Mileage: Irrelevant

A lot of folk reckon that the reason many bikes exhibit ‘buffeting’ at speed is because a vacuum forms behind the screen, and the vortex creates the buffeting.  The way round this is to lose the vacuum by moving the screen away from the cockpit, allowing air to flow into the space.  Some manufacturers even build this into their screens as standard – IIRC the VStrom screen is forward of the cockpit, and I’ve seen Honda Dullsvilles with a hole in the screen to eliminate the vacuum.  I had ‘Tobinators‘ on my GS which in part at least do the same thing – and with some success – I could ride motorways without earplugs on that bike.

Anyway, I’ve read that doing the same thing on a Tiger will help with the wind noise problem – so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Seems like a fairly straight forward operation – fitting spacers in between screen and cockpit – but the problem is that as soon as you move the screen forward, the fixing holes in the screen no longer line up with the fixing holes in the cockpit, and you can’t bolt the screen back on.  So I bought some longer bolts, and some quite stiff, but still flexible hosing ( high-pressure fuel pipe in this case, and you don’t want it too flexible otherwise the screen will flap about in the wind ).  I cut the hosing to the length I wanted to move the screen forward by, plus about a centimetre.  Then I sliced the ‘spacers’ at angles to create some ‘washers’.  Here’s an illustration.

This allows the bolts to pass through washer – made-up washer – screen – made-up spacer – cockpit – and finally retaining bolt – at an angle which doesn’t force anything, but still allows the screen to be secured properly, and a couple of centimetres away from the cockpit.

Result: Well, the wind noise and buffeting on these Tigers is bad, and fixing it is all about incremental improvements. This mod in combination with the taller Skidmarx screen does seem to help with the buffeting and turbulance, but the wind noise is still worse than I’d like – so I’m still on the look-out for ideas.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 20:16 and is filed under Tiger 955i. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.