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Old 01-29-2008, 08:08 PM
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Highmiles Highmiles is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: 43 miles from Charlotte, NC
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Highmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milkHighmiles stays crunchy even in milk
I am certainly no expert. I am a dinosaur when it comes to the new electronics controlling the fuel delivery on my new Harley. In order to make a reasonable decision on the direction I wanted to take, I asked everyone here, and read absolutely every piece of information I could get off of the internet and out of magazines. Here is what I think I learned. With a stock 2008 Touring bike, there are no easy solutions for the seemingly simple addition of an aftermarket exhaust and free flow air cleaner. Harley-Davidson says the download is for adding mufflers only! A free flow air cleaner/muffler combination will end up extremely lean with only a download. I'm not sure I believe this. When I removed the mufflers from my bike, I was shocked at how restrictive they were. The left side muffler looked like it was built to stop any flow from that side of the bike. The amount of restriction concerned me, because, I intended to put SPO's on with <gasp> no download. I figured it was all ready leaning out to 14.7 to 1 on idle and cruise anyway, and nothing short of removing the O2 sensors would change that any way. I'd take a chance. It ran great. No pinging, and smooth as could be. The Dealer techs were shocked. Said I couldn't get away with that. Wrong. When I put on the SE air cleaner, I went with the SERT. Why you ask? Because the ECM that came on the bike is a highly sophisticated, well thought out, piece of equipment. We may not like the parameters loaded into it by the factory, but the system itself is the most sophisticated out there. Why would I need it? I have what amounts to a simple stage one? This is true, but I plan to keep this bike until I die. Might add another, but this one stays. At some point, this engine will grenade. Harley built it that way. On purpose. The crank and bearings become marginal at 100HP. That means that until I commit to spending some really large bucks, I need to keep the tune conservative. I would love to change the cams, get gear drives for them, and work on the heads. I would also love to bore the cylinders, and go to 103". That will happen in the distant future, when this engine has problems. At that point the rebuild will include a better crank, Timkin bearings, and the other stuff mentioned. Hopefully I will be able to take a trip to someone like Otto, or make it up to Maine for lobster and a trip to Big Boyz. At that point the O2 sensors come out and the tune goes up a little notch as a stopgap. In the meantime, it is really running great. It pulls extremely well, runs smooth, and still has reasonable mileage. I'm absolutely sure there are people out there with other solutions that work for them. The bottom line is no matter what you go with, you better have a good tuner who knows how to deal with the system you went with. I am lucky. I have lots of good people around me, and they all do SERT.
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