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silverbird1100

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I was all excited to brag about how much cooler my bike runs but the difference seems negligible.  Cost me $400 including shipping and my bike was down for a month.

 

What sold me was the .015" thickness, much thicker than typical costings. Guess it really is all about radiator flow, but at least now I know for sure.  And yes I did paint them black. 

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7 minutes ago, silverbird1100 said:

Far as I know cats are only in exhaust pipes with expanded sections after it meets the mainfold.

 

They are.  I can detect their cuppage from this view.  You can't?  Fucking amateur.

 

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10 hours ago, silverbird1100 said:

I was all excited to brag about how much cooler my bike runs but the difference seems negligible.

It should make you a little less hot in the heat of the summer but it would be hard to measure.  As far as water temp......

I think Swamp has a coated header.

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The Bird that Carlos now owns has a JetHot coated header in the pretty shiny color, looks kinda like aluminum.  At idle the header tube temp dropped from 400ish to 300ish with an infrared thermometer, but colors effect the readings on those things so I'm not sure if that's an accurate number.  And it's real purdy.  I considered swapping it back to the stocker before delivering the bike, but brotherly love & all...in the Az hell heat every bit helps.  300* is still a lot of heat, but that was sitting still with no wind.  With a little bit of air flow I expect the difference with the coating would be even higher.

 

I didn't do a whole lot of slow traffic riding after the swap and didn't really take note of felt heat before/after, but later realized that I no longer felt a noticeable furnace blast coming off of it like I used to.  Do not expect a drop in engine temp, that's almost entirely controlled by the thermostat/cooling system.  You'll probably get less fan running since the header isn't cooking the radiator as much and you should have less felt heat coming up around the fairings.  If you have a thermometer and can get a temp reading it would be interesting to see your numbers.

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The Bird's radiator is somewhat shielded and not all that open to the incoming air, and the out going behind the rad. seems fairly restricted too.  It would be interesting to know how fast you have to go to keep it from coming on, if there is a magic speed.

 

The fan on my Excursion kicks in at 85MPH on a hot day and that has nothing but a grill restricting incoming air.  The fans on many of my vehicles kick in at high speeds, doesn't seem like they should be able to do more than what the natural air is doing, but they cycle which indicates that they are actually doing something.  I only notice it with mechanical fans because they're loud, don't know if any of my electric fan cars kick in at high speed, but since the mechanical ones do I assume the electrics do too.  It also happens with semi trucks and those radiators are very open to natural air flow.

 

Most radiators are fairly restrictive to air flow.  Even tho a fan can't move air at 80MPH, it's right against the radiator so it's able to create enough pressure/suction to force air through it.  To make the radiator less restrictive it would have to be bigger to still have enough surface area to get rid of the heat as well as one with a tight core.  I've known of some cases where someone "upgraded" from a 2 row to a 4 row radiator and started having overheating problems because the fan wasn't powerful enough to force enough air through it.

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Depends on the guard, I've never seen one.  Anything in front of the radiator will restrict flow to some degree, but it might not actually matter if the restriction is minimal.  If the guard is like hardware cloth I'd say it's no issue, if it's a fine mesh screen it might be a problem.

 

The stator is always putting out max power and the regulator has to absorb & dissipate any extra power not being consumed by other stuff so adding electrical loads, like running the fan, takes that stress off the regulator.

 

A bike's stator is very similar to the alternator on a car, but different.  An alternator has spinning windings inside a stationary electromagnet and the regulator cranks the power to that magnet up/down to create more/less energy.  The bike has stationary windings (the stator) and a permanent magnet spinning around the outside of the windings creating an uncontrollable amount of power.  The regulator basically creates a controlled short circuit to bleed off extra power that's not being used by the bike.  That extra power is turned into heat which is why the regulator gets hot and why Honda made them bigger & better in later bikes so they could dissipate that heat better and live longer.

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17 hours ago, silverbird1100 said:

I'm reluctant to put a guard on it even though I should because I tour on it.  Do they restrict flow even more?

 

I'd also wonder if one of the reasons the charging systems get taxed so much and fail is because the fan is always on.  

You will be fine with a radiator guard. I have had them on multiple track bikes, which are running harder and hotter than cruising down the highway. They do not restrict airflow in any meaningful way. 

Edited by jcrich
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On 9/15/2019 at 9:49 PM, superhawk996 said:

dissipate that heat better and live longer.

That's why I mounted and wired in a computer cooling fan directly to the regulator, always on.

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I got talked to for using the emergency lane on I-10 from Phoenix to Tucson in summer.  It was a parking lot.  When I got to the front, the cop directing traffic asked me WTF I was doing.  The fact that I rolled right up to him and didn't try to sneak back into traffic probably helped.  I told him the bike was severely overheating and I had to either do that or risk boiling over, and he told me to go.

 

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4 hours ago, SwampNut said:

I think the problem is that the fins just aren't big enough.  The later models are huge.  Here's mine.

Yup, mine has smaller fins, and its on the other side. I have a larger fan, no switch, it's always on.

 Similar mounting as the photo. No photo, sorry.

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