Creating Horsepower:

The magic of cylinder head porting
presented by 2 wheel workshop

This is the how-to and the what-is-going-on kind of stuff that surrounds the mystery of why porting a cylinder head is such an effective way of creating horsepower.

There is no real magic to what goes on in the workshop when a technician goes to work grinding on your cylinder head. Modern sport bike engines are designed with good shape and flow characteristics from the factory. The problem lies in the fact that they need to produce thousands of them quickly and inexpensively. It is those last few details that they can't deal with on a production basis. For a street engine, very little metal needs to be removed since we don't want to enlarge the port, lowering air velocity, and potentially losing some performance lower in the rev range. A good street port job will produce power gains everywhere (even low in the rev range) and usually improve drivability as well.

What we really want to do here is clean up all the flaws and mismatches that the factory couldn't work out. I'll point out what we will be looking for along the way.