Vital MX Insider: MDK Speed

Nick Wey, pinning it through a bowl berm earlier this season.

Earlier this year, it was common to see Nick Wey at or near the front of the pack as the Supercross class charged toward the first turn…well, at least before he was sidelined with a badly dislocated thumb. With his MDK team doing their own engine development (dubbed MDK Speed Equipment), as well as ramping up to begin selling the products they’ve been developing to the public, we were very interested to see what they were up to. That led us north, to San Jose, CA, and into the office of Pete Hann, the self-described Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer at MDK Speed…though when pressed, he finally added Director of Engineering to his title.

Pete’s career background is a little different from the norm in the moto hop-up realm. “From an industrial standpoint, it’s been aerospace engineering,” he explained. “We have a company that builds products that handle, hold, and manipulate satellites and weaponry. Involved in that are the aspects of engineering and manufacturing, metallurgical testing, and all types of quality assurance testing. Our background is very heavy in QA (Quality Assurance), and procedure analysis.”

When asked if there were any projects on the aerospace side that he’s particularly proud of, Pete responded, “I’d say in general we’re involved with just about every communications satellite launch. We also support companies like JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) that do the Mars Lander and Rover…the wheel systems for those. They’re kind of fun projects that require multiple-axis machines.”

MDK Speed's Pete Hann. While he looks deadly serious here, we can confirm that he does actually smile. He's also been involved in motorcycles for quite a while, which was confirmed by the Joe Leonard poster on the wall in his office.

Interest in two-wheeled horsepower’s nothing new to Pete, though. “I’ve always been a passionate motorcyclist, from short track racing in the early days to flattrack and motocross.” His current involvement in motocross started with MDK’s Danny Paladino. “I’ve known Danny for a long time. He had befriended Mark Kvamme, and it was kind of a natural progression together to put a little bit of our passion in the manufacturing and quality genres into what turned into the business of MDK Speed.  Mark and I are partners in that, and he’s got some dynamic plans for MDK.”

When quizzed about the success of their engine package on David Vuillemin and Nick Wey’s bikes, Pete said, “With my background as an engineer, I try not reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to. Our approach when we came in was really to reverse-engineer each platform. The Honda is a great platform, so we were able to get some very good performance out of it.”

Nick's engine package, combined with some good start skills, resulted in him running up front several times early in '07.

They’ve also had good luck with durability, and Pete explained, “Those are not motors that we have to throw all the parts away every week.  They’re very much based on an OEM platform, and really, our engineering is based on torque and hookup. When you see Nick and David getting those kinds of starts, it’s essentially dedication to how the power is laid down and the gearing, so it’s a good synergic package that works for them. Each guy rides differently. It’s our job to integrate and make them comfortable. As you know, if you can get that start, it makes it a lot easier than having to fight through the pack.”

In discussions with Pete, as well as Steve Lamson, both had mentioned their close working relationship with FMF, something Pete confirmed. “They’re really easygoing, a family-run business, similar to what we are, and they can make changes on the fly. Our first alternate material, a carbon/Kevlar, is something that we brought from our genre, and you’ll see that the MDK/FMF pipe is a little different than a standard FMF carbon pipe. But we brought these advanced materials in and they’re great to work with us, and they’ve always got time for us to be down there on their dyno. It’s a real good symbiotic relationship between the two of us.”

Besides using FMF's dyno, MDK Speed has their own in-house setup.

“I don’t know if it’s just a case of luck, but our motor packages and their pipe products work well together. Donnie’s pipes also work well with stock bikes, so for us that’s a Godsend that we can use them with both the custom products for David and Nick, as well as our retail-based bikes. It’s easy for us to spec FMF pipes on everything we do.”

Walking through the shop, there were a variety of machine tools in action, including what looked like vintage oversized lathes for extremely parts, as well as some more modern high-end machines. We couldn’t help but note that in some respects, it was very reminiscent of previous visits to FMF, where Donnie Emler had collected an eclectic batch of machinery from auctions and other sources. When asked about the similarity, Pete smiled and agreed, explaining that in the past, he’d spotted machinery at auctions that he knew Donnie would be interested in, and had placed calls to him.

To date a lot of what they’ve done at MDK Speed is for their own team, though the intent is to offer the products to consumers. When we asked Pete if they were still a bit of a secret in the market, he nodded, saying, “Yeah. Some of it is by choice. We really value the focus on development and R&D, so it’s a nice luxury to be under the radar and just building bikes for the Supercross team, or the Arenacross team, which has really turned into a real good testing ground for us. Those guys definitely abuse their stuff. To have 15-year-old Tyler Bowers out there every week is a definite luxury. But as Mark and I design the retail stuff, we’ll definitely be ramping up.  We currently are going to be in the Motosport.com catalog with all of our Speed Products, so you’ll see everything that was developed for Nick and David available, within reason, in that catalog. Really, the push will be later on this year, as we head into the Nationals to get our Stage 1 motor programs out to customers there they can buy pre-done OEM product, ready to go and bolt it right up to their bikes and get those MDK horsepower improvements.”

One thing that’s interesting about the MDK Speed Equipment is a focus on durability, and consistency. “Initially from the retail standpoint what I tried to do in terms of componentry and porting was see how far could I go using OEM components. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. I always look at it like the OEMs have done huge amounts of research and I’d be a fool to not look at what they’ve done and integrate it into our packages. So essentially what we tried to do was get price points for retail customers in say the case of something like a 250F, where the industry kind of averages say 34 or 35 horsepower, and try to get at least a 20% increase, in this case, say for a thousand dollars.  What would it entail for us to do? Along with that, we really wanted to go with reliability. The demographics of our riders are pretty young, and money is not a huge option for them, so we’re trying to keep them on a reliable platform, where if they do basic maintenance, the motor’s running. The two-hour time bomb, it’s just not in their repertoire to have money to do that.”

One of the MDK Speed Equipment heads, set up on their flow bench.

“When we first got involved with this, the tried-and-true method of flow porting is lots of hours at flow benches and on a grinding table, and that still hasn’t changed. We use computer engineering programs for certain functions, but a great portion of it is back grinding a head, doing flow testing on it, and then from the dyno to the riders. My concern was, how do we replicate that? From a manufacturing standpoint, we have the ability at this shop to come up with a master head, that does everything we need for it to do, and at that point what I need to do is bring it into our quality assurance department, and use a CMM to go in there and do port calculations in it and extract a wire-frame model for that. Once we do that, we essentially have a master from an OEM head, and our performance head, and we can overlay those two on a computer and look at the differences in the porting, whether it’s adding or subtracting material. Now at that point, if you’re going to go traditional, you take your standard skilled port guy, and he knows where he’s removing material or adding it. The advantage to us at this point, is with five-axis machining, you can use an advanced package to generate a cutter path. So really, the future for us will be to tool these things, and do our porting on five-axis machine tools. So what we can do is replicate. If you buy a head from us and like the way it performs, the next one will be the same, and the next one, etc. It gives us consistency in manufacturing.

Besides the plans for the consumer products, the MDK brand is also expanding into road racing, and Pete also hinted at things we might see in the future on their MX bikes...which sounded like a bit like production-based works-style componentry. “We’re currently involved with some lightening of the bikes and getting the CG (center of gravity) down. We also use FEA analysis, so we sit down with our programmers in the seats and decide what’s enough structure for these bikes. It’s something that’s going to be an advantage for the riders…not just from a power-to-weight ratio, but there are things they can do with physics that will definitely make the bikes handle better.”

Nick Wey's Xyience/MDK Honda CRF450R. Watching their bikes in the future might be very interesting.

“The nice thing about what we build for the defense people is we can take the technology of manufacturing, whether it be machining or welding processes, or our quality assurance department and use all those same protocols in developing the products that we use on Nick and David’s bikes.”

Contact:

MDK Speed
1020 Timothy Dr.
San Jose, CA 95133
Tel: (408) 295-7437
www.mdkspeed.com

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