Hitchcocks Forum

Just thought id ask those owners who have had the classic enfield engine lean burn engine and the new EFI engine, how do these three different bikes compare up against eachother as in riding mainting etc .

Reds

This sounds like a question for ric! A.

Ha! Honestly depends on if you get as good one or bad one.
I've put over 4,000 miles on my B5 this month and my only real problem has been a slow puncture and the only maintenance required an oil change, haven't even needed to adjust the clutch, touch the brakes, or top up the oil. All I've had to do is open and close the filler cap.

On the down side none of my other bikes came with a bent swinging arm and incorrectly offset wheel rims or took 3,000 miles of running-in to reach the point it no longer felt a little tight.

Ahh another incorrect offset. I thought it was just me. My back wheel was out by about 10 mm. Maybe we have each others wheels. I'm still not sure things are correct as when I take my hands off the handlebars, the bike pulls to the right

Incorrect offset is not a feature unique to RE, the front cast wheel on my Hinckley Triumph sat off of centre between the forks because of shoddy machining as it did on several other bike sitting on the showroom floor. If I buy another RE I'll be going into the showroom armed a pair of two metre long straight edges...

Rather have my old 94 iron barrel a bit worked but pulls easily to a whisker over 140kph. New B5 could, nt get over 100, another shop looked at it now does 120 with a bit of struggle, would expect with 8.5 comp and efi to go better, kept getting told the old chesnut will be better the more klm you do got about 4000 on it now, only thing needing run in is piston to bore rest are roller btm end and bearings in crank and gearbox, not the improvements you would expect from a supposed new model.should have got the Japanese to do the development work, would be interestingto see what they would have made.

My C5 still vibrates more than I think it should despite careful running in and all the other things you need to do to minimise vibration. I believe the theory at Ace Cafe, the American tuners, is probably right: the crank balance is variable. You either get a good one or a bad one. I don't think it's entirely fair to compare a tuned iron barrel Bullet with an EFI though. A standard iron barrel isn't as fast (!) as an EFI. I don't much care for the drum tight primary chain tensioner either; if the Japs had designed the engine it would have had gear primary drive. This wouldn't have affected the feel of the bike but might have removed another potential source of trouble.

There is a school of thought that a more aggressive running-in procedure actually frees the engine up better and the result is smoother running. This chap claims it did the trick with his C5.









A.

My experience of riding a number of C5’s is that vibration, while varying from bike to bike, is almost always a definite problem. The root cause is that the engine lacks a balance shaft. Why an engine designed in the 21st century was left without what is a basic feature for a large single cylinder four stroke is a mystery. The secondary causes are, I believe, down to poor assembly and quality control at the manufacturing stages. No doubt there are tweaks that may reduce vibration but no doubt they ought not to be necessary.



A personal 'best' out of the Indian-made bikes? – the 350 iron barrel ‘classic’ – not much down on power (!) from the 500 version but a nicer engine and more enjoyable overall 'riding experience' (but I know I'll be in a minority with this choice).

Interesting videos. Certainly on more modern designs of engine they can burn oil if one is too gentle in running them in because the ringa and bore never become truly smooth, especially if the engine has had fully synthetic oil in it from new. Not sure that REs are exactly precision engineered though. There is a well-known Australian on another forum who has had half a dozen C5s from new (don't ask) and he reckons they all vary in terms of vibration. Interestingly he also briefly owned a new 350cc version of the C5 and reckoned it wasn't much slower than the 500cc. Maybe I should give mine a bloody good thrashing. Anyone up for buying me a new engine if it blows up? Thought not😀