Hi Phil,
Always loved the look of the ol' Sports.
Mod-wise, there is a lot of options, depending on how much you want to spend. It sounds like a reasonable amount of money is not an issue here as you are asking about some moderately costly upgrades.
First off, know what you have with that lump. The heads do NOT flow well at all, so that will be the key to your power success. Simply adding cams will not do anything for adding power, infact may hinder your power output as any cam upgrade will overwhelm the ports. Also the compression ratio is relatively low.
The issue to address for power here is in the heads, so the way to go here is spend the money on a good port job. I would also say add bigger valves for several reasons. One, better flow(obvious). Two, this allows you to reshape the chamber for better combustion. Also, you can change the collets to MBP collets(whencanging cams) and stop worrying about valve adjustments every 6K miles. The second reason is you will add hi-comp pistons to the job(I would go with the BCM 795 kit) to extract the full potential of the newly shaped heads.
There are several people that do magic on these 2V heads.
Bruce Meyers (meyersperformance), can contact through BCM Motorsports
Guy (pronounced "Gee") Martin, you can send your heads via Cris Kelley's shop @ (
www.ducatitech.com)
Doug @ Arc Fabrication (
www.arcfabrication.com) does a wild mod for 2V heads, really thinking out of the box. (I am sending my heads in November)
All of these guys are tops in their work and should net you some decent power, however I would venture to guess somewhere in the $4,000.00 range for these jobs (roughly guessing). The heads are about a $2500 job alone.
With the exhaust and carbs you have, should have a good overall setup.
This way you don't have to get into the bottom of the bike, and with proper cam timing and tuning, your power curve will look like butter (smooth and fat) with that extra top end you're seeming to lack.
There are other things you can do to lighten the motor(some say better than spendng the "power mod" money, and that's to lighten your rotating mass. The bike will "feel" like you just added a bunch of power as it spin up faster. Once you get to the top-end(much faster), you're hitting a wall though. So a riding style change(ie: shifting) would be in place. Advantage here is that you are not killing reliability. Personally I have over 22k miles on my SS with all of these mods, and she's a street daily driver, along with a track tool. Just keep an eye on things more.
CAUTION: The word on the streets is older small cases are prone to cracking with higher levels of pressure (compression, revs, etc.). I've personally not seen but have heard, but keep that in the back of your mind.
I hope that answered some of your questions. Good luck.
Linear Mode
