[Fot] Kas article in Feb 1972 Car and Driver

[Ponostyle]

That’s the late, great Gordon Jennings, not Jenkins. My favorite motorcycle technical writers and the inspiration for the first really big Fortran program I ever wrote (nine three row boxes of Hollerith punch cards). Gordon Jennings book “Two stroke tuner’s handbook” was must have for any aspiring two stroke engine builder and one of the many valuable features was calculations for required port timing and expansion chamber element lengths for any two stroke engine once you know what you could rev the thing to, and what you needed for powerband (calculated by finding the RPM drop from upshifting in the most important gears). I was taking a class at the time on writing Fortran and assembly language for the IBM 360 computer and had access to time through the class. So I wrote a program to do all the calculations automatically and recursively find the best fit for all elements—not a simple task: The perfect expansion chamber often turns out to have impossible dimensions. Once I had the thing debugged and running I designed porting and chambers for a number of very successful production road racers and drag racers. I sent Gordon a long letter describing what I’d done. He liked it a lot and was talking about doing a new version of the book including the code, perhaps on a disk, which I had translated to C to run on the Osborne 1 computer, I went so far as to also translate it to MBasic for people uncomfortable with the intricacies of compilers and makefiles. Perhaps his publisher dissuaded him from doing something no motorcycle mechanic would buy—but he lost interest. I remained a fan. 


Bill Babcock
Beach Bum
bill at ponostyle.com
https://www.Ponostyle.com

> On Jan 7, 2022, at 1:33 PM, Mike Harmuth via Fot <fot at autox.team.net> wrote:
> 
> My wife came across a large stash of old car mags at a recent garage sale. As I was digging through them, I came across an article about the new Kastner-Brophy company's turnkey race car building program. 
> 
> The article, (attached PDF file) by Gordon Jenkins, follows Kas and Lee Mueller as they deliver the first customer race spit at Willow Springs to Jim McCashin.
> 
> There's a price list for the add ons needed to transform a MKIV road spit into a race car.
> 
> Racer net, including the price of the new spit, is $5700
> Enjoy
> mike h
> 
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