From:Mark Hill e-mail:hillm@canton.edu
Subject:Shower Head Date:Fri Mar 22 06:49:07 2013
The Cannonball exposes weekness that can only be learned on that type of brutal, non-stop competition. I watched three of the Wolfpack Hendersons run wounded. Bramwell's was the worst(he could only cruise about 75mph). Cutter, you got the video that day in Iowa when we were smoking the entire line of bikes. See if you can get it to Dave H. It would be cool if he could add it as a link. It was great smoking those HDs.

We had torn up some mainshafts on some of the bikes due to a materials compatibility issue. During one of our gas station engineering sessions, we began talking about taming the Henderson transmission.

Our modern motorcycles and dirt bikes all shower and pressurize the transmission. With the type of power we are making now, and on long, sustained pulls, it became apparent we were not cycling enough oil through the transmission. This was probably partially due to the line boring process I employed. The shims that I use between the bearing halves get bored 360 degrees along with the bearings.

Originally the Henderson shims were not set up like this. They stood back off the edges of the shafts which probably allowed for some oil in the rear bearing to effectively "puke" back around the small bevel gear (to use an engineering term)- completely inadequate in its own design as the lack of a 360 degree bearing is kicking the hell out of the hydrodynamic lubrication of the shaft itself.

Discussion of our situation led to the topic of the late model Indian Fours having a drilling off the pinion support bearing, showering the bevel gears with a jet of oil (1940 - 1942). Yes, Barry, I updated your '36 to this spec. We were pushing these bikes hard, and they let us know what worked and what didn't.

It would be very difficult to achieve the Indian style shower effect with a Henderson case due to the differences in geometry of the saddle support of the case. Everyone was in agreement that we needed to figure out how to get oil from the tail stub of the crankshaft to the transmission.

Mike Fockler (#65) offered up one of the suggestions that we think will yield big results. We would wire EDM, an oil hole, through the pinion gear at an angle to provide a shower effect to move more oil back to the transmission area to cycle oil through the system. This gets us a shower on the gears but it still does not address the lack of hydrodynamic lubrication of the main shaft. Wait until you see what we are doing with the main shaft.

TO BE CONTINUED...