I bought my FatBob a few months ago. Actually it is my wife's bike. When I rode this bike it always seemed a little quicker than my Triumph TBird. However, sometimes, we race a little when taking off from a light. She swears that my bike is faster. So the other day, I took her bike out and found that the rev limiter is set at 5500 rpm. We bought this bike barely used, it was a rental. Did they set the limiter low? Maybe to keep people from abusing the bike when it was rented? or is that the normal limit.?

 

Yep, that's normal.
The tachs redline at 5500 also.

 

Limiter is easily changed with a stage 1 download or just about all tuners. Is yours completely stock?

 

http://www.harley-performance.com/stage-1.html

Stage one raises your rev limiter to 6200. I never approach that without shifting first.

 

When I had mine on the dyno the power dropped off a lot past 5500, I don't really see any need to raise it much higher. I think I have mine set at 5800 now.

 

I have the rev limit on mine set to 6200 using my tuner. With a stock motor it's useless to even get near that since it's well out of the powerband. And since I don't want to know when the valves start to float I keep it under 6000 anyway.

 

Mine is set to 6200 as well. Completely useless range.

 

Yup, that's stock. Assuming the engine's stock, what I've heard from a few people with a lot of experience working on Harleys is that you can set the rev limiter to 6300 before you start to worry about valve float.

 

Like the others said, there's nothing past 5500 with the stock motor, if you're hitting the limiter, shift earlier.

As far as valve float, I used to turn my old 95" to 6500+ regularly with stock springs and never had any float. New bagger se tuner stage 1 maps are at 6400 right from harley, don't know why.

 

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. With the original cams no matter how you tune it, the high RPM range will fall off. If you change cams then the sky is the limit.