I didn't know the Fireball was also designed for good manners on the street, I thought it was an all out performance package. I'm really excited to see if the same will be done for the UCE now. Since I'm planning to put a sidecar on in the future I'd welcome some extra power while maintaining easy driveability.
Scott
Hi Scotty and Nigel,
I have not made any attempts yet to do anything with the UCE. However, something of a similar nature could be done to the UCE, of course.
I don't really have a plan or funds to get into that right now, but it's something in the back of my mind for the future, if the need arises.
If it responded anything like the Fireball, it could pull a sidecar very easily.
At this point, I'm sort of leaving that task up to the people who are "higher up on the food chain" than Ace. I am just a "privateer" effort that's funded out of my back pocket, and Chumma works together with me, and we enjoy the development facilities and expertise of Joe Mondello's shop, since Joe is involved in a strategic relationship capacity, and he's our buddy.
We are sort of a little "club" of performance enthusiasts at Ace. The basic idea is that we come up with things that we design to do certain jobs, and the small group of enthusiasts can buy them if they want to. It really all began as me wanting to build my bike, and seeing that the available products were insufficient. And so, instead of me just having the items made for myself only, I made some extra parts so that others could get them too, if they liked my concept. And it's still sort of like that. And Chumma got involved early on in the game and he was testing all the parts on the road, and he also came up with the piston design that we use, and he's an integral part of the effort.
Like any engine, it boils down to knowing what to do with heads and cams. And also identifying and curing potential reliability problems so that the engine can survive the performance upgrades, and not getting "silly" with it to the point of losing street manners. The Fireball has better street manners than any Bullet ever dreamed of having. Just yesterday, Chumma was doing a little break-in riding on Chuck's new Fireball that has about 30 miles total time on it, and he pulled a hill in top gear at 2200rpm, without even a hint of lugging, and it has an 18T gear on it, and 19" wheels. If he gives it a hard twist of throttle a little closer to torque peak rpm in first gear, he lifts the front wheel off the ground. And it idles like a clock at 900 rpm, and starts on the first kick.. And believe it or not, yes this is a Bullet being described here.
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make here, is that a bike CAN be made high-performance without giving up street manners. And it could be done to the UCE too. The key is to know your stuff, and not push the limits too far, where you give up the tractability in the lower rpms. Stop a little short of making it a full-on racing bike.. It still can go like blazes, but it behaves, IF you do it right.
And that takes alot of knowledge. But it can be done.
If I start getting people approaching me for UCE head mods and stuff, and are serious about buying, I will talk to Joe and see what it will cost to get it done on a UCE head, and I will have to make some new cams for it. And stuff like that is not cheap, and I will require that I have the head for analysis, and it will be a development project..
And it could be done on some future RE twin too, or whatever.
It all depends on what the person wants. Some want a factory bike, and some want a modified bike. I work in the modifications arena.
The typical pattern that I see is that as a person has an engine failure, or it's got alot of mileage and is getting tired, they look for options on the rebuild. And that's when they often come to me. Some will do it early, because they want the performance increase. And as you mentioned some buy a dead or cheap used Bullet as a lower-cost basis on which to do a performance build.
And Nigel,
Regarding your question about the con-rod, the original Bullet has a one-piece rod.
I haven't looked at the bottom end of the UCE closely enough to see about any rod changes that they made down there.