| Author | Message | ||
     Modular |
How did Erik get 100hp in the 1999 X1 out of what was essentially the same 1203cc engine used in a Sporty? | ||
| Beardo |
Easy, he wasn't bound by tradition! | ||
| Greg_cifu |
Properly designed two-into-one header for a start. Harley owners want staggered dual exhausts and generally don't like even a crossover tube. That costs in horsepower. This is one of the things that blows me away with some Buell guys: they'll cut off the headers and run them wide open or whatever...not a good combination for the most horsepower. Then the muffler. It's huge for a reason: it's a big twin and it chuffs out a lot of gas. They engineered the mufflers to have enough volume to allow the engine to breathe without stifling the performance. Lots of volume allows the engine to breathe without the bark getting to the outside world. Finally, the intake: the stock airbox was carefully designed to hold enough air for the engine to quickly, yet silently gulp all the air it needs in an intake cycle. Those three things, along with the Thunderstorm heads and cams, allowed the engine to live up to its potential. It's ironic because, without the optimized header, muffler and intake, most of the choppers built from the remains of Buells, probably don't make as much power as the bikes their engines came from. | ||
| Coxster |
What amazes me is how H-D can sandbag and sell these 50 HP motors for more money in an inferior motorcycle and have people lined up to do it. A local businessman calls H-D the accessory company that sells motorcycles too. You hit the nail on the head Cifu. | ||
| Jolly |
HD....the great SWAG shop...they are clearly in business to sell t-shirts and other crap (yeah, I got a drawer full of em and two big twins in the garage..), anyway, back to my point, they are a swag shop that sells bikes to move their real products....clearly I am guilty of buying into their marketing...ouch! but I have other bikes that hopefully make up for it...Buell, Triumph, Moto Guzzi... | ||
| Ratbuell |
Heads Cams Compression Exhaust Intake Lightened flywheels ...just regular ol' hotrod stuff... Of course, you can port and polish until you're blue in the face, but if you don't know how to balance your flow with velocity, and match it to compression, with the right cam timing and duration...it's not worth the aluminum you whittle it out of. | ||
| Stev0 |
plus 1 for rat's call. Sporties didn't have the N4 cams or larger valves or free breathing exhaust or DFI in the same years as the Tubers ran. Even the 1200S sporty only had a mild set of cams and slightly different heads to go with the dual plug setup. It's the sum of the parts working in harmony. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Getting 100 HP out of a sporty motor was really no trick. Getting 100 HP out of a sporty motor and making it mass produced, street legal and reliable... well that was nothing short of a miracle. (One might argue the X1 came up just a little short in the "reliable" department... but it was close, and the XB certainly got there). | ||
| Hootowl |
I don't know about that. The X1 and S3 have the same motor. If the X1 motor was unreliable, why isn't the S3 branded the same way? | ||
| Stev0 |
I think maybe along the same lines as the XB's. People treated the X1's harder than the S3's. It became more noticeable with the XB's when they were marketed more to the jap bike crowd. It's also noticable over here in Aus in the secondhand market. | ||
| Sportyeric |
Its all about the noise. The N4 cams would be too noisy to pass tests, both at the intake and the exhaust end without the big airbox and big muffler. I think the 1200 Sportys were redlined at 5500 because of the noise as well, weren't they? And the Sportys' buyers wanted low-end grunt like an M2, so that would be a better comparison, at 91HP. I think Sportys claimed 72HP. So they picked up 20Hp from pipe design, muffler size, breadbox intake, cams, and, perhaps redline. And T-Storm heads, which goes back to low-end torque. |
