I went through tons and tons of conversations with engine builders, racers, former turbo guys, etc trying to figure out the best way to get the compression down. Here are some of my earlier options and why I didn't.
Stock pistons ceramic coated. Swaintech has a very nice heat-resistant coating for $38/piston. This would take care of the heat side of things, but a cast piston just won't take much boost for long and I didn't wanna always be worried about it so this was scrapped.
Wiseco K836 forged kit with base gasket spacer. This was my next plan. I forget off the top of my head exactly how much I needed to raise the cylinders but I seem to recall dropping a full point every .035" or so. Wiseco's are 10.25:1, and with some chamber work I could get that to maybe 10:1 SCR, meaning I'd need atleast .060" of base gasket space to get back to turbo-friendly ranges. At that kind of spacing the stock cam chain won't reach anymore. Allegedly, according to a guy who used to put DOHC900 rods into his engines (1.5mm longer) and space them up you can make a timing chain fro #219 shifter-kart chain. This may have been a possibility still, but in the end the big valve pockets and overly large squish would have cost hp and made for a kludgy setup. Just not in the cards.
I also considered DOHC750 rods (1.5mm shorter) with Wisecos. Not convinced they're strong enough, and I'd have the same squish problems as above so this got scrapped as well.
Last possibility was F-head on a Wiseco kit. This would only get me down to somewhere around 9.5:1. Better, but not great for a turbo. Also, the overly large exhaust ports would make the turbo very sluggish. Add in the f-head reliability problems and cost to rebuild and I scrapped this idea as well.
I happened across a set of MTC forged 836 8:1 pistons earlier this year and got my hopes up, but when I sent them to Mike Rieck to be checked over and refurb’d they were found to be no good. 30 year old parts and all, I wasn’t all that surprised.
This brings me up to the present. I noticed that Dynoman listed stroker pistons with the pin moved. I figured a stroker piston might also work in a turbo so I eMailed him. He said they can get custom J&E pistons made in pretty much any compression ratio I wanted. So we settled on a set of forged 836 pistons in about 8:1. They’re gonna run the same rings as the Wiseco K836 kit because they’re easy to get, inexpensive, and good quality. APE tool steel wristpins finish it off.
At the moment I’m debating O-ringing the block. I’m not gonna be running all that much boost, but I probably oughta just do it and prevent trouble down the road.
Next on my to-do list is figure out the clutch basket/clutch pack necessary for this bike.