I contacted Andrew Cathcart, manager of the re-opened iconic business Vee Two. For sure the inquiry was for my self, but turns out some of us may have a rare opportunity to acquire some of the cams that have been off the market for a long time, and was a must do mod for tuned bikes back in the day.
This Is the reply I got for everyone to see, and just wondering if theres any interest out There. Obviously we don't know exact cost, just need to know if theres any guys keen to find out where this goes. Then we can go from there, and also get refreshed on the specs.
Ill be the first to put my hand up.
Hi Adrian
Thanks for your enquiry. You’ve hit at my heartstrings, as I’m very much a fan of the TRX, and would like to produce some of these cams again.
Brook and I have recently restarted Vee Two to concentrate on bevel-drive Ducati motorcycles.
We have recommissioned our Vee Two camshaft grinder, and have been grinding up a stock of each of the different cams for the Ducati models that we specialise in.
Although there are currently no plans to make up a batch of the TRX cams, I do have the tooling for the cam grinder ready to go, so I could do a run in my free time. It would involve me machining up some specialised two and three lobe blanks, but I could do a small batch if the interest was there.
As far as the specs of the cams are concerned, they were designed with Brook (the owner here at Vee Two) whilst OVER racing were developing my Dad’s factory Yamaha TRX racebike – affectionately known as TRiXie. My Dad Alan campaigned the bike in the BEARS Championship and the BoTT European and World Championships over several years with great success. I’ve attached a couple of photos of the bike.
I am making a road-going replica at the moment, so will eventually need some of those cams to fit to the spare race-bike engine that I’m using for the project. If you could get a few orders together with any of your fellow TRX owner mates, I recon it’d give us the push to do some over a couple of weekends in our free time.
The race engines in TRiXie were modified street engines, and had titanium conrods, billet pistons, extremely lightened cranks and FCR’s, but used stock sized valves with these camshafts. The grind isn’t too extreme as to be useless on the road, as Brook designed the cam profiles and timings for torque rather than absolute power.
As far as performance is concerned, the cams work great with a free flowing exhaust and decent carbs (preferably FCR’s of course), and are the ultimate addition to a big bore kit. There would be little or no difference to a stock setup, but if you’re interested in cams you probably already have done the rest…
Hope that helps. Let me know if you can get some interest with your TRX friends on TRX850.com (I’m on there as well), and I’ll see what kind of costs would be involved in making some. It’d have to play second fiddle to the setup work that we’re doing here with bevel-drive Ducatis, but I’m sure I could organise something in the coming months.
An interesting read.
The bike (Alan Cathcart) that these cams were designed for. Now that's Trx850 nostalgia.
My bike i want the cams for.
