So, I have decided to keep my byke and upgrade some things to make my ryding more comfortable and manageable.
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3. The heat is not horrible until after the 7th hour of ryding with breaks every hour to 1 1/2 hours. Then I go spread eagle to cool off my inner legs to my thighs.
3a. I am looking for a way to cool that down. I read that there's not much I can do, but I'm a bit of a determined guy to find things........
Bear with me for a bit, this isn't just a 2 sentence answer! There's actually a fair few things you can do that will have some impact on how you get exposed to that heat, with varying degrees of success; but overall, most of the 'add on' things you can do will only be band-aid style fixes, each with fairly minimal results.... You can wrap or ceramic coat the exhaust pipes; you can delete or cut holes in the under-body panels to allow better hot air flow & escape; you can fit better insulation to the inside of the tupperware to minimise radiant heat getting out to make you hot; and there's a whole bunch of other stuff along those lines, each with the afore-mentioned rather small individually but collectively incremental results. :sour:
Or you can get rid of the dirty great lump of metal that's effectively a very effective 'heat generator' stuck in the exhaust right underneath you - the 'catalytic converter'!! At their core & simplified to their most basic, those things are designed to trap & extract significant amounts of heat from the passing exhaust gases so that the heat will transfer into the honey-comb of special metals held inside the hot box so those metals can do their 'catalytic' best to react with some of the nasty things pushed out with the exhaust.... but the nasty bits are only there in microscopically small amounts in what is really rather a large amount of exhaust, so there's a helluva lot of what is effectively 'waste trapped heat' that gets trapped & then radiated underneath you while a little bit gets to do the intended job... and as we all know, heat rises; and 'heat soak' means that once the metals in the engine start getting hot they take a helluva lot of 'work' to cool down, so the Spyder engine & everything around & above it gets hotter over time!! Sorry, that means you too!
BTW, you don't really hafta to do anything much else to the OE exhaust & muffler (altho you can if you want) so the noise doesn't hafta be much more than stock!!
If you're brave enough to get rid of the catalytic converter, you might also consider getting rid of all the convoluted & bulky air ducting & trunking on the inlet side of the engine as well, cos at least part of its function is to collect & retain a volume of intake air so that it can be readily available for any sudden throttle openings & the subsequent increased air requirements - which is good stuff actually, since it helps minimise things like throttle lag & hesitations or flat-spots in the power & torque curves... but the emission control mob got involved there too, and instead of making manufacturers work harder to do better on their initial engine tuning & mapping in order to minimise those nasty emissions we ran across earlier, instead they let the manufacturers get away with the cheap & easy option of simply pre-heating those trapped volumes of air in the intake - all of which adds to the 'under-tupperware' heat that creates more heat soak & eventually transfers a bunch of the heat problems over to you, the ryder!! But all is not lost here either.... just like losing the cat converter helps reduce the trapped heat from the exhaust, eliminating all that intake trunking means there's less overall heat trapped in the intake ducting so that less gets radiated on to you!! And a neat by-product is that the engine will actually run better on a cold charge of inlet air as well!! JT makes a luverly little air filter that does away with all that extra ducting & other stuff, which frees up a lot of space for air flow and lets your engine suck in cooler air that hasn't already been held for a while in all that trapped heat under the tupperware, so you get less heat AND a better running engine! :yes:
But what about all those nasty emissions, you cry!! Well, there's a solution there too - I mentioned earlier that the heated intake air thing was the easy way out of that particular little problem, and that with better tuning and engine mapping, while initially being more difficult & expensive, you can actually help minimise the nasty emissions too! I don't know if Monster or any of the other readily accessible ECM Tuners over there have the skills & knowledge to do this well, I haven't asked, but there are people around who can & will do exactly this type of tuning upgrade, altho it's generally not quite as cheap or readily available as the 'less complex & therefore easier to do' plain old power & torque upgrade type mods to your ECM!! Oh, and a nice little by-product is that if they do the ECM tuning properly, not only will those nasty emissions be minimised, but they can 'tune-out' all the flat-spots & hesitations that started people thinking about ECM tuning in the first place AND you can get at least some of those power & torque improvements too! Wins all round!!
hyea:
Overall, the heat minimisation achieved thru tossing the cat converter & all the intake dams & ducting, then fitting a free-er flowing inlet filter along with better ECM tuning will do far more for reducing heat than all the other little bits added together!! :lecturef_smilie:
