I also make no guarantees as to the practicality of my idle wanders into "what if..." land.
So! This is just a 'little' idea I had tumbling around my head recently, which got stirred to the front of my mind by another thread
(This is where I very rapidly diverge from reality, I think. )oilburner wrote: I'm not sure whether it would be more economical to make a pattern and cast a new crankcase and cylinder head or CNC mill new ones from billet. Personally, I'd prefer to go with the billet. You can do dry runs on nylon, make modications as necessary to the CNC program until satisfied, and then attack the billet. If a new cylinder head was required, the combustion chamber and port design could be borrowed from an existing design, but there would be issues with oil galleys etc.
Rather than running a very complicated milling job, though, what about laser sintering?
3D printing custom engines! In metal, no less!Some company, who have the shiny machines that do this, wrote: Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) is a revolutionary technology that produces metal components that are 99.99% dense, directly from your 3D CAD data. The parts produced are comparable to a good investment cast part and the mechanical properties are comparable to those of a cast or machined component.
The DMLS process is not restrictive in its application and the components produced can be used in place of almost any conventionally manufactured part, whether they would normally be machined or cast. The advantage of the process is that the more complex or feature rich the component, the more economical the process becomes.
Admittedly, I think it's perhaps a tad unlikely that the average tinkerer has easy access to the kind of kit, or the desire, to do this, but it might (perhaps) be The Future(TM) for a company designing and making conversion kits. (Consider, the aerospace industry apparently uses this process for creating gas-turbine parts, so it must be good for something! )
Engines printed to fit the exact bike you're building, where you just can't find the right one?
...okay, I'll go take my dried frog pills, return from the crazy world of hypothetical engine production, and don my flameproof suit.
What would you do with this, though?