did the bridge go?
00:12:39We can't do it.
00:12:40Right, resistor caps, resistor wires, and resistor plugs.
00:12:43Don't use all three.
00:12:44You only need one usually in the system.
00:12:47And, of course, further reducing interferences in the most modern engines, the plug cap has integrated into it the ignition coil for that cylinder.
00:12:58Yeah, that was a beautiful step, wasn't it?
00:13:01Yep.
00:13:01On Jaguar V12s, you could, in low light on something that hadn't been maintained, where the plug wires were kind of, it was pretty hot ignition, but if the plug wires were degraded, you could mist water and watch electricity cloud out from the plugs.
00:13:22It's just, it's just, it's, yep.
00:13:25I'll wake you up, put your hand in the wrong spot.
00:13:28Well, the only way that that capacitive-only spark can work is if you have a very homogeneous air-fuel mixture.
00:13:40Because when FEMSA in Spain in 1968 saw a market, we'll build a CDI Magneto for all those Yamaha production racers that have the Magneto on them.
00:13:54It's a terrible old thing that goes out of time just because you started the engine and then shut it off after five seconds.
00:14:02Anyway, their Magneto didn't, their CDI Magneto didn't work because it was producing that very short capacitive spark.
00:14:14And in a two-stroke engine or in a top fueler, the charge is anything but homogeneous.
00:14:20In a two-stroke, there's exhaust gas left from the previous cycle so that whatever whirling little vortices are coasting through the spark plug gap, some of them aren't even mixture.
00:14:35They're exhaust gas.
00:14:36So you get a misfire.
00:14:38So someone tapped the chief engineer on the arm, sir, sir, if you please, told him the facts of two-stroke life.
00:14:47And they said, oh, no problem, we'll extend the spark duration.
00:14:51And their engine worked or their ignition worked very well.
00:14:54And a lot of FEMSAs and motorplats and what have you, replacement CDI ignitions for Japanese motorcycles were sold.
00:15:05And the same thing happened in top fuel when a hot rod company decided to make a CDI style Magneto and it wouldn't fire the engine because there were so many blobs of nitromethane pelting the spark plug electrode.
00:15:25So that short duration spark didn't cut any ice there.
00:15:32They had to make the spark last long enough for some ignitable mixture to come coasting through.
00:15:39So at this point, we have a tiny flame kernel that has been established by the heating effect of the spark.
00:15:51It has, just like putting a match to the wadded up newspaper in your fireplace to start a comfy wintertime fire, you are heating up the unburned material to its ignition point.
00:16:07That's what happens when the spark passes through ignitable mixture.
00:16:12Hey man, back at the house, we got a wood stove, wood burning stove.
00:16:17And on those cold nights here where we get into, you know, 29, 30 degrees, it's actually better to have a pile of wood inside the house that's not 30 degrees.
00:16:27It's easier to light the fire when the wood's already 70.
00:16:31Now, the flame kernel is surrounded by cooler material to which it is losing heat.
00:16:41So it is important that the flame kernel ignite more mixture so that it is generating more heat than it is losing.
00:16:52Otherwise, it will be extinguished and you'll have a misfire.
00:16:55So, this brings us to the question of what is ignitable?
00:17:03And it didn't take the hardworking humans long to work out that mixtures that were leaner than 18 parts of air to one of fuel or richer than 10 parts of air to one of fuel,
00:17:20spark just was not a reliable way to ignite those mixtures.
00:17:25So, hydrogen is a different story.
00:17:28It is ignitable over a much wider range, which makes it require special handling.
00:17:36But peak power, a chemist might think, well, that must occur at stoichiometric mixtures.
00:17:46Stoichiometric is a la-di-da way of saying complete combustion is achieved.
00:17:54For every hydrogen and carbon in the hydrocarbon fuel, there must be just enough oxygen in the atmosphere,
00:18:04atmospheric oxygen in the air mixed with it so that every carbon burns to carbon dioxide and every hydrogen burns to water,
00:18:15two hydrogens to one atom of oxygen.
00:18:17That's what exhaust consists of.
00:18:20And that's what EFI systems that are going for low emissions aim at that.
00:18:28It's neither the most powerful nor the most efficient, as you were saying.
00:18:34You know, you're 14-7, you know, you really want, what, probably 12 or a certain amount.
00:18:41It's probably 4% CO for power mixture.
00:18:44Those practical fellows out at Brooklyn Speedway and everywhere around the world where motorbikes and racing cars and airplanes were being developed in the early years of the 20th century
00:18:57discovered that stoichiometric is not best power.
00:19:02Best power, in fact, best power occurs when there's some carbon monoxide, which is, as you know, poisonous.
00:19:14Back in the days before catalytic exhausts, movies depicting depression and disappointment showed people in their cars with the horrible smoke from the tailpipe conducted in with a big piece of...
00:19:30Oh, it was a magnificent scene in Mad Men, the series Mad Men, where Don Draper goes out to his garage and he's going to commit suicide in his Jaguar and it won't start.
00:19:44Anti-climax.
00:19:46Yeah.
00:19:48So they found that the reason that best power is a bit rich from chemically correct mixture
00:19:58is that more molecules are generated.
00:20:02You can generate more molecules by partly burning carbon to carbon monoxide than by burning it all the way to carbon dioxide.
00:20:11And the more molecules there are beating on the piston, the more power you're going to get.
00:20:20So that was the reason why best power is a slightly rich mixture.
00:20:28And that, in turn, is why people who are trying to read spark plugs with a little illuminated magnifier
00:20:38are looking down into the shell of the plug to see if somewhere along the length of the otherwise white insulator,
00:20:52this is during a plug chop, clean plugs are used, that's why I'm saying white,
00:20:56way up inside, there must be a dark ring which shows that there is some excess carbon in the mixture.
00:21:08Because if there isn't, you're not at best power.
00:21:13Now, also people discovered that when they went too rich or when they went too lean, power dropped.
00:21:22Why should that be?
00:21:26Well, if you throw a bunch of sand into a fire,
00:21:32the sand is carrying away some of the heat from combustion,
00:21:37and the combustion becomes, dwindles away.
00:21:42Same thing happens if you supply anything extra in the fuel mixture.
00:21:46If you have extra air, that air is not going to participate in combustion,
00:21:51but it will be heated by it, and it will carry away that energy rather than letting it
00:21:57drum on the piston crown.
00:22:00Same thing if it's too rich.
00:22:03Even today, you will still hear people who will say,
00:22:06well, you know, the way to make power is the more gas you can put to her,
00:22:10the better she'll run.
00:22:12No, the more mixture, the more best power mixture you can put to her.
00:22:21Because if you simply add gasoline, you're making the mixture rich.
00:22:25Combustion is becoming cooler so that it can't propagate as quickly.
00:22:29So it's the same thing as retarding the timing.
00:22:34And the extra material, in this case fuel, that you're supplying,
00:22:39is carrying away heat that should be beating on the piston crowns.
00:22:46And this is where I want to ask you about two-stroke oil,
00:22:49because you're putting that in the gas.
00:22:51Oh, this was a great topic for Gordon Jennings all those years ago.
00:22:59It reminds me of a fellow that bought from the Kawasaki dealership
00:23:06that I used to be a partner in, bought an A1R in 1969
00:23:11when there were not enough TV2s to go around.
00:23:15Sometimes the revolution is not supplied in the necessary quantities.
00:23:19Anyways, anyway, this fellow takes his A1R to Daytona
00:23:23and he goes out into practice and seizes.
00:23:27And he comes to me and he says, I seized my bike.
00:23:31What am I going to do?
00:23:33And I said, today's main jet for these bikes is 210.
00:23:38What main jet do you have?
00:23:40190.
00:23:40Well, I suggest you fit main jet 210, a fresh piston,
00:23:49clean up the cylinder, and you'll be going brave and well.
00:23:54So I didn't think about him for a while because I was at Daytona
00:23:58for other reasons to be his performance advisor.
00:24:02And so maybe an hour or so later, he comes back seized again.
00:24:08And I said, oh, did you put in the 210 main jets?
00:24:15No, I didn't.
00:24:18Well, what did you do?
00:24:20I put in more oil.
00:24:21You know, I figured oil makes it slippery and that'll stop it from seizing.
00:24:28And I said, no, it won't.
00:24:31What happens is when you add oil, you're allowing less fuel to enter the engine.
00:24:36You are leaning out the mixture.
00:24:40So it's 190 jets were too lean.
00:24:43Adding extra oil made it even leaner.
00:24:47And he went out and seized again.
00:24:50And then he decided, this is all too complicated for me.
00:24:54I'm done with it.
00:24:55And he loaded up and drove home 1,200 miles.
00:24:58Oh, boy.
00:25:00And this is so unfortunate because he had this fixed idea that he'd got somewhere
00:25:07that dumping extra oil in would make it, would reduce friction.
00:25:13And whereas the actual problem was he was jetted down toward peak power, but air-cooled two-strokes
00:25:25couldn't cool at a peak power mixture.
00:25:29They had to run a couple of sizes rich.
00:25:32So 190 main jet plus two sizes, 210 main jet.
00:25:41And Gordon Jennings talked about adding oil until you were 10 to 1, 10 parts fuel, one part lubricant.
00:25:54But of course, years later, Yamaha ran a whole bunch of testing on different two-stroke oils.
00:26:02And they concluded that some oils had less effect on octane number, but weren't very good lubricants.
00:26:14It was a mess.
00:26:16And so we ended up with Castrol 747 and had good results.
00:26:23But it was definitely up to the individual.
00:26:26There was no big data you could go to and say, solve all my two-stroke problems, please.
00:26:31You had to get out there and break stuff.
00:26:36And it's sort of discouraging to seize.
00:26:40But you figure out why it happened.
00:26:43Well, you become your own expert, as you always say.
00:26:45And that's what's great about it.
00:26:47You know, it does cost mental energy.
00:26:50It costs dollars.
00:26:51So does college.
00:26:52Yep.
00:26:54So you're going to get an education one way or another.
00:26:59Life is like that.
00:27:01So this range of mixture strengths, if it's on the rich side, there's going to be free carbon in the combustion gas
00:27:12because there's not enough oxygen for the carbon and the oxygen to get married and live happily ever after, as carbon dioxide.
00:27:22And that's why, as it says in the Honda Bentley manual, exhaust smokes are thick.
00:27:32That's awesome.
00:27:33That's awesome.
00:27:35I like it.
00:27:36Yes.
00:27:36That's a great book because it's bringing some humor, maybe unintentionally.
00:27:44But when you're trying to learn all this stuff, you definitely need some humor.
00:27:50Yeah.
00:27:50Now, we've all heard about lean burn.
00:27:58But I just finished saying that as you lean down the mixture, you get one, less power, and two, the effect of retarded timing.
00:28:08So where's the benefit?
00:28:13It works like this.
00:28:18When combustion occurs, the temperature of the gas rises steeply.
00:28:27In ideal conditions, it's like 2,600 centigrade.
00:28:31It's just pip.
00:28:32As soon as combustion is complete, there is this really hot gas.
00:28:35That's the energy that's going to drive your motorcycle.
00:28:39And we like to think that that energy takes the form of much greater molecular velocities.
00:28:50They're just zooming around in there and colliding with everything, including the piston.
00:28:55And those collisions add up to pressure.
00:28:59But it isn't true.
00:29:02Not all of the energy goes into faster moving molecules.
00:29:07Some of the energy, and more and more of it as combustion becomes more intense at higher temperatures, goes into making the molecules vibrate or rotate.
00:29:19And rotating and vibrating, don't push pistons.
00:29:24The rotating, vibrating molecules go out the exhaust port, carrying a rich supply of energy that they just took from your engine.
00:29:34Whoa, less performance.
00:29:37So it was discovered that as lean combustion reduces combustion temperature, because it's having to heat all this extra air,
00:29:51molecular vibration and rotation were greatly diminished.
00:29:58So you were getting more of the heat energy in the form of velocity and wasting less in the form of these other motions.
00:30:08There's also the question of dissociation.
00:30:11When combustion is very hot, when combustion is very hot, some molecules are broken apart.
00:30:19And later when conditions cool off, they will come together and form molecules again.
00:30:27That's dissociation.
00:30:29But in running engines, dissociated molecules generally go flushing out the exhaust port, carrying the energy that it took to break those bonds that hold the molecule together, carrying that energy away with them.
00:30:46Bring that back.
00:30:47We want that.
00:30:49Well, dissociation is also decreased by the cooler combustion at lean mixtures.
00:30:57So engines have been built to run leaner and leaner, to get more energy out of the hot combustion gas in the form of mechanical drive to the crankshaft, and less going out the pipe in these other forms.
00:31:20So, finally, they get down to a mixture of 18 to 1 and ignition is becoming intermittent.
00:31:31Now, what do we do?
00:31:32We'd like maybe to run it 23 to 1.
00:31:37Well, turns out that one way to do it is, a lot of ways for it drives,
00:31:44one way to do it is to create a rich zone that exists only at the spark plug.
00:31:50It's called stratified charge because you have the whole cylinder filled with lean mixture, but you have this rich zone,
00:31:58which is sort of like one person wearing strong perfume in a large room.
00:32:03The effects are local.
00:32:08So, this other problem, other methods of igniting, plasma igniters have been tried, laser igniters, more and more energy being dumped in.
00:32:24But then, of course, the problem with stratified charge is that there will be some production of,
00:32:34there will be some dissociation and some molecular rotations and vibrations in the zone around the spark plug.
00:32:40Well, people naturally got interested in the details of combustion.
00:32:50I believe I may have said in another podcast that Honda created an emissions group with 10 engineers in it quite early
00:33:01because they wanted to know the details of combustion.
00:33:05They wanted to know what would speed combustion up, for example.
00:33:10And they found that combustion was speeded up by saving the energy of the fast inrushing intake stream
00:33:22by creating a zone in which that high velocity can be stored in rotation.
00:33:33We've spoken before about axial swirl.
00:33:36Well, the intake port comes to the cylinder on a tangent, like directing a hose into a bucket you're filling
00:33:43and making the water spin around, or causing tumble in which material from two intake valves
00:33:52goes to the opposite cylinder wall down to the piston crown and back up in a tumbling motion,
00:33:59which is recently on the BMW R12 G slash G slash S launch.
00:34:07There's a hose on the intake of that engine because it's an air oil cooled flat twin.
00:34:20There's a little hose on the top of the intake that induces tumble.
00:34:24That helps that motor get through Euro 5, and they run, I want to say, 12 to 1 compression on that as well,
00:34:31which is pretty impressive.
00:34:31But anything we can do to get tumble, they had to add it.
00:34:36So what these various things, axial swirl, tumble, et cetera, they're just a bank in which you store intake energy
00:34:43so that as the piston makes the combustion space very small near top dead center,
00:34:49that that motion does not just die out because there's so many things sticking out like valve cutaways in the piston
00:34:58and what have you, or a great big dome on the piston that's in the way of everything.
00:35:02They are providing intentionally open space in the combustion chamber in which the process of turning that single motion
00:35:16into many tiny vortices can take place smoothly and without killing the motion.
00:35:23Because if you fill a cylinder with a fuel-air mixture, I saw this done in a school assembly when I was maybe 14.
00:35:38The person presenting this had a big lucite cylinder.
00:35:44He made a mixture inside of it, and then he fished out his lighter because in those days everyone smoked.
00:35:50Everyone had a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, and he held the match of the lighter up to the open mouth of the thing,
00:35:57and it went, borrp.
00:36:01It took a second or two for the flame to go two feet, the length of this plexiglass tube.
00:36:12When the mixture is still, flame propagates very slowly.
00:36:18Without charge motion, the internal combustion engine is impossible.
00:36:25The flame cannot keep up with the motion of the engine.
00:36:30So turbulence is essential to combustion speed.
00:36:36Now, we know that as an engine speeds up, the intake process is being completed in less time.
00:36:44So that means the intake velocity must be higher.
00:36:47This is a trap in engine design because people are interested in peak power.
00:36:56They're working on the dyno.
00:36:57They're jiggling their cams around, and finally they've got this tremendous peak power.
00:37:02And they go out to ride, and they find that things got no midrange.
00:37:08It doesn't accelerate.
00:37:11Well, why not?
00:37:14Because they fixed it so that when intake velocity is lower, flame speed will be lower, and torque will be lower.
00:37:25So there's always a compromise in the design of an engine between all the things you'd love to do to make peak power and win the dyno contest and the practical things that add up to a rideable motorcycle, which is what we're getting now from the industry.
00:37:42These KTM's, these MTs from Yamaha, they have wide, flat torque of a kind that was unheard of 20 years ago.
00:37:56And one of the tools for achieving this is to maintain adequate turbulence at all the engine speeds that you're interested in actually using.
00:38:08Unlike the Madman Eyeball, Bloody Eyeball 600 rider of 2005, who considers that letting the tachometer drop below 12 is a black mark against his soul.
00:38:28Now, those were exciting times.
00:38:31Fantastic motorcycles.
00:38:33They were designed for what?
00:38:35Not to ride.
00:38:36They were designed to win Daytona Supersport races because the bike that won the Supersport race at Daytona was going to have a bump, bump, bump in sales.
00:38:50And so those bikes were designed not for the consumer, but for a promotions department.
00:38:57And I love that.
00:38:59I think that's just wonderful.
00:39:01You should have heard the disappointment.
00:39:03I was driving to Las Vegas for a dealer show of some manufacturer, and I was stopping at the gas station.
00:39:11And I always talk to the kids who stop on motorcycles.
00:39:14And there's this kid on a Yamaha R6, which was an incredible track bike and less incredible as a street bike.
00:39:22Pretty fun, but not a lot of mid-range.
00:39:24Very high RPM.
00:39:25Pretty aggressive chassis.
00:39:29And he had them.
00:39:30I asked him how he liked it, and he's like, yeah, it's pretty good.
00:39:33And he was sort of not, you know, he was not feeling the stoke.
00:39:36And I said, well, you know, what did you have before?
00:39:41And he's like, well, I had a Kawasaki 636.
00:39:44And, you know, I think it was a little bit better on the street.
00:39:50And he's totally right.
00:39:50That was a great bike.
00:39:51You know, 636 was softer, wider seat, but it had a big, fat mid-range.
00:39:57It was the 600 that was made for the street.
00:39:59But we all wanted 15,000 RPM, and we all want, in our minds, we all want to win Daytona.
00:40:06And we'd better have the tool to do it just in case.
00:40:09That's how I just...
00:40:10That was an era.
00:40:11Yeah, it was.
00:40:12That was an era.
00:40:12Well, in the middle 60s, people became concerned with urban pollution, air pollution.
00:40:22And a lot of it, of course, is traceable to industry.
00:40:25And it's hard to clean up industry because their lobbyists are in D.C. 24-7.
00:40:33But a common man drives a car and woman.
00:40:36And so cars got the axe from the emission control people.
00:40:44What they found was three major forms of emission.
00:40:49Unburned hydrocarbons, which means, originally it meant carburetors, had to be set at a compromised mixture.
00:40:58Rich enough not to be lean in fall or early spring when the air is cold.
00:41:08And not to be so rich in summer when the air is warm that they stumble.
00:41:15So all these vehicles, through riding season, are rich.
00:41:20They're pouring out unburned hydrocarbons.
00:41:23They're floating around, waiting to be operated on by other forces.
00:41:32Another emission was, of course, carbon monoxide, CO, rather than CO2.
00:41:39CO is carbon monoxide.
00:41:43And it's something that you don't remember.
00:41:49I remember, you know, I remember when we made chlorine gas in chem lab and I took a lung fall.
00:41:58Oh, boy.
00:41:59Yeah.
00:41:59God.
00:42:00I remember that.
00:42:01That was a pollutant.
00:42:03And I felt strongly polluted.
00:42:05But CO, you have a few whiffs of that.
00:42:08You're sitting in traffic.
00:42:09Dum, dum, dum, dum.
00:42:10You're breathing it in.
00:42:12In the 1960s.
00:42:14And you're not falling off your motorcycle dead.
00:42:17But these people are studying this whole thing from the ground up.
00:42:23So we have unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide.
00:42:27And the third and most troublesome is created at combustion temperatures above roughly 1500 Fahrenheit.
00:42:38It is oxides of nitrogen.
00:42:41Now, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen.
00:42:47And when the Manhattan Project was preparing to test its first implosion bomb, the Trinity test, there were people sort of biting their nails because they said, what if this sets the atmosphere on fire?
00:43:05Oh, well, it can't happen because I did.
00:43:09Here's the back of the envelope where I did my calculation.
00:43:12Well, the project had a certain momentum and they went ahead and exploded the thing and it worked perfectly.
00:43:18And it didn't set the atmosphere on fire.
00:43:20But in internal combustion engines operating at high throttle under intense conditions produce quite a lot of nitrogen oxide.
00:43:31And the late dyno operator Jim Ciccala talked about the sharp smell of nitrogen oxides in the dyno room.
00:43:41These things, nitrogen oxides, NO, NO2, et cetera, referred to as NOX, where X may be any number, pick one.
00:43:53They, in conjunction with solar radiation on clear days, participate in chemical reactions that produce smog.
00:44:07So it is called photochemical smog.
00:44:10And when I stood on the straightaway at Ontario Motor Speedway, which is now housing development, and looked straight up, I saw green fingers of gas streaming overhead.
00:44:22So, like the great smog of London, 1952, this affects the young, those with a pre-existing lung condition, and the elderly, whose hold on life is not what it once was.
00:44:40So, it became a strong situation motivating government and industry to reduce the emissions of these three from automobile engines.
00:45:01Now, my late friend Ron Burns said, you ever sit in traffic and smell a sulfuric acid?
00:45:08That's a legal pollutant.
00:45:11The catalytic converter turns those sulfur compounds in the exhaust stream into sulfuric acid.
00:45:19Well, I tell you what, Kevin, you know, I have been sitting in traffic my whole life growing up in California.
00:45:23I've been around combustion engines.
00:45:26And an 86 Toyota, a car of the 80s, the smell of the exhaust gas is different than the smell of a later car or an earlier, right?
00:45:35Like, they all have a different smell because we were treating it a certain way to work on it.
00:45:41So, can I make the dumb observation of, okay, we get our ideal mixture in our 67 Ford Mustang, and it's going to be on the rich side, or my 69 F250.
00:45:56But I said to my carburetor guy, Bob, at RPM Carburetor, Bob, this thing always acts rich.
00:46:02You're an expert.
00:46:03Could you just make it right?
00:46:05And he took it down a couple sizes.
00:46:07He's like, oh, yeah.
00:46:08He just crisped it out.
00:46:09It was really nice.
00:46:10And it got better gas mileage, and it actually ran nicer.
00:46:13So, we have that, and we need to, okay, let's lean it out.
00:46:17We'll lean it out because we'll reduce our hydrocarbons that way.
00:46:20It might get a little bit more efficient.
00:46:23But then it gets hotter combustion, and then that's when we get our NOx, right?
00:46:27Yeah.
00:46:28Our nitrogen oxides.
00:46:29Yeah.
00:46:30And then that's why one of the first steps was EGR, exhaust gas recirculation.
00:46:36Yes, because by putting inert material into the intake stream, it reduced combustion temperature.
00:46:45And those systems, as it is, I'm familiar with this deeply now because I have this 89 Ford,
00:46:51and I've been messing with it, trying to make it run like a new truck.
00:46:55And I've watched the vacuum pattern on the valve.
00:47:00So, the EGR valve is stuck on the side of this big gooseneck EFI intake twin butterflies.
00:47:06And then the pipe goes down to the exhaust.
00:47:09And there's always a tiny, there's like an inch of vacuum when the engine's running.
00:47:15And then if you dip into the throttle, it'll go, say, to 10 inches.
00:47:21And that's opening the valve and bleeding exhaust in.
00:47:24And at the same time, the computer's advancing the ignition timing because the combustion is going to be slower.
00:47:30So, it's trying to make it efficient to happen at the right time.
00:47:34If you go wide open throttle, EGR closes.
00:47:37It gives you everything you want, all the fuel, all the power.
00:47:42So, dipping in 10 inches at cruise, I want to say 15 inches.
00:47:46So, it's opening more and you're getting that much advanced timing.
00:47:52And I'd say it's actually a system on the Ford.
00:47:55It works pretty darn good.
00:47:56The truck runs really nice.
00:47:58I had it, had it, had it, the sniffer.
00:48:00And it was very low emissions, you know, for its era.
00:48:02It was well within, well under the limits.
00:48:07I'd say the only downside is it puts that dirty business in your nice clean intake area.
00:48:11And that's probably the worst of it because when I took it apart to rebuild the motor, it was gross.
00:48:16The intake manifold was just, ugh.
00:48:19It's like, that's the worst part of it.
00:48:21I'd say, generally, it works fine.
00:48:23I mean, the truck is really beautifully drivable and it makes a ton of torque.
00:48:27And if you really got to hit it, you get everything you need.
00:48:32Well, remember that there was a time when motorcycles had air injection into the exhaust ports.
00:48:39The idea there was you want to get as far upstream as you can where the gas is hot enough to burn the unburned hydrocarbons if you give them some fresh oxygen.
00:48:54That was one of the systems.
00:48:56Another system was the general lean-out.
00:48:59We aren't going to have drive summertime cars on October jetting anymore.
00:49:07And the result was poor starting, stumbling, poor acceleration.
00:49:15And then they decided, well, what about post-treatment?
00:49:20Let's put, let's find some catalysts that will help the unburned hydrocarbons, a dating service that will help the unburned hydrocarbons unite with oxygen molecules and be transformed into stuff that gets up your nose without any ill effects.
00:49:42But it's our very knowledge of combustion and our ability to control everything with all the sensors and our very powerful little ECU guys that's allowed us to, we don't need EGR.
00:49:54Nobody uses EGR.
00:49:55Nobody puts, I mean, they do on diesels, but on a gas engine, there's no EGR.
00:50:00We're not doing that anymore.
00:50:01Because we're making the combustion in the first place so much better, we don't need as much of a dating service on the tailpipe side to take care of the stuff that isn't getting converted into the purest form in the combustion chamber.
00:50:17A catalyst is something that participates in a chemical reaction without itself being changed or consumed.
00:50:24And that's why I call it a dating service.
00:50:28The dating service doesn't get married.
00:50:30It just enables others to do so.
00:50:35And there are precious metals in catalytic systems, which is why you may come back having parked your car somewhere you shouldn't have and find you have no CatCon anymore.
00:50:49Um, the CatCons light off, begin reacting quicker, the closer they are to the engine.
00:51:00Uh, this is not so easy to do on a motorcycle, but that's what that big stainless suitcase underneath the engine on so many motorcycles.
00:51:08Now the CatCon is in there as well as the muffler and little pipes come out through which the exhaust can seep.
00:51:16Yeah, O2, they want, what is it, 600 degrees, I think, an O2 sensor starts to work.
00:51:23Yeah.
00:51:24So having it close, you know, if you look at your Triumph twins, they're right there, the infields are right there on the, on the head almost.
00:51:33Now that he's mentioned O2 sensors, Oxy sensors, uh, this allowed a closed loop, um, mixture control system.
00:51:45Um, most motorcycles have had N alpha systems, which basically, um, are mapped on a dyno.
00:51:54Uh, and they assume that every motorcycle produced to that same standard will run properly with the maps for ignition and, uh, fueling that were worked out for it.
00:52:08Um, and N is RPM and alpha is throttle angle, but further refinement is possible if you can make a controlled loop and have a device that says, smells like it's a little rich to me, tone it down a bit.
00:52:26And you find that the mixture, instead of sort of drifting off in, in a unproductive direction is constantly being corrected back to, uh, the ideal curve.
00:52:39Yeah.
00:52:39Cold start, you get a map and then the O2 sensor heats up 0.45 volts is what it, it looks for.
00:52:48And it switches and it goes lean, rich, lean, rich.
00:52:51And it's just like right on there, 0.45.
00:52:53Yep.
00:52:54You can watch it happen.
00:52:55You can watch it go close, close loop.
00:52:58And, uh, you can have your volt meter on there.
00:52:59And sometimes it takes a second to figure it out.
00:53:02Like it'll go back to open and the way it goes.
00:53:05Well, the wonderful thing that happened next is still with us.
00:53:09And it has, I think pretty much satisfied everyone that emissions are not a barrier to good performance.
00:53:19And that is, uh, digital engine control, ECU, uh, that is, uh, based on, uh, fuel injection and variable ignition timing.
00:53:33This is all worked out.
00:53:35Uh, it's helped by the Oxy sensor, but with this kind of control, you can have excellent performance.
00:53:44Comprehensive, comprehensive, accurate sensing.
00:53:47Yes.
00:53:48And processing.
00:53:50And you can end up with a strong performing motorcycle that is not in any sense a disappointment in the way that the stutter and stall bikes were.
00:54:00I remember a period at Daytona when the PA would crackle to life every few minutes and say,
00:54:08will Mark Dobeck, please go to garage 29.
00:54:11Well, Mark Dobeck was making jet kits, needle kits, making little washers that you would drop your metering needle through this little washer.
00:54:22It would lift the needle up just enough to enrich the mixture so that your engine did not stutter and stall, but ran like a regular motorbike.
00:54:33And of course, in the Daytona super bike races or super sport races, um, Mark Dobeck was, was the universal consultant.
00:54:42Will Mark Dobeck, please go to garage 29.
00:54:47So today, uh, there, people are, are bemoaning the fact that, oh, Dorna has established yaw control on racing motorcycles.
00:55:06If the back end hangs out too far, it kind of tells the engine to cool it until it stops swinging quickly out of control.
00:55:16The rider should be doing that.
00:55:18Well, what about the poor tuner, the guy doing this, looking at spark plugs, whipping the carburetors off, taking the bowls off, changing the jets?
00:55:33Doesn't have a job anymore, that guy.
00:55:35At the racetrack, nobody looks at a spark plug.
00:55:39The O2 sensor looks at the spark plug now.
00:55:42And the result is better running in every respect.
00:55:49Yes, the top tuner was a, an admired priesthood within the narrow confines of motorcycle racing.
00:55:59Not everybody goes.
00:56:01But, uh, there's no need for that now because we have something better.
00:56:08And, oh, well, it's so complicated and it's going to go wrong all the time.
00:56:15That didn't happen.
00:56:17Doesn't go wrong.
00:56:18Micro circuits are, as the industry so tediously says, robust.
00:56:26And like the bouncer at the club.
00:56:30So, I think it's good.
00:56:33We've come a tremendous distance.
00:56:35Yeah, massively tunable too.
00:56:36I mean, you can take, if you want to make a track bike out of some street bike and you want to put cams into it and all that stuff, it's, it's just click, click on the laptop.
00:56:46You know, there's no messing around.
00:56:48You're not guessing.
00:56:49You're not reading plugs.
00:56:50You're just saying like, that's what the O2 sensor says.
00:56:53And I want this for this power reading.
00:56:56And you just plug it in.
00:56:59You either put a piggyback on like your Dynojet or you just remap the ECU.
00:57:04You can just get in there and crack it.
00:57:06And there's plenty of people who sell you a pigtail and some software and you just tell it what you want.
00:57:11Well, when Matt Mladen was first at Suzuki, his results were a bit disappointing.
00:57:20Yoshimura advertised for a computer specialist to help with engine tuning.
00:57:29And who should respond but Amar Bazaaz, who was an atmospheric scientist, sciences student, graduate down here in Amherst, Massachusetts, where the flowering trees on the city streets are so beautiful in the springtime.
00:57:49And Amar came and whipped that situation into good order.
00:57:59Mladen was accustomed to saying to people who wanted to change this or change that, forget that nonsense.
00:58:06I'll just do more pushups.
00:58:09The rider was going to compensate for all these problems.
00:58:12Amar was able to show Matt Mladen that with a few changes, he would finish races not only first, but able to go to the party afterwards rather than collapse on his bed in his leathers and sleep until morning.
00:58:32So it's a good thing not to get too far into nostalgia with technology because I had the experience of carefully setting the points opening, points gap, and the timing.
00:58:59Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on the points plate to move it just a little bit.
00:59:04Ah, and the needle on the dial gauge telling me the piston motion would sweep up to the timing point and the cellophane between the contact breakers would.
00:59:17Well, how about even, yeah, how about evening it out on a twin where you have the two lobes?
00:59:22And so they're never perfect.
00:59:24So you have to alter the timing by changing the gap ever so slightly, the points gap.
00:59:29So that you get the spark happening at the time you want.
00:59:32If you're acting crazy.
00:59:34Now, the cam operating the points on this magneto was out at the end of a crankshaft extension.
00:59:44So that anything the crankshaft was doing, rattling around in its bearings, was magnified out there.
00:59:51So I set this nicely.
00:59:53I started the engine and warmed it up.
00:59:55Then I thought, let's just check again.
00:59:58It was timing, points gapped, all screwed up.
01:00:03So my friend, again, the late Ron Burns, whose reason to live were, among other things, two Vincents, a square four, and a long succession of two-stroke racing motorcycles.
01:00:16Ron said, just as it's foolish to constantly be cleaning house when you could just wait for a steady state in which the amount of dirt tracked in equals the amount of dirt tracked out.
01:00:32It'll never get any dirtier than that.
01:00:35In similar fashion, he said, it'll rattle itself into perfect timing as often as it rattles out.
01:00:41Is that a philosophy for progress and success?
01:00:49But I can muster a little bit of nostalgia for this.
01:00:54I can remember sitting cross-legged, facing the left side of an A1R, which had the ignition unit behind the cylinders, and setting the timing.
01:01:05It was a lovely afternoon.
01:01:07Practice was over.
01:01:08I was looking forward to dinner, and I thought, this is good.
01:01:13I'm loving this moment.
01:01:15Well, I think folks are getting thirsty, so I'll just go ahead and talk about the VALICET.
01:01:19Okay.
01:01:20BTH Magneto points.
01:01:23That stands for British Thompson Houston, by the way.
01:01:27Yeah.
01:01:27And it was a superior Magneto for the day.
01:01:31They got put out of business by Lucas, who was able to be a little more cost-effective, perhaps at a minor expense in performance, but a beautifully reliable system.
01:01:42I mean, people denigrate the Magneto, and then we say, well, you realize that thing is 85 years old, and it's still going.
01:01:50Yeah.
01:01:51It's really okay.
01:01:521903, 1903, they were getting to be quite common in cars.
01:01:58Yeah, I mean, the worst of it is the capacitors wound inside the armature, and if that goes bad, you've got to get in there and do that.
01:02:04And there's little capacitor things you can stick on the outside, and there have been solutions.
01:02:10But it's reliable.
01:02:12It's pretty good.
01:02:12This has an automatic timing device, ATD, with weights on the gear, and so when it spins, it opens.
01:02:19But you're really getting an idle spark, and then you're getting an all-in spark, and that's it.
01:02:27And that's how it was on my Norton Commando.
01:02:30I had probably one of the last Norton Commandos running on a good set of points because it was a very low mile.
01:02:36I sold it, and then I ended up buying it back years later, and the guy did not maintain the ignition.
01:02:44And the mechanical advance had all the red fretting, and it was all wobbly and sticky, and it ran horrible.
01:02:51And it wouldn't idle because it wouldn't go back to idle timing.
01:02:54The weights would hang out.
01:02:56And electronic ignition, man.
01:02:59I put a TriSpark on the recommendation of my friend Bill Getty from JRC Engineering, who does all kinds of aftermarket British parts.
01:03:08And TriSpark's amazing.
01:03:12It's got idle stabilization curve and just transformative.
01:03:17You do that with some good carburetion, AMO Premieres or something, where they've updated the AMO Concentric to a nice idle circuit and better materials.
01:03:28And, man, they just sit there at idle.
01:03:32It's really nice to do it on the cars, too.
01:03:34A couple little Jaguars with programmable distributors.
01:03:39Bluetooth.
01:03:40Bluetooth.
01:03:42Makes a huge difference.
01:03:43I don't know.
01:03:44You were talking about nostalgia, and I think about nostalgia quite a bit with old bikes because I do want the old bike experience, and there's basically nothing really modern on the velo.
01:03:53It does have a Premier Concentric, which it would have had a monoblock.
01:03:59I don't know where the draw the line is, but I'd draw the line at not walking or trying to walk less, you know, like uninterrupted motoring.
01:04:07Well, in 1977, I took a D model, a TZ250.
01:04:14Oh, take a drink, folks.
01:04:17To Daytona.
01:04:18And I set the timing for first practice at 2 millimeters BTDC, which is about 20 degrees.
01:04:27And the reason that two-stroke combustion is faster than four-stroke combustion is that the transfer process takes place in a very short time, so the velocity is very high.
01:04:38So 20 degrees BTDC, we go out, practice, Rich Schlachter up, as the horsey people say, and we got a baseline.
01:04:51Then I pulled it back to 1.7, I think, picked up 300 revs.
01:05:02Why?
01:05:03The CDI Magneto that came stock on that motorcycle had fixed timing.
01:05:07It was always going to fire at 20 degrees if it was set at 2 millimeters, no matter what the RPM.
01:05:15That is a compromise.
01:05:17It is too much advance for peak torque where the flame speed is very high because the exhaust pipe is working like gangbusters.
01:05:27The waves are just charging back and forth in there.
01:05:29It's like trying to cross one of those eight-lane roads in Thailand.
01:05:37This, where am I now?
01:05:42We changed the timing to 1.7.
01:05:44Yeah.
01:05:46What we did was we took out the compromise on top end by retarding the timing.
01:05:55So instead of the engine being firing a little bit too early in order not to fire absurdly late in mid-range, where the pipe is just starting to chug a little air,
01:06:11we slid the compromise toward what Daytona has most of, high-speed roadway, and gained 300 revolutions without any other change.
01:06:24Eventually, we ended up at 1.6.
01:06:28And if you get out the instructive manual for TZ500, it shows a curve for that ignition, which had variable ignition timing.
01:06:4336 degrees at 6,000 RPM, which is well below any usable power, and 15 degrees at 12,000.
01:06:54So the electronics people said, well, wait a minute.
01:07:02We don't like these compromises.
01:07:04You must not like them either.
01:07:05You want to have too much here and not enough there and having to constantly fiddle with it on, oh, this is a different racetrack.
01:07:13It's just like listening to doctors saying that we should use leeches, you know?
01:07:18It was the best we had, but there you are, you know, pro-race guy with the pro-race bike, and you have one ignition timing.
01:07:29You don't have any variation.
01:07:31It's just, it's so shocking, right?
01:07:33It's just, so the electronics people said, you know, you can have the exact timing that the engine wants at every RPM.
01:07:43If you want that, we can build that for you this week because they had all, at that time, radar systems were frequency hopping automatically
01:07:55and remaining stable while all these variables are just thundering all over the place.
01:08:03Military electronics had accomplished wonders that few people know about.
01:08:10I don't know about them, except that they exist.
01:08:12And so what they were able to do was not only to produce an ignition timing curve that was optimized for best performance,
01:08:26they could also say, well, what about rain?
01:08:28We want to take the sharp edge off the torque.
01:08:31That's what Kenny Roberts did at Daytona one year when he said, let's pull it back just a little bit, Kel.
01:08:38And Kel Carruthers pulled it back just a little bit.
01:08:40And that worked.
01:08:44So now, not only race bikes, but production bikes have multiple engine modes.
01:08:54And of course, I wonder about the supposedly coming era of self-driving cars.
01:09:02How will people express themselves with their automobile in traffic?
01:09:07Will the mode, the driving mode say normal, sport, and unpleasant person?
01:09:19How will this be managed?
01:09:22Anyway, these are, we could talk endlessly about all this stuff because any little bit of knowledge,
01:09:31when you start following it, you find, oh, well, there's a paper by a guy named Pounder.
01:09:37Oh, there's a, there's a lecture from this lecture series.
01:09:41There's all this information.
01:09:44And it's so fascinating.
01:09:47Sometimes I have a wonderful day when I learn some kernel that brings several things together
01:09:54so that my understanding is up a little bit.
01:09:58Nothing better than that.
01:10:00We, it was something we appreciate you about, about you, Kevin.
01:10:04So, no, I, what I like, so emissions laws really regulating emissions has driven us toward
01:10:10the most thorough understanding that we have now and that we should hope to progress even more.
01:10:17And we have all the control and we have all the sensors and we know what to do with it.
01:10:22You know, we were sort of roughing it in, in the EGR era, figuring out like, oh, well, the, the, you know,
01:10:29my positive crankcase ventilator on the Ford is tied to the ECU and it opens.
01:10:35It's not just some spring that's working on the vacuum.
01:10:39It's a little smarter than that.
01:10:40And, and we, and we saw benefits from that.
01:10:43And now the benefits are, you know, things back here where we have a R12, uh, excuse me,
01:10:49R1300 GS with, um, 130 horsepower and spectacular torque and a torque curve.
01:10:57That's just as flat and broad as you could.
01:11:00As a table, as a table, Tom.
01:11:02Oh, it's just engines.
01:11:03And this is, this is what people were striving for from the beginning.
01:11:08Think of all the poor young dirt track racers who tried the hot super cam and couldn't get off the
01:11:16corner because as soon as the engine came on the cam, away with the rear tire, no traction.
01:11:22I'm eating dirt as I slide head first up the track.
01:11:26Hope somebody doesn't run over me.
01:11:28What those people needed was this flat, predictable, no surprise torque curve.
01:11:36And, and it's not low.
01:11:38That's the other part.
01:11:39It's not low.
01:11:40It's, it's hugely abundant.
01:11:41And that's, what's great about it.
01:11:44One of the things that is great about it, of course, is compression ratio because compression
01:11:49ratio, unlike cam timing, unlike intake port diameter is not RPM dependent.
01:11:58It helps your engine at every speed at which it runs every speed.
01:12:04So why didn't they just boost compression way up there years ago?
01:12:08Because the engines would detonate themselves to pieces because they would, they were air cooled
01:12:15monstrosities that overheated almost automatically.
01:12:19Like it was a feature.
01:12:22And so now engines can be protected by knock detection and spark retard systems.
01:12:31It, it detects some noise that sounds like detonation.
01:12:36It has, it can discriminate between mechanical sound and the sound of detonation waves hitting
01:12:42the cylinder.
01:12:44And it pulls the timing back until the detonation goes away.
01:12:48And then it puts the timing back.
01:12:49And if there's no detonation, you carry on like that, but otherwise it jumps back and forth and keeps
01:12:57your engine from detonating itself to pieces because you bought gas in a rural gas station
01:13:04where they get a delivery every six months, regular, some old gas down there.
01:13:10Well, these are, these are great benefits to the motorcyclist.
01:13:18It's just like rider aids, man.
01:13:20You know, it's we, we, all we ever wanted was more torque, right?
01:13:24That's all we ever wanted.
01:13:25Usable, abundant torque.
01:13:27And we got it.
01:13:27And rider aids, we want faster, safer lap times.
01:13:32And that's what we got.
01:13:33And of course, people are saying that, uh, yaw control is some radical new idea.
01:13:39No, in the nineties, I went to talk to, um, Earl Werner at Harley Davidson.
01:13:48He'd come from Corvette where he was in charge of that GM division and he became chief engineer
01:13:54at Harley for a period of time.
01:13:55And he said, why can't we have yaw control on a motorcycle?
01:13:59Well, because one of the things that is hardest to control is if you're accelerating on a surface
01:14:07that has some sand or gravel on it and the back end starts to step out, chances are you'll
01:14:16tip over.
01:14:18But if there's a system that is sort of saying that's enough now, it could help.
01:14:25And that's 30 years ago.
01:14:2630 years ago, they were talking about yaw control for motorcycles.
01:14:32It was coming in on cars.
01:14:34There's no reason not to implement it.
01:14:37And in MotoGP, where it was just, um, tried out at the last, uh, Grand Prix, the people
01:14:47who put the system forward said, it's optional.
01:14:51Can turn it up or down, you can turn it off.
01:14:54So where's the harm?
01:14:56Of course, the harm, as far as the old timers is concerned, is it's taking away functions
01:15:04that belong to the rider.
01:15:07Yeah.
01:15:07Well, we did an entire podcast about that.
01:15:09So you can go back and, and find our electronics killing racing.
01:15:13I think that's what the title was on that one.
01:15:15And their, their answer is no, they're not.
01:15:18No, they're not.
01:15:19They're, they're making it, uh.
01:15:21The lack of them, the lack of electronics was killing riders.
01:15:25Just the Navy cannot afford to train enough naval aviators to waste any of them making a ramp
01:15:36strike on a carrier that's in a heavy swell.
01:15:40So they have auto throttle and all that other fancy electronics to make sure that pilot gets
01:15:48on the deck, picks up the third wire.
01:15:51And minutes later, he's relaxing with a tall, cool one.
01:15:55Yep.
01:15:55That's a good outcome in my way of thinking.
01:15:57And so, um, in motor racing, it used to be that on a bad year, uh, the Isle of Man TT would
01:16:09kill five riders.
01:16:12Now, race teams, Grand Prix teams basically told their riders, oh, and another thing, no
01:16:20Isle of Man anything for you because we can't afford to have you laid up or interred.
01:16:28So, we're trying to conserve people.
01:16:32People are still mourning the passing of Jarno Sarnan, who was a brilliant rider who was just
01:16:39at the point of becoming a 500cc champion when he was wiped out in an unnecessary crash.
01:16:48So, as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to see racing turn into a vintage class for people
01:16:56who want to see how motorcycling was in 1960.
01:17:00And on the street, it's not the best environment for a motorcyclist.
01:17:07So, he or she needs all the help that's available.
01:17:11And that's the way things go.
01:17:18Yeah.
01:17:19If you don't like it, there's always the comfort of nostalgia.
01:17:23What do you call that?
01:17:26Worship me at the altars of our fathers.
01:17:28Yes.
01:17:30Good one.
01:17:31Well, we like going on a, you know, we like our vintage riding, but, uh, I sure like the
01:17:38benefits available from electronic ignition and other things.
01:17:41You know, um, the Ignitec, it's this jet company.
01:17:44I got one of those on my 95 Ducati and it was transformative, a different motorcycle, better
01:17:50motorcycle.
01:17:51Yep.
01:17:52Well, thanks for listening, folks.
01:17:53That's it.
01:17:54Uh, we'll see you in the comments.
01:17:56I'm sure some of you have comments about emissions, uh, regulations.
01:18:01So, we'll see you down there.
01:18:03Uh, thank you for listening.
01:18:04We'll catch you next time.
01:18:05Don't forget those tiny particle accelerators in your spark plugs.
01:18:08Yes, particle accelerators.
01:18:11All right.
01:18:13Take care.
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