Unofficial Royal Enfield Community Forum
Royal Enfield Motorcycles => Bullet with the UCE engine => Topic started by: Arizoni on May 20, 2011, 12:38:29 am
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When I got my new G5 home and parked it one of the fin vibration dampeners fell to the ground. It had been located in the fins of the black cylinder which leads me to my question.
Is the black area where the cylinder is located made from cast steel/iron or is it painted aluminum?
Being a designer of jet engines I am familiar with vibration and the reasons for using devices such as this to dampen out resonant frequencies so I can understand why the aluminum areas like the cylinder head might need them.
Cast steel or cast iron on the other hand is usually able to tolerate most vibration so that is the reason for my question.
Any information or thoughts about the need for the dampeners in the cylinder fins?
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It's all aluminum.
There was a pretty good discussion on them a few months back. The final decision was you had to have the rubber things in there to fend off some cosmic disturbance creating some field that would transmogrify the alloys used in the manufacture of the bike.
Or something like that.
Most folks take em off cuz they ugly. And if you take em off early enough there won't be marks where they were.
CJ
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I tossed the ugly things on day one :D
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I keep mine on 'cuz they're purdy!
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Hello Arizoni !
When I got my new 2010 G5 Deluxe, The first thing I did was " yank 'em ". I talked with a Royal Enfield engineer and he told me they were not needed . I suspect that some moron from the EPA was concerned that the resonate frequency of the cylinder fins would affect the mating cycle of the deers in the forest , or any wildlife anywhere !
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Thank you all for your replies.
I did a search for the other post about the dampers and found it. Although it was interesting it seemed to go downhill a bit towards the end.
As for dampening the noise, I can see where they would help quite some of it.
I believe part of the reason some bike makers switched to water cooling is because it also helps silence the engines which in turn helps them meet some of the questionable noise requirements our governments impose.
I'm not fond of the look of all of those rubber strips on my nice clean fins and would consider removing them but I'm wondering how that might effect the warranty?
Any one have a thought about that issue?
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I doubt it would affect the warranty. As I understand it those things are there to prevent the fins "ringing". On or off, the fins don't ring!
As for the warranty - who's to know you've been riding without the rubber dibdabs, as long as they're back on when you take the bike in for any warranty issues which may arise..... ;)
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I keep mine on 'cuz they're purdy!
Me too! Hey, we can be purdy buddies!
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I say, steady on chaps..... :-*
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Thank you all for the responses
I'll give some more thought to removing them.
One of my thoughts is that it gets up to 115 degrees F here in the summer and 108 is pretty common. An air cooled engine like this needs all of the cooling it can get when it's that hot.
Yes, it's a "dry heat" but the engine doesn't know that.
Those rubber dampers cover up a fair amount of the fins surface area and they also block off the flow of air past them. That can't be good when it is really hot outside.
If I were an Enfield design engineer I would be more concerned with overheating than with sound emissions. :-\