An engineering question for you engineer gurus

[Rockdoc]

Hi all y'all,

I have a technical question about the basic design of the V-twin engine in my Intruder. First I'll make it clear, the bike is very well made, I really like the drive shaft and I love the low end torque. Having owned many motorcycles over the years I'm still astounded by the reported longevity built into these bikes. As some of you may know if you've read some of my other posts, I purchased the bike as a fixer-upper, basically as a mental distraction from having lost my son to brain cancer in May. In fact I call it my Suzuki Distraction. After screwing with the carburetors for weeks in the relentless Arizona sun I finally got the bike running good... about a week before cold weather arrived. I live at 4,650' so yes it does get cold here.

I'm a retired geologist who's also worked on cars, motorcycles, and boats all his life. Even at 75 years of age I still do 95% of my own vehicle maintenance. My technical question is, why didn't they engineer the bike like the standard V-twin with cylinders that are mirror images of each other. With the mirror image arrangement you only have to fit the bike with one carburetor and in doing so there's one less carburetor to cause problems and none of that carburetor synchronization nonsense. BTW, I did teach myself how to synchronize the carburetors. Between burying the carbs under the gas tank and other assorted mechanical clutter and then having to resynchronize them each time I worked on them, which was often because they were a gummed up mess from the bike having sat for 5-6 years, it was much greater distraction than I'd ever dreamed of.

I guess I'm complaining, but it astounds me that the Suzuki engineers would create such a beautiful well built bike and then equip it with the cylinder layout that it has.

I'm currently up in the Denver area enjoying the holidays with my daughter. When I return to Arizona, now that I have my Intruder running so good, I plan to ride it all winter even if I have to wear my old snowmobile suite and helmet.

Steve

[hillsy v2]

They ended up having both intakes in the middle on the 1500. That bike had the airbox where the traditional tank normally is..and the real tank under the seat.

Whilst a single carb is easier to tune it offers less performance than a carb for each cylinder. The 1500 had twin carbs on a rack to this end.

Air cooled v-twins also have airflow issues to the rear cylinder - and they run hotter. Having a separate carb for each allows the jetting to be altered to compensate.

[Herb]

Not being an engineering guru I have no idea why they did it this way, but it works very well and has a remarkable life span so I think that they made some really good choices. My 87 was still running good when I sold it with 154,000 + miles on the bike.

HOWEVER, they really screwed the pooch on the clutch assembly. I never got more than 15,000 out of a set of clutch springs until my son bought Designer's springs for me.

There is also a poor design issue in the 5 speed transmissions. At 135,000 a split cotter pin wore out and allowed one of the shift forks to come loose from the shift drum. It allowed the trans to go into 2 gears at one time which broke a couple of gears and bent one of the transmission shafts.

Considering that it went into 2 gears at about 40 in a turn and locked up the trans it could have been VERY hairy, except that when one of the gears broke it allowed it to stay in one gear and I was able to limp home.

Very expensive situation.