Oil pickup mods

[Guest]

Does anyone have a good description/pictures of how to mod the oil pickup tubes and is it required on a big bore street strip engine?

 

[bobgroger]

The basic deal is to rotate the pickup so one tube faces the rear. Plug the other tube, extend the rear facing one to about 1" from the back of the pan. 1/2" copper plumbing works well.You need to cut a channel in the oil pan baffles to clear the extended tube. There is probably a picture on here somewhere. Should you? Couldn't hurt while accelerating, will hurt while braking. If you have huge cams it might help save them, pretty sure a roller bearing crank won't notice a momentary loss of oil pressure.

 

[ArttuH]

Yep, it's balancing between accelerating and braking. The stock pickup will suck air during hard acceleration, probably even with stock engine. The stock oil light pressure switch is quite forgiving so you won't notice short pressure drops. On my turbo engine I have a deepened oil pan and the pickup is modified accordingly. So in theory that should be pretty good for both accelerating and braking. In reality it works really well for acceleration but still gets some air during hard braking. Good news are that the GS engine doesn't care too much about short pressure drops. I guess the cams are the first to suffer.

On bottom line, drag strip use with stock pickup sounds like a bad idea based on my knowledge. On the other hand reversed pickup doesn't sound too good either if the bike will see any hard braking.