Announcing New Kirkham Billet Aluminum 427 Block

[Guinness]

Very cool David! I sure wish I could have made it to the open house Saturday to see the wood prototype. Heads & Intake next, even cooler.

Jeff

[Aussie Mike]

This is awesome David. I wonder how long before someone orders a solid no water jacket block for a max effort FE based blown alcohol drag motor.

Just a thought David, Honda have been running bare aluminium bores in their CBR900 motors with good success. I can't remember what sort of ring pack they were running to do it but they seem to be reliable. Using billet you should be able to get a perfect surface finish on the aluminium bore with no porosity as you would with a cast block.

Nikasil has been arround for years and the technology is awesome. I used to mess arround with 2 stroke race bikes back in the 80's and a lot of the bikes back then used "chrome" bores or Nikasil. The bare aluminium of the cylinder bore is efectively electroplated with chromium or Nikasil. It's a very thin layer so the heat from combustion is conducted through it much faster than an iron liner. It's also very very hard. If a bike ran lean and nipped up or siezed very often the bore would be un marked and you would be racing again with just a new piston dropped in. A cylinder with an iron liner needed a re bore or a re sleeve.

The aircraft industry has beeen running chrome bores for even longer. many of your air cooled aero engines use them as they reduce weight, last longer and improve cooling. I tried to get some dammaged motorcycle cylinders replated at one of the aero engine plating companies but unfortunately the smallest bore they did was 4". We had to send them to Nikasil in Germany for plating.



Cheers

[David Kirkham]

U2,

Missed you this year. We had lots of cool things I would have shown you in that are hiding in the Skunksownia.

BossCER, We will bring one to the Bash...good idea!

WDZ, I miss things too. Usually too many things because I am working on billet blocks!

Mike,

I see you have been reading the same things I have been reading. People are probably wondering why everyone doesn't use Nikasil...cost. If Detroit can save a buck they will sell their mother. Nikasil is incredible stuff.

David