Hello everyone, new Harley owner. Just purchased a 2015 Night Rod Special, love the bike except for the pipes. Thinking of putting on some Vance & Hines Widow Slip-Ons but don't know if I need some kind of Fuelpak or Auto tuner, No Air Filter or any other upgrades only the slip-ons, please advice.

 

I would recommend the Vance & Hines 2-into-one stainless-steel (the black version). Once you blow out the fiberglass packing replace it with stainless-steel (Walmart 3M pot-scubber scrungies -- 6 of them) and then you will have a set of pipes that will have that deep snarling gutteral sound that HDs Twins are known for. The stainless-steel packing lasts for a long long time.

Wire one scrungie-ball in the open throat just after the collector to help prevent exhaust gas recursion which can be a problem. Recursion happens when you let off a hard-throttle and low rpm cruising. When it happens some ambient air gets sucked into your exhaust and makes it to your O2 sensor which begin to report oxygen in the exhaust causing the ECU to make adjustments to enrichen your Air-Fuel mixture (and your wife will begin to say, "Why do you always smell like gasonline after a ride?")

The cleanest way to do that mod is to not dangle on any kind of air-fuel management device (another unnecessary point-of-failure) but to have the dealer or other re-flash your Air-Fuel ratio tables based on a re-mapping provided by V&H (or other for your bike). These re-maps are perfected on a dynometer.

As I understand it -- if you don't do this you may begin to face problems with burnt valves, etc. after 40k miles or so. So a trusted HD trained mechanic told me once.

If you get something like the Powercommander (Dynojet(tm) -- self programmerwith LCD screen that sits on your handlebars) so you can reflash your own ECU tables in seconds and for varied improvments and even riding conditions. I likek that unit cause you can do it all from the device without any laptop/computer attached and you can leave it in place and see other engine statistics you can't normally see on a mini-dash coming from the CAN buss. Or you can just re-flash and remove it and off you go without any "dangles or dongles" -- the best way if you ask me. Kind of expensive though: ~$600 with wide-band O2 sensors. Got to replace the O2 sensors cause the stock OEM ones are narrow-band and so really don't provide much information to the engine to do full sprectrum fine tuning. The VRod does posses a closed-loop fuel injection system but it places heavy reliance on the air-fuel ratio tables predominately.

 

Thanks JayDRod, I'll keep that in mind. I'm really just thinking of putting on slip-ons only, don't feel like changing the entire exhaust, just want it to sound like a Harley instead of a moped while keeping cost down.