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One of the things we get
asked a lot is how well the Forcewinder air cleaner
from Force Motor Products works. People like it
because it looks cool and offers a lot of knee
clearance, but they're skeptical of it's performance
because it's got a fairly small filter element and a
90 degree elbow.
Well, we've dyno tested
the Forcewinder quite a bit, and this page is to
share some of the things we've found. First and
foremost, it's performance. The following chart
compares it to a Buell "race kit" air cleaner, which
uses a large 3" element under an XL style ham can.
The testing was done on our 1996 Buell S1, which was
nearly stock at the time ... but stock on this bike
is nearly 100hp as you can see.
It actually works pretty darn good! Over a certain
range, the tuned length of the Forcewinder worked
better than no air cleaner at all, which is
remarkable. You can see it in the torque curve, too:
We're big fans of the Forcewinders, we sell them and
we use them. But at the same time, there's something
to be cautious of when using a Forcewinder with a CV
carburetor.
The Forcewinder on the left is an older one, the
Forcewinder on the right is a newer one. See how the
bowl vent area was changed? Well, we've seen
entirely too many cases where the new style on the
right doesn't do an adequate job of venting the bowl
as the rpm's climb. As a result, the motor goes lean
and runs poorly.
It's extremely easy to hog this area out with a die
grinder or dremel tool and greatly improve the bowl
vent. Take a look at the following:
In blue you see how this bike ran with the
unmodified new style Forcewinder. In green is how it
ran by simply hogging out the float bowl vent area
to look like the older style Forcewinder. Here's
another real world example:
You can see what a
dramatic difference this little modification makes,
and you can also see how well the air cleaner
performs, approaching the zero-restriction
configuration, which is saying quite a bit as an
awful lot of the air cleaners on the market don't do
this. So we highly recommend Forcewinders for a lot
of high performance projects where knee clearance is
needed, just be sure to make this modification if
you're using it with a CV carburetor. If you're
using it with a Mikuni, or with an injected bike,
this modification is not needed and does nothing for
you.
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