The Hypermono!

Today the trunnion table for our 4 axis machining center came in. It is a custom design from Martin Manufacturing Services and is a beautiful piece of work. It will be used by us for accurately and quickly machining many parts, most importantly the crankcases, but also some suspension castings and the swingarm for post-heat treat machining.



Stan from MMS was receptive to making a design to my specifications and delivered exactly what I needed. He is also a big MotoGP fan hoping for a good showing from Spies, as we all are! It was nice to talk with a vendor that shares some common interests, especially another person who felt bummed out about the direction Moto2 took with the spec engine! Once he heard this was for a custom racing motorcycle project it really piqued his interest. Regardless of the application, he did all he can to provide me with the best product at an extremely reasonable price.


The surface of the table has features to locate a Kurt vice and a square pattern of Ballock locating/clamping pins that for use with a fixture plate that will allow me to index the parts 90 degrees with an accuracy of +/- .0005". He supplied 3 ready to use fixture plates made from Mic6 cast tooling plate.


Having everything in 3D CAD enables me to simulate machining operations and verify clearance and machine travels.

I just realized there's no info on what we are building on this blog. You can find more info at www.moto2-usa.com, a URL name whose significance is largely irrelevant to our efforts at this point, but here's a primer. Hopefully saner minds will prevail and they will open up the specification to more engine configurations in the future.

Anyway, we started this project after seeing the FIM release with the initial Moto2 rules.

Here's a good analysis of them by David Emmett of motomatters.com

This quickly changed to a Honda spec engine which dashed our hopes. Ever the outsiders we decided to continue on and build our dream bike, which does not include any part of a CBR600. Now we have finished with the design and are starting fabrication of the following bike:



The chassis and suspension designs have been race tested over the past 7 years with good success. This bike is taking all we learned and incorporating a custom designed V4 engine as a powerplant. As soon as we have a rolling chassis we will be doing development, internally at first, then partnering with Celtic Racing, a top AMA race team, with access to top rated national riders, as the bike comes up to speed. We'll enter a few local club races by the end of the season and see how the bike does in competition.

In addition to the head welding, Scott is also taking on the fabrication of the aluminum swingarm and whatever welding and heat treat fixturing required.

We had the sheet material waterjet cut by North Eastern Water Jet from 6061-T0 material. Scott is machining the billet parts from 6061-T6 and will be having the entire assembly heat treated and post machined on our 4 axis CNC mill. County Heat Treat will do the heat treat to a full T6 condition.

Some CAD of the finished product:



Some pictures of the parts so far:


It's good to see so much progress taking shape on several fronts. Scott will be doing a lot of billet and welding fabrication on many chassis related parts which will free me up for the major effort that is getting the engine running.

That's all for now.