PAGE 3: BUILDING A WORLD LAND SPEED RECORD HARLEY

Adapting Harley engines to EPA standards

Around that time the EPA took the lead out of gasoline and reduced octane ratings, and a whole new challenge was presented to Harley tuners like myself: how to manage the combustion chamber heat buildup that the lead in gasoline had helped dissipate?

I put my racing experience to the problem – race tuning is all about heat management – and found the right combination of valves, guides and seats unique to every Harley engine type up to the Evo, that cured overheating when running no-lead gas.

In fact, I had those old Knuckles, Pans and Shovels running stronger and cooler than when they were running leaded high-test!

Perry was workin' a flowbench when most of today's Harley tuners were watching Sesame Street.

The Evolution engine brought more exciting challenges. Its design was a big step forward, but a lot of things didn’t get done right on that motor. I worked the problems and came up with solutions nobody else had thought of, mostly in the cylinder head area.

More magazines called, and at their request I wrote more articles. As word got around that some guy on the Central Coast was coming up with Harley performance solutions that worked, I decided to adapt my company name to focus on my specialty. That’s why we’re now known as FLO Headworks.

By popular request I created a six-hour video that shows my porting and tuning techniques in detailed, real-time demonstrations. This video is not available to the public. However, it can be seen at Daytona, Sturgis and Laughlin, at the FLO Headworks booth.

Building a world land speed record Harley

One day out of the blue I got a call from Larry Easley, a long-time Harley performance enthusiast from Arkansas. He wanted to run a Panhead at Bonneville and go for the record, and he wanted me to do the heads.

It sounded like a great project. It would give me the opportunity to learn in the best classroom of all, building competition engines, and find out if my techniques really could measure up against the best Harley builders out there.

We scheduled a year for the project, and over that time my area of responsibility went beyond the heads to include the entire engine. (Even though my company is FLO Headworks, I do bottom-end work on all Harley engine types on request.) To everyone’s surprise, at their first outing at a wet and sloppy Bonneville, Larry’s Panhead, with his son Cecil riding, set a world land speed record in the 2000cc Pushrod Gas class. The bubbly flowed that night!

Larry Easley's 1999 world speed record Panhead, engine built by Perry, ridden by Cecil Easley, pictured. For more info about this awesome machine, click on the picture.