That's a beautiful bike Gordon, something that Ed can aspire to as he toils away in his snowbound winter bunker. I agree with all of the above, but if Ed keeps his engine stock and just cleans up the ports, he shouldn't need to worry about all of the go fast goodies as long as he doesn't ride it outside of it's original design parameters.
He's already got a mild(ish) street cam and heavy duty springs if he wants to use them, but he's said that he's going to go back to stock items, so I think that if his bike won't be seeing too much redline action, it should just be a a good strong stocker.
As you've said above, one thing leads to another when you're building a hotrod engine, and quite often the end result can be disappointing, with increased wear, blown head gaskets and oil leaks (all of which I've experienced over the years) so a nice stock engine that is capable of doing lots of miles reliably over an engine with license losing potential but questionable performance and reliability wins hands down, IMHO.
I've got a friend who owns some really exotic motorcycles here in Melbourne (4 x CB1100R's, 2 x Bimota's, 1 x RC30, CX500 Turbo, etc etc) and he keeps them all stock standard. When we discussed hotting up old bikes his reply was that he enjoyed their reliability, and if he wanted to go faster, he'd just buy a faster bike. I couldn't help but think he was making a lot of sense. Cheers, Terry.
