BusyLittleShop

A quick and easy way to check correct fit of a prospective helmet is to begin with a large size and work your way down to a snug fit... and that is after you get it on your head and without buckling the chin strap, snap your head side to side in quick movements... if the helmet stays snug and follows your head then the size is probably correct... if it moves about then it is too large... try next smaller size... what you'll end up with is knowing what is too large and what is a snug fit without going too tight... in other words the correct skid lid for your cranial...

Buck 40 is go straight to jail velocity...

Thanks Mike you beat me to it... its true that no one looses money investing in Mr. Honda's exotic race bred V4s... Blessed by HRC in the name of the Father... ($15,000) in the name of the Son... ($27,500) and the Holy Smokes... ($184,000)

Hi BusyLittleShop, Thank you for your donation of 100.00 USD. We look forward to improving the forums with your donation. Thanks VFRDiscussion

Hiya Johnnie... Even though Freddie Spencer had an RC45 during his High-Performance Riding School days he would instead dice with the students on his VFR... I think that the 5th gen VFR (98 to 01) has more sport and less tour than the other generations... Freddie Spencer's RC45 serial number 6...

In my learned opinion VTEC (Vacillating Torque Engine Compartment) was successful on heavy autos but it's been 50 / 50 when applied to lighter weight bikes because of the unwanted bump in the power ban...

You're correct... Honda did used the RC45 tooling to make the engine for the 5th gen VFR 800... specifically adding bearing support structure to carry a swingarm pivot... My friend Makota San previous job was Chief Engineer Honda R&D who invented Honda's VTEC... he calls VTEC "his baby" and recalls his boss being super skeptical of the idea working at all... Makota San down on cannery row...

Hiya Ron... the orange BMC will pass more air than a K&N... but you might need to remap the ECU... K&N are designed to pass just as much air as the stock paper and thus no remapping...

Understanding how an air box works and the reasons why a stock box is a safer bet... If you have ever had the gas tank off your late-model sportbike, you will notice that the front of the fuel tank doesn’t hold fuel; it holds an airbox. In the old days, when you bought a new bike, it had an air-filter case attached to feed the carburetors or the fuel-injection intakes. All the sharp, young guys would immediately rip off the filter case and replace it with four sock filters. Reduced airflow resistance. Much better performance. One day in the late 1980s, they began to rip off the airboxes of their new bikes and their engines fell on their faces. They lost a bunch of performance. “This can’t be happening! Putting on sock filters always worked before.” But it turns out the industry found a way to boost performance by making what is known as a resonant airbox. We have all in an idle moment blown across the mouth of a beer bottle and heard the "whoooo" of the bottle resonance. As air goes across the mouth of the bottle, it creates a low pressure, which causes air to flow up. That deflects the air away from the mouth of the bottle. Then the air goes back in, the airflow from your mouth goes back across, and the cycle repeats, rapidly fluttering and producing that deep tone. The compressible air in the bottle is acting as a spring, and the slug of air in the neck of the bottle is the mass that vibrates against that spring. This intake airbox from a fuel injected Honda is just a glorified beer bottle. Instead of the engine blowing across the mouth of it, its four throttle bodies are sucking from the box, pulling its pressure down. Air rushes in through the ducts in the fairing to fill up that low pressure. The next cylinder sucks the bottle pressure down and more air rushes in and restores the pressure. If the volume of the box and the mass of the air in the intake pipes are correctly chosen, the box will hum like the beer bottle. The trick is to get your engine to draw air from the box when the pressure is up and then the box refills when the pressure is down. And that is why ripping the airboxes off and putting on old-time sock filters resulted in a reduction in performance. In a specific zone of rpm, a resonant airbox can boost your engine’s torque by 10 percent. That’s worth having! My friend Stephen called long distance from England because he just installed a $900.00 HRC air box on his RC45 and saw 120HP on the dyno... mmmmm... together we wondered if the stock box be modified??? We found that stock RC45 throttle bodies are 46mm but the air box was restricted to 40mm... no problem... I'll bore the air box out to 47mm on the milling machine... I drew up plans for 47mm bell mouth based on the stock 40mm bell mouths and purchased a block of black Delrin... I'm not happy doing repetitious work but I labored long hours to machine 4 each bell mouths with my best accuracy... Don't you love when a plan comes together especially if it turns out perfect??? Now I had an unrestricted air box with my own 47mm bell mouths... it was the best I could do to replicate HRC $900.00 air box... not to mention I wanted to keep my home made K&N filter... Time to put the Mod to the test on the dyno... this is Dave at Chandelle Motorsports... No joy... I lost 1.8HP on the dyno... so bigger is not better in this case... a whole week worth of work shot down in flames... it seems Honda got the intake velocity right for a stock pipe after all... air boxes are like tuned instruments... alter the holes and the tune just makes sour notes and power suffers... Mr.RC45 fueling is not the problem... my air box will remain stock because our air box works like a finely tuned instrument... any wild ass guess mod disrupts this highly engineered resonant to where to you're producing nothing but sour notes... The airbox inlet tubes, or “horns”, are specifically designed to provide a resonance that can increase the total airflow by up to 10-15%. Second guessing these can cause the engine to loose power and increase the intake noise as in my case... RC45's stock intake horns are there for homologation purposes only and do not directly feed into the airbox only the HRC intakes feed ram air into the airbox...

Mileage is a loose standard because wear depends on so many variables... A more accurate standard of chain wear is after the 3rd adjustment because that is undeniable evidence that the factory installed grease is beginning to fail to lube the critical pin roller junction hidden behind the X ring... the length of the chain is growing because of this metal to metal wear... I can not call a chain serviceable that is grinding metal... it's like saying that a dry bearing that runs ruff is acceptable... the net result is another 2 to 3% drop in RWHP as more energy is lost grinding metal behind the X ring... This is what we don't see behind the X rings... metal to metal wear every time we adjust the chain that eats into our engine's available HP... a new pin measures 206.5 and wears down to 205.5 at the 8K mile mark... looks good to the naked eye but multiply that 1 thousand of an inch times 108 links and you have 108 thousands of an inch wear or about the range of the green marks provided by Honda's wear gauge... 202.8 show the very visible wear at the 12K mile mark... the pins are turning red from extreme heat of grinding dry metal... a chain in this condition may consume up to 6 to 8% of our RWHP... not to mention it may snap into and cause case damage... Some manufactures provided a handy guide to monitor chain wear... stay with in the green and you'll be looking for a new chain and sprockets at the 8 to 10K mile mark... What we are lubing are external roller and between the roller and the sprockets (red area in my drawing)... we are not lubing the X rings nor behind the X rings so any oil applied in that effort is a waste and will only fling off... We are lubing the external roller and between the roller and the sprockets (red area in my drawing)... we are not lubing the X rings nor behind the X rings so any oil applied in that effort is wasted fling off...

General info... Trouble shooting Chris's RC45 continuous high idle the culprit proved to be air leaks... you see that on a fuel injection engine *any* air that bleeds past the throttle bodies the map just increases the correct amount of fuel... the result is high continuous idle... make sure all the rubber hoses are connected and in good shape... make sure all the intake boots are tight and in good flexible shape... if the rubbers are hard and cracked its time for replacement...

WOOF!!!

You're welcome... but it is designed to dampen clutch knock not engine sound...

Bolt on noise dampener...

Welcome Charles... Before Mr.RC45 I had a love affair with my 86 VF500F Interceptor bought new from Golden Gate Cycles... I modified it extensively... Dymags... Billet Clutch basket... Exhaust and even converted the chain to belt... This became famous Belt-0-Ceptor... I racked up 98,000 trouble free miles... I sold it to my Air Force buddy up in White City Oregon... Home made Billet Clutch Basket My custom dash with Oh Shit warning... Sometimes being the littlest bike among the Big-Bad-Motors of Death can be a recipe for bruised egos...