Going back to the infamous CE article, if you read between the lines you can pick out the info...first he refers to Gerry Pell (top LC tuner) that does work on his cranks.
Then in his tuning philosophy he refers to the combination of
crankcase pressures, in combinatin with big pipes and madder porting etc. He next refers to packing the crankshaft as being 'old mans route' and the 'wrong way' . He outlines a standard Lambo with box pipe as being 1.65:1 and a modern motoX machine as being 1.2:1.....and the fact that on a Lambretta that runs a decent pipe, you actually need to
increase the volume in the crankcase. He again goes on to repeat his statement yet again, that low
crankcase compression is one of the keys to making good power, and that you have to have the right pipe to work with it.
Finally, in the section at the end called 'inside the beast' his crank spec is listed as:
Modified Tino 'supercrank' webs, fitted with a long Japanese conrod and welded pin.
So you tell me......if HPC and crank stuffers are old mans route and the wrong way, and he repeatedly refers to crankcase pressure and crankcase volume as being key to making good power, he has top LC tuner Gerry Pell re-working his cranks, to use a long rod (presumably this a lower comp height piston with packer plate) and his
crank webs are 'modified'.......am i completely mad to be thinking that Charlie is running an LPC crank similar to ours and similar to MBs??
Mark Broadhurst was using these types of cranks back in 1990, and the scooter it was in is still running! Sean Brady has been doing them for a similar period in Vespas, and has more recently (amid much negative speculation
) being turning them out for Lambos.
Now Mark comments the following:
OK, I asked Paul Baker what cranks they were using in Stuarts bike, they said a low primary one, I ask if he had problems and the upshot was I said I would see if we could make a balanced, tighter LPC crankshaft for them to test. SRP Racetec run an LPC crank too, and I built the one in the thread before I set off on the Euro. Interestingly, I spoke to a tuner who said they get 3-4 bhp more on a RB with a LPC crank! They can not get the power from an RB without lowering the primary compression!
So........we dont have the graphs to show you back to back....but the evidence is there for all to read, and interpret as they wish. Nobody except Charlie and a select few friends knows exactly whats in his crank case.....maybe he's scooping metal out inside there somewhere and its not off the crank, or maybe it is off the crank but in a different way....who knows....but those that want good power in either fast road or ractrack applications might find that little something they are looking for, in something like this by MBD:
or this by Sean Brady:
................. but as Blackadder might say "They're as cunning as a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on and is now working for the U.N. at the High Commission of International Cunning" .................. you never know!