Thunder Roads Magazine of Oklahoma/Arkansas July 2014 | Page 32

Dual-purpose motorcycles suck.
I’m not trying to offend you, I’m just
saying... anytime one motorcycle is designed
for two purposes... compromises have to be
made.
If you really wanted to build a nocompromise motorcycle... you would build
it for one purpose. And if you had two
purposes... you would build two motorcycles.
And that’s just what long-time collaborators
Bud York and Mark Carlton did. They built
Mark’s bike from the ground up for the strip,
and then built Bud’s for the street. This isn’t
really that big a deal for them. With about 50
years of professional wrenching experience
between the two mechanics they could
probably build a motorcycle in their sleep.
Mark started by building the motor from
scratch by transplanting late model TwinCam jugs and heads to a set of Ultima-built
Evo cases and a stroked crankshaft. This is
NOT a bolt-on modification so please don’t
try this at home. It takes lots of fussy, exact
machine work by somebody who knows what
they are doing to get this to work, even to the
point of welding up the push-rod holes and

32

Thunder Roads Magazine of OK/AR

Mark Carlton