Feh. It's big but not new. Twenty years ago a bloke by the name of Lucky Kaiser here in Oz cut off the end two cyclinders from a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine and built a 5-litre V-twin around them. The clutch plate was so heavy he had to use compressed air to move it (for some bizarre reason people assumed the bottles were for nitro - on a 5-litre motorcycle?). I first saw it - in a manner of speaking - at the Sydney motorcycle show in 1985 (I think). It still had a fair bit of development work to go and when he took it outside and fired it up the front two rows of the crowd simply disappeared in blue smoke. I hope I still have that photo somewhere. Three years later he brought it to camping grounds of the 1988 Bicentennial Rally in Canberra and he took people for drags on it. I have no idea of its fate but I heard his next project was a bike that went around corners.
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A: Top-posters. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?
You can say that twice. I saw a fellow named E.J. Potter at Irwindale Drag Raceway in California on a 327-cubic-inch V-8 Chevrolet-powered motorcycle forty years ago. Lots of smoke, lots of noise, and well over 100mph in the standing-start quarter-mile on the crappy tires of that era.
