Deal or no deal: Honda Blackbird

[rusjel]

Living in Oz where things get warm I have often wondered about this.

Apart from the afore mentioned increased mechanical noise and heat rising from the motor I've never had an issue with any of my FJs.

My water cooled bikes have gotten coolant temperatures up to 114c in traffic, but according to the manuals that is still a few degrees cooler than when problems start. According to the manual the temp guage on the Bird will start flashing at 118 and the engine will auto shut down at 120.

If you did feel that an air cooler like an FJ was getting too hot is there anything else you can do besides giving it a rest?

A farmer friend of mine operates a cattle station and uses TSX250 Suzuki's for mustering. Because they do a lot of walking pace running in 40+ ambient temps he had some overheating issues. His solution was a an extra fan from a computer with manual switching to supplement the bikes radiator fan and says that works.

If you were worried and did a lot of traffic work perhaps a similar fan operating with the FJ's oil cooler would help?

[ribbert]

If you did feel that an air cooler like an FJ was getting too hot is there anything else you can do besides giving it a rest?

Not really. On the odd occasion that is what I have done. The oil takes a long time to cool but the engine will cool relatively quickly, certainly in less time than it takes to re bore it and fit new pistons!

On that occasion my bike was already stinking hot and had I not just broken free of the gridlock I would have pulled over. However, no sooner had I got moving and there was a multi car pile up just ahead of me. All the traffic came to an abrupt and barely controlled halt, with me stuck in the centre lane and not a gap anywhere to get off the road. I was uneasy about being stuck out there without the motor running and expected the cars would soon start filtering their way around the accident , they didn't.

His solution was a an extra fan from a computer with manual switching to supplement the bikes radiator fan and says that works.

If you were worried and did a lot of traffic work perhaps a similar fan operating with the FJ's oil cooler would help?

This suggestion is regular raised here. It is the general consensus and certainly my own view that this would be next to useless on the FJ and about as effective as kneeling beside the bike blowing on it.

A car with a cooling system in good order should never over heat under any circumstances but for reasons of space and aesthetics, bikes systems are more marginal.

Noel

[rusjel]

Yep, suspect you're right. Any blown cooling solution for the FJ would have to include the cooling fins on the motor as well.

My Dak daks (VW beetles) always ran cooler oil temps with all the tinware directing the air around the motor, in place.

Would kind of spoil the rugged good looks of that FJ lump though!

[Alf]

Thanks for your contribution, but apart for reading about the overheating problem in this forum I don't know a single FJ or XJR broken due to overheating... and a lot of water cooled bikes broken with expensive repairs due to overheating

So again, apart for subjective feelings and obviously that the air cooled engines get the tolerances wide with the temperature increase (so the sound increase), I can't agree, simply based in my own experience. In Spain in summer there is a lot of hot. And I've been riding at the Jarama circuit with more than 30ºC air temperature (maybe 45ºC on the tarmac) a lot of times, and suffering everyday on Madrid traffic jams. And my 1100 had perfect compression when I sold it with 165.000 mks