Well spotted Ian
It's a new 10 stud blown crankcase from the Dave Flake/Tony Betts lineage. It came partly machined by Dave Flake and needing "minor" details like crankshaft and camshaft bores machining.
This has led me to spend many hours with standard mag crankcases on my milling machine using the digital read out to measure centre distances and work out key dimensions (I had no drawing). The outcome is that whilst we all know that Austin had trouble keeping the timing gear mesh in tolerance, resulting in different gear sets, they had the same problems with keeping the camshaft in line with the crank. One crankcase showed the rear of the cam being 20 thou out of parallel with the crank (in the horizontal plane). I assume that they did this to allow the oil pump to mesh correctly when that position had machining inaccuracies.
It's a new 10 stud blown crankcase from the Dave Flake/Tony Betts lineage. It came partly machined by Dave Flake and needing "minor" details like crankshaft and camshaft bores machining.
This has led me to spend many hours with standard mag crankcases on my milling machine using the digital read out to measure centre distances and work out key dimensions (I had no drawing). The outcome is that whilst we all know that Austin had trouble keeping the timing gear mesh in tolerance, resulting in different gear sets, they had the same problems with keeping the camshaft in line with the crank. One crankcase showed the rear of the cam being 20 thou out of parallel with the crank (in the horizontal plane). I assume that they did this to allow the oil pump to mesh correctly when that position had machining inaccuracies.