55Panman, yeah, Duncan Keller was the mechanic that would build motors for Vance Breese. I hung around Duncan's shop for years, between contract jobs I was working. Vance showed up one day coming home from Bonneville with the streamliner that later almost killed him. I learned he would not use impact wrenches, even to take things apart. He also taught me the racer's ethic--make due with available material, we are going to make the race. One thing I loved was when he asked the other mechanic to turn off the music he had blaring. Vance said, "I like music, but my life depends on this bike, and I don't want any distractions when I am working on it." To this day I tend to not have music playing when I work. Vance is into gyroplanes these days,
check out this video. People wonder if Vance's slow speech is because of the Bonneville crash, but I can assure you he had that slow measured voice ever since I knew him.
It was Vance and Duncan that figured out Vance's Sportster road race bike had way too much oil sloshing around the crankcase. They put in a flywheel oil restrictor and Duncan fashioned a second scavenge pump driven off the #2 cam, and they also put in a sump. One of the many problems of the 1977 and later cases is that they let all the oil drain into the crankcase. All the other racers told Vance he would be burning up engines, but without the oil sloshing around, the bike ran 10 degrees cooler. Years later I met a guy that did drag races and dirt track, and he said they were running flywheel oil restrictors for decades.
thefrenchowl, I can believe that finger pressure will move the dial indicators on a flywheel truing stand. It was at Duncan's shop that he showed me a 104CID big-bike engine he built to drag race. He had put oil scrapers on the wheels. He showed me where the scrapers had been worn at an angle by the wheel flexing, and it was not a little, more like 1/8 inch, some unbelievable amount. Until today I wondered if he was serious or if he had made some mistake, but now I have to believe that things are moving around a lot down there. Now I see why the manual talks about checking the crankpin flatness to the deck-- yeah, I could see that breaking all kinds of things.