Much like the scars left from numerous cosmetic surgeries on the stereotypical aging Hollywood starlet, I’d hacked and re-connected a bunch of parts on my ’93 Sportster cases, leaving a number of ugly (but strong) welds and cut marks. Lucky for me, cast aluminum is more forgiving than flesh and I could make those hack marks disappear — and I wouldn’t need a doctorate to do it.

The act of grinding down the welds and cuts would only solve one of my problems, though, and the cases would have grind marks in some areas and the natural sand-casting texture on the rest, not exactly what I’d call matching or acceptable given the other, more finished surfaces on the machine. Afterwards I’d have to have the cases polished in order to achieve any kind of regular or finished look.

The XL cam cover was the last part of the motor I had to cut-up before I could take it to the polisher. There’s a lot of superfluous material surrounding the actual cam chest and I planned to remove any material that wasn’t a gasket surface. Cutting it apart was so easy that I’d recommend this procedure to anyone whose got to service or replace their cams, or anyone who has opted to permanently remove the final sprocket cover on their stock sporty.

Going through a set of tools, I wondered what that certain weird shaped grinding bit was for? It was probably made for something like this. Be glad you have it. In order to get into all the nooks and crannies it took a number of odd shaped porting bits.

Eventually, I finished with the power tools and had to use good old elbow grease and coarse emery cloth to finish the exterior of the cases for polishing. Check it out…

On to Page 2...

Back to The First Page Of The Previous Installment...