We have started a series of videos on my Youtube channel to discuss the West Bend 820 and its variants. Topics are about making the rods race ready to turn more rpm than their industrial counterparts. We have been racing with West Bends for awhile and modifying them for power for just as long. My dual rear engine kart runs a pair of US Motor Power 820s. There are things that work and things that don’t work on running these engines, hopefully we will give you some ideas on things that may save some of you some time, money, and frustration. For instance the cast heads of the US Motor Power version have a very power threading to the combustion chamber for the spark plug. After many failures, we have solved that problem with a fellow karter by CNC’ing our own billet heads, by Tom Kelley aka Kelley Karting aka GTM Enterprises (that’s Give Tom Money). Hopefully you will find these vids helpful. Credit goes to Steve Welte, my dad, for filming and discussion, I just edited the videos.
Part 1: Discussion about the connecting rods for 820s and 610s.