My shop gets a lot smaller when my wife gets home. But I won't complain as there is enough room for the 2 bikes, a bench, and my tools along side the cars. Thanks Ace I live in a hilly neighborhood so I can do lots of short bursts on and off throttle. Might settle for getting the exhaust done as I took my daughter for a long ride on the other bike and went to an airshow and right now the couch is feeling pretty good.
A hilly neighborhood road is great for the break-in process. That's very good.
You shouldn't hear any ping up the hills, if you have it timed right and have good octane fuel.
My first impressions when I broke-in a Fireball were that it felt quite strong and very smooth at the lower rpms. The lower and lower-midrange rpms are amazingly nice and torquey, but they don't knock you over with the impression of super-power. Those rpm ranges are for dealing with traffic in town and general moderate speed riding when you want the bike to be torquey but relatively tame and controllable and well-behaved.
And it does that real well, which was part of the design goal.
You'll want to spend most of the early break-in at those ranges under 4000 rpm for a while. And you will be able to do most road riding needs with only the first 4000 rpms of the power range. It will be faster than any normal Bullet even with those rpm limitations. It mostly feels like a Bullet with alot of added torque at those ranges. And very smooth, with so little vibration that the mirrors are clear, and you can't believe that you're on a 500 single with this little amount of vibration. The smoothness is smoother than you are even imagining right now. It's smoother than some twins.
Then, after a few hundred miles as you begin to feel the bike getting comfortable with some spurts over 4000 rpm, and it seems to want to go, then you can begin to explore that range between 4000-5000 rpms. It is at these rpms that you'll really begin to feel what this Fireball can do. This is the part where you see 4000 rpm on the tach and keep the throttle on, and look up at the road starting to fly past, and then look down at the tach after about a second of time and it's already at 5000 rpm.
That 4000-5000 range is where you get the "surge" from the cams. Most people are quite shocked at just how fast it goes between 4000-5000 rpm. Usually they are thinking that this is as fast as they might ever want to go, or need to go.
But then after that, there's the 5000-6000 rpm rev range,which Chumma describes as "being in a hurricane". This is the part where you really can't even believe that the bike is still wanting to rev higher and give even more power, for another whole 1000 rpm until 6000. At first, you think maybe you shouldn't be going up that high, because it is ferociously loud and you are not used to revving that high in a Bullet. But it goes right up there like it was made to do it because, ... well,... it WAS made to do it.
So, if you want to be nice and practical and well-behaved with plenty of smooth torque, just stay under 4000 rpms, and you can do whatever you want to do very nicely, and you can even cruise up to 70mph without going any higher than 4000 rpm.
And if you want to be a wild-haired "Ton-Up" hooligan, just take it up thru the gears, shifting at 6000rpm in each gear, and before you know it you'll be hitting the ton, and it's a wild ride, let me tell you!
So, you get to choose how you want to ride it by how much throttle you give it, and where you decide to shift. It can go from mild to wild, anytime you want, and it is great at being both mild and wild.
I hate to sound bragadocious, but the Fireball is a really kick-ass bike. It's so good that it even scares me, how good it is at everything. It's more than I even thought it would be.
Topic: Fireball #8, finally in the frame (Read 3713 times)