Talked to S&S tech support. They do recommend just doing the intake manifold upgrade, but they said the carb doesn't need to be changed unless it's causing grief, given the bike only has 12,700 miles.

 

My 99 softail has a keihin screaming eagle butterfly carb and intake on it. It seems to run decent but would it still be an upgrade to go to the cv?

 

Seems unlikely that your '99 would have a butterfly carb since the last year for that carb was '89.

 

True, but you might like the performance improvement if you did the CV upgrade. There's a reason the factory made the change.

 

I don't know what carb you have on there exactly, but I had a Screaming Eagle Keihin carb on my bike from about 1988 to about 2002. It was OK, but the S&S was definitely an improvement. I would GUESS that a well set up CV or an S&S would be a noticeable improvment over the SE. I still have the SE in on the shelf.

 

It's definitely a keihin screaming eagle butterfly carb with no vacuum slide. someone must have put it on there for whatever reason. it has the bolt on flange screaming eagle intake too.

 

Yeah, that sounds like the kit I bought way back when. SE Carb, cleaner and intake, but still used the compliance fittings. It was much better than the stock POS carb.

 

Ok, but it's also $400 more not including the labor to install it.

 

A carb is an easy thing to change. The cost of labor is one reason why I started working on my own bike. The other is to make sure it was done right. I may take me longer than a shop but when I am done I am sure it was done right.

 

For that kind of money you can get a new custom-built CV from Dale's Killer Carbs and have a few bucks left over for the manifold/air cleaner conversion. Several members here have gotten these carbs recently and enthusiastically endorse them. I got mine from Wood, but if I had known about Killer Carbs beforehand, I might well have gotten one of those instead and saved a few bucks. The Wood-built carb is a marvel, but it ain't cheap.

If you don't upgrade the carb now, within the year you will probably be thinking about it again, particularly if you make any other performance-oriented mods, like free-flowing exhaust/air filter or a cam.