First off this week, I would like to talk about increasing the orifice behind the rear cylinder. I do recommend it if you are tearing down the engine. However, I see no reason to remove the cylinder if there is no other damage to fix. The size of the orifice has been debated, and we here at X-Man Performance Products open it to 0.063". I have heard the engineers opened it to 0.080" to 1.000"; the problem I see with this is it never went into production and they were doing these tests from the beginning. Remember, the more you open the orifice, the more it takes away from other areas.

     Next, this is the one that I can't prove, but with over 300 transmission rebuilds under our belt, we now see a pattern not even the factory could have seen. The gears do not seem to have any problems due to oil starvation; fourth gear is the most noticeable, and fifth shows some bearing wear. I have spent a lot of time documenting miles, wear, and the serial numbers of bikes that might show more patterns. Our transmissions are a knock-off of the Yamaha V-Max and most parts are inter- changeable.  Why is it that Yamaha has had this nearly identical transmission on the market for twenty years with few problems? 

     Our idea is that Excelsior-Henderson added two-tenths to the fourth and fifth gears, therefore putting more stress on the narrow bushing. Super X transmissions have no problems with 1st through 3rd gears, only the two gears that E-H made with extra teeth. A while ago, a transmission was sent to Baker Transmissions and they thought that fourth gear was too narrow. At first we thought it was an oil problem, but now it looks like they were right. 

     So what can we do to fix the problem? We have two options: we can use the Yamaha fourth and fifth gears, or we can increase the width of the stock bushing. With our bearing material, we can make the bushing wider to support the increased load due to the diameter. From all of the X-Man testing, we have see that increasing the bushing width has been working great. I do recommend rebushing the Yamaha gears (if you use them) because the Super X makes more torque and has more weight than the V-Max. Yamaha also does not run their bearings the full width of the gears.

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