Not voodoo at all about green forgings and aging , cast machine tool frames and beds are worked under those conditions ( Meehanite ) raw castings are (were ) set in an outdoor yard and left there for a year before being worked . Cast flywheels are the same composition materiel as those bigger cast machines and " green " or new castings haven't stabilized yet or de-stressed if you want to put in a crude way , believe it or not the physical dimensions will warp & shrink a bit with aging .That can be done in a fixed temp oven over a long period of time or you can cheat the process a bit with smaller stuff with the burying trick . Newer casting and forging processes that have gotten way cheaper have about negated the need for all the old school stuff the true mechanic had to know years ago . I see that as good and bad both , huge loss of skills when the last of us are gone .

I try to keep the cylinders on my shovels stock length , they just seem to last longer and I can balance a motor out to almost 7000 rpm on the 88 & 93 inchers , anything bigger doesn't seem to make a difference in longevity one way or the other .

 

Reducing the weight of anything that rotates will always help you out.......until strength becomes an issue.

 

After 30 years of knee draggin', 10 years on a RK I was ready to kick back and just cruise. I built a old school chopper that forced me to slow down and take it easy. It won't do wheelies front or rear, and if I drag the pegs I'm already on the ground. I designed and built my unique frame, have a dynamite paint job and most of all when I hit the throttle I have the knowledge that I am riding a masterpiece of my own doing and getting my rocks off!

 

When I moved to Maui in the sixties I was riding a fast BSA 650 Lightning, stripped down and hot rodded quite a bit. Got to know a bunch of local boys I met at a Sunday morning coffee stop, ridin knucks and pans and a coupla flatties, even an Indian, a Norton, and a coupla Triumphs; started riding with them, got the hots for a panhead, so picked up the '62 FLH police special. Several of the boys in our group were looking at building choppers (the movie Easy Rider had not come out yet), and I got into it myself. Understanding the engineering involved and learning to do the fabrication/mechanical work myself was fun and rewarding. For me the bike was a comfortable ride, rode it often and many, many miles over the years from 1968 to 1992, it never let me down, and it fit in well with the club we eventually formed, the Royal Hawaiian Cycle Club of Maui, we are the 2nd oldest motorcycle club still active in Hawaii. Even though I retired that bike in '92, I kept it stored away, and it is now getting it's well deserved restoration.

With my bad back (industrial accident) and knee problems, don't know if I can still ride it very much or very far, but if not, I'm certain one of my three sons or my son-in-law will be happy to ride it, or any of my other three bikes.

Old school choppers were works of art and were personal statements. When properly setup they were easy to ride and a lot of fun.
Aloha,
"2Loose" *****

 

Choppers are cool. Provided they're done right. For example adding ape hangers and forward controls to a dyna doesn't make a chopper, it just makes a gay looking dyna.