Service
Service
LONG-DISTANCE R1 ACID. NOT THE BATTERY KIND. BEST USED BIKE ASK KEVIN
RAY NIERLICH
Despite what Tim Conyers was told by his mechanic, it's fine to take an Ri on a long trip. Our suggestion: Get a new mechanic!
SPORT NOT TOURER?
Q: I have a 2013 Yamaha YZF-R1. So far my riding has been on local highways here in the Ozarks. I have been asked to come along with some others on a 4,000-mile trip to South Dakota and back home. I took my bike to the dealer for new tires and its 4,000-mile service. There, the tech told me my bike wasn't designed for long trips and that I would need to go different speeds on the highway for my transmission's sake. Ideally, I would ride a cruiser on this trip, but my Ri is all I have. Will it damage my Ri to make such a long journey?
TIM CON VERS NEWARK AR
A What?! survive An a 4,000-mile Ri transmission highway can’t B trip? Ridiculous. Somebody forgot to tell the thousands of owners who have been riding the wheels off their Yamaha Rís for years.
No matter how well intentioned, your tech is either very novice or just misinformed. This “varying the speed” old wives’ tale keeps resurfacing. You should vary speeds during engine break-in, mostly to seat the piston rings properly and especially during the first 50 miles. But modern gears need virtually no break-in time. At 4,000 miles, your engine is definitely fully broken in.
I wouldn’t worry about going long distances at steady speeds on your trip. I predict you will get bored riding your sportbike at cruiser speeds, and, soon enough, you’ll be zooming ahead to do scouting or making excuses to do side trips and catching up later.
HALLUCINATING HONDA
I have a 1991 Honda CBR600F2, and it has a strange problem. * I have about 31,000 miles on it, and an infrequent and inconsistent knock has developed, only at idle (whether clutch is engaged or not) and after around five minutes of warming up. I wouldn’t think that it’s a valve or cam-chain tensioner, since that would be more rhythmic. I replaced the clutch but to no avail. I don’t know where to go from here. Also, at night, my dim headlight will randomly get brighter for a few minutes then go dim again. Maybe the stator is the issue? To clear the air, I ride sober, and I’m not even sure what acid looks like.
CARON MANSFIELD VIA CYCLEWORLD.COM
A spread Bless you the for word. riding This sober; is a tough please one since, unfortunately, I can’t hear your clunk. I think you have two separate problems. Your headlight shouldn’t normally be dim, as Honda headlights in general are some of the best. Look for a bad ground connection. On your bike the ground is on one of the fairing mounting studs. Not an ideal location, as the fairing vibration wiggles the ground. I’d run an extra ground elsewhere.
Usually, a clunk at low engine speeds will be something rotating that is moving back and forth. I suspect the camshaft is floating end to end or even wobbling in the journals due to excessive clearance. To verify this, borrow a mechanic’s stethoscope or take a very long, slender screwdriver held up to your ear and run the bike until it’s warmed up. Then, see if you can narrow down the general location of the clunk. The cam noise isn’t usually terminal, but if it gets bad enough, you might be looking at pulling the cam to make a repair someday.
MUFFLER MAYHEM
I have a 2005 Victory Kingpin. The stock mufflers are too quiet, * so I installed a set of straightthrough performance mufflers. The performance mufflers were too loud, so I decided to try one stock and one performance muffler, and the sound is perfect for me and the engine seems to run just fine that way. My question is this: Will this setup in any way harm my engine?
LOUMORRISS PALMYRA, MO
AWhile going to your be recorded solution isn’t in the exactly annals of elegant engineering, it shouldn’t harm the engine. The powertrain engineers work hard to design each cylinder to work precisely the same. This is difficult with a V-twin that has a front cylinder out in the cooling breeze and the rear cylinder blocked from it, but these days designers get tuning all close enough that these engines will run like a train for mileages we could only dream about 30 years ago.
GOT A MECHANICAL OR TECHNICAL PROBLEM with your beloved ride? Perhaps we can help. Contact us at cwservice@cycleworld.com with your questions. We cannot guarantee a reply to every inquiry.
ASK KEVIN
Q: I have two motorcycles: a 2009 Kawasaki KLR650 and a 2007Triumph Tiger 1050. TheTriumph has nearly three times the power and twice the displacement of the KLR,but they both get about the same gas mileage. How is it that the Triumph, with more power, more gross weight, and more moving parts, uses the same amount of fuel per given distance? I love my KLR, but where is all that fuel going that isn’t being converted to power?
]0HN TIMOTI SAN CLEMENTE, CA
A: Let’s assume both bikes are operated on the freeway, at freeway speeds. Yes, the Triumph is GO percent larger in displacement and weighs considerably more. But it has a fuelinjected engine with a high (and fuel-efficient) 12.0:1 compression ratio, versus the carburetor and 9.8:1 compression ratio of the KLR. Carburetors have to be jetted rich enough to be safe from lean mixture on the coldest anticipated riding day, while electronic injection continually “re-jets” itself to deliver correct mixture as air temperature and pressure vary. For this reason, the Tiger will run at all times on a correct mixture while the KLR runs rich at all times except the coldest days.
Torque is not the only variable that increases with increasing compression ratio; fuel economy also increases (half of the reason forthe extreme fuel economy of diesels is the high compression they run). But probably the biggest effect on mileage is engine revolutions per mile. The Triumph Tiger, a purely highway bike, is geared for comfortable and economical cruise at moderate engine revs. The lowerthe revs, the lowerthe engine friction. The KLR, which has some off-road capability, must have a lower first gear even though it has only five transmission speeds
to the Tiger’s six, so in fifth I’d bet the KLR is turning fairly high rpm and generating a fair amount of extra friction loss. Normally, you can expect a bike with fewer cylinders to have lower heat loss(because of lowertotal combustionchamber surface area) than a bike with four cylinders. You could see this in Superbike racing, when 1,000cc fours needed visibly bigger radiators than did 1,000cc twins. This effect, however, seems unable to push the KLR’s mpg fartoward that of the Tiger.
While this is not, I admit, a rigorous answer quoting specific numbers, it does indicate important differences between the two bikes’ fuel usage.
-Kevin Cameron
Running it as you are, the EFI should compensate for the difference in backpressure, and, therefore, the difference in mixture between cylinders shouldn’t be noticeable. But you are making Victory engineers cringe.
