Boyesen Power X-Wing
Boyesen Power X-Wing
CW EVALUATION
Intake air straightener-outer
IF YOU'VE EVER WATCHED LATE-NIGHT television, you've surely seen them: little intake-air deflectors and swirl-inducing devices claimed to help your car's engine do practically everything but make coffee in the morning-more power, fast er acceleration, better fuel economy, etc., etc. Most have been proven worth less, but at least no one makes those kinds of products for motorcycles.
Actually, now they do. Boyesen Engineering, the Pennsylvania company famous for its superb two-stroke reed-valve technology, is producing the Power XWing, a sheet-metal air deflector that fits into the intake opening of a motorcycle’s carburetor or fuel-injection throttle body. Boyesen makes Power X-Wings to fit most ohv Harley-Davidson Twins dating back to 1990, as well as a virtually identical product, just called the PowerWing, for a variety of twoand four-stroke off-road bikes. The company claims the product “straightens” and “streamlines” the airflow as it enters the intake, causing smoother air velocity that helps an engine produce more horsepower and torque.
Hmmm. Certainly sounds like yet another snake-oil scam to us.
Except that it works. No, really, it does. Here’s proof: Armed with a full load of skepticism, we bolted an X-Wing on a bone-stock, fuel-injected, 2007 H-D Electra Glide Classic. Installation took only a few minutes, as all that’s required is to
remove the air-filter housing, slip the XWing in place and reinstall the filter assembly. No retuning of any kind is necessary, even if the engine has been modified-which is the case with the vast majority of Milwaukee’s Finest.
In stock form, the Classic pumped out 68.3 horsepower and 81.5 foot-pounds of torque, good peak numbers for that bike’s 96-inch motor. We then immediately plugged in the X-Wing and did another series of dyno pulls. To our wideeyed surprise, the engine made more peak horsepower (69.5) and torque ( 83.3 ). Granted, 1.2 horses (a 1.7-percent increase) and 1.8 ft.-lb. (2.2 percent) are not huge improvements, but there were equivalent gains all the way through the rpm range. Besides, that the X-Wing produced any positive results is remarkable; these sorts of products usually don’t do anything but lighten your wallet.
Speaking of which, while most of the intake-system gadgets you see in TV infomercials are priced in the $39-$59 range, the Power X-Wing is a whopping $130. That’s a steep buy-in for a product that, in the end, doesn’t boost performance enough to feel; sorry, folks, but unless you were born with one of the most hypersensitive butt dynos on the planet, you aren’t going to detect a 2-percent increase. But there’s no denying that the Power XWing does work-and you didn’t even have to stay up late to find out. □
$130
Boyesen Engineering 8 Rhoades Rd. Lenhartsville, PA 19534 800/441-1177 www.boyesen.com
Ups A Dead-simple to Install A Money-back guarantee A Comes with colorful decals Downs ▼ Too expensive ▼ Gains are too small to feel Hp-per-dollar quotient too low
