We grappled and struggled with the oil bag system for months, going back and forth. I studied bags in dressers, the serpentine baffles and the notion that the pump would initially pull the oil up outta the bag like siphoning gas from mom’s sedan.

Additional thoughts from a reader regarding ground clearance: Depends on the track, spring set-up, suspension set-up, tire pressure, strategy, wedge and wheel jacking, blah, blah, blah. Might know you would ask your southern friend that question. If you are looking for ground clearance and ground effects and such go to: http://purplesagetradingpost.com/ sumner/bvillecar/bvillelinks.htm.

Yes, I know it's long. Whatever the ground clearance, make sure it can roll left and rIght (lean angle) without touching the ground. I'd say 1.750 inches ground clearance but if one of the tire goes down, we don't want the frame to get on the ground as it's going to be bad enough anyway.

--Pablo

Berry Wardlaw of Accurate Engineering sent me detailed engineering drawings from the biker bar down the street, Slippery Shirley's Saloon. Seems he was road testing his performance dresser, when he ran past a cop at over 100 and kept going. He stopped at this saloon and started drinking Jack Daniels and drawing oil bag interior designs. With the bar napkin blueprints in hand he walked into the sun to board his hot rod bagger. He was met with the cop who clocked him earlier. It all went downhill from there.

I went from cutting an oxygen bottle in half to studying Jap bike bellies. We fitted our nitrous bottle, the Hamster air dam and measured twice. We shit-canned the air dam, the NASCAR theme and the earlier, smaller Nitrous bottle mount. We decided to make the bottle fit as close to the top of the oil bag as possible. Then we measured twice again and rolled to the Wilmington Iron Works shop down the street.

It’s a cool old building and we told them the width needed to be 8 inches and the depth 1¾ inches, and it needed to be 26 inches long. We carefully bent a chunk of brass rod as a guide. They cut the piece out of the 14-gauge material we provided, then their brake wouldn’t bend anything over 24 inches. They hauled it down the street and called me from the shop, “Is the angle or the width critical?”

That was a damn good question.

“The width is more critical,” I responded.

The next day, the bend was available. The width was critical. If the angle had been more severe, we would've been cool, ‘cause we had some ground clearance to play with. But they went the other way flattening out our slab of sheet metal until it wouldn’t hold a half-quart of oil.

More and more I attempt to look at blunders or obstacles as benefits. They give us more time to contemplate design, refine structure or detail construction. We reviewed our concept again and decided to run a wider oil tank to the center of the bottom frame tubes on either side. I bent another chunk of 1/8-inch brass rod and rolled over to San Pedro Sheet Metal. Art could handle the task and in a couple of days I was looking at the initial shape or our baby, except he bent it out of 18-guage. That haunted me.

Now came the difficult part. We had to devise the interior serpentine baffles without schooling or a map, placement for the fittings, an aerodynamic bow and stern, fill cap, drain plug and mounting. First, I contacted Darin at Bungking.com for fittings and rubber mounting brackets. They do a helluva job. One kit is designed specifically for oil tanks with a fill cap, and three 1/8- inch pipe bungs. Jeremiah stopped at an auto parts and scored a drain plug with an interior magnet and I made the drain bung with ½-20 threads.

The tough part was placement, but we started with the baffles to prevent all the oil from slogging forward or to the stern and out of reach of the feed inlet. Then I made a template of construction paper for the nose and cut out the sections with a plasma cutter.

I started with the nose and one baffle to ensure the shape of the 16-gauge sheet metal during construction. Heat can do strange things to metal. Next, I cut the rear of the oil bag to allow any low-flowing air to escape the undercarriage of the bike with ease. Hope I know what I’m doing. That’s an oxymoron!

With the stern “V” ground smooth I used the belly as a guide to scribe another panel of sheet metal to close in the stern.

I tested capacity, initially holding my hands over each end and Nyla poured pint measuring cups of water into the breach and we counted. We were confident that our crazed design would contain at least 2.5 quarts. We were cool. Then I added more capacity with the bow and less cutting the stern.

We positioned the bag so it would meet with the nitrous bottle. “Nitrous bottle is 17.64" tall and 5.25" in diameter,” Colonel Wardlaw informed me before the bottle arrived.

So the oil bag stuck out in front of the frame by about 4 inches. We rolled the dice on this design element several times. We questioned whether we should form a scoop or air dam to shove the nose down. That could become an immediate air resistor and slow the vehicle, so we went for the slippery notion. Get the air through and around the bike as comfortably as possible, and we’re hoping our design plus the shape of the nitrous bottle will accomplish just that.

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