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Old 09-19-08, 01:59 PM
  #18  
JackD
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Originally Posted by alheim
JackD, you know you have too much time on your hands. But I'm impressed regardless .. how did you come up with this?
An old guy named Giuseppe taught it to me. He of course grew up in the days when aluminum was like gold and started with steel cans until one day a recon plane over Napoli developed engine trouble and crash landed in his fathers semolina field and ended up rolling straight into the barn. The pilot was dead so they just closed the barn doors and salvaged the metals. Some of it was perfect for handlebar shims. One of the other things he built out of the parts was a desmodromic crank set, but that never really took off due to arguments with his fascist brother-in-law over who actually owned the intellectual property. Fabio took the concept to Ducati in the early 50's.

Anyway, he is the one who put most of the effort into developing the shimming process. When the 70's came along and aluminum cans were everywhere, everyone else jumped on the bandwagon and did it themselves. Some just cut the shims with no prep and were horribly disfigured. Some blinked and you know all about not blinking. It crushed him and he complained bitterly about the loss of the craft to anyone who would listen. As long as he was buying the cinzano I listened. There are a lot more of his secrets which died with him because they took too long to explain and he was already incoherent by the time he got to the critical point - elliptical bearings was one of them which still cause my thorax to constrict when I think about the loss.
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