This past weekend, my wife and I took a little ride leaving Friday from Crest Hill, IL to Savana on Friday. Saturday we rode past Nashville, through Wyoming from east to west, then again through Wyoming from west to east, and back to Savana. On Sunday we rode from Savana to home in Crest Hill. Before anyone calls BS on this, Savana is a little river town in western IL, Nashville and Wyoming are towns in Iowa between Savana and Anamosa.

Anyway, we both set our trip meters before leaving home. My bike (2004 Ultra) logged 436.7 miles. Wife's bike (2006 Sportster) logged 425.3 miles. That is an 11.4 mile difference on a fairly short trip. Mind you - We both rode our own bikes the whole time and neither of us took and side trips. I can understand slight difference in the odometer reedings, but 11.4 mile difference for such a short trip seems kind of odd. Does anybody know how accurate (or inaccurate) HD's odometers are???

 

shoulda hollered... would have bought you a beer. my odometer v.s. gps is off by about 3 at 75... reads 78. so at an hour.. that's be 3 miles for every 75... devide 436.7 by 75 and multiply by 3 = 17.46 miles.. so i think your bikes are pretty close to average.. and if the tire shows some wear it's going to add up eventually.

 

For improved speedo and odometer accuracy. Have one on mine, works great.

http://www.dakotadigital.com/index.c...rod/prd238.htm

 

Can't say what the newer electronic speedo's are like but the old mechanicals lied like a crack ***** , mines off by at least 15mph so that makes the OD way off .

 

Maybe the wife took the curves tighter than you did!

 

can't say how many cable cores i've gone thru on my boattail. i just pick up a cable replacement kit (cut to length) for a couple of bucks everyonce in a while just so i can say it works. i'm sure it's off by a mile as well.

 

Are you both still on the factory size/spec tires and have you changed your gearing?

Depending on how the bike measures distance (I assume it counts rotations of the final drive pulley on the transmission and does the math based on OEM gearing and tire size), a change in either one could affect accuracy of your ODO and speedo.

Have you benchmarked either bike against a GPS yet? That is another good way to get a solid reading on accuracy.

 

I am sending in my paperwork for an Iron Butt ride. I keep both odometer readings and GPS readings.

My odometer reading showed a distance of 1,819 miles, compared to a GPS reading of 1,783. The Harley odometer overstates speed and distance by almost exactly 2%.

BTW. I completed the run in 34 hours 47 minutes.

 

Sounds perfectly normal. Most factory speedo/ODO readings overestimate by 1-4%.

I have seen factory bikes off by at much as 8% before (I bought a Yamaha some years ago that was off by 7.5% from the factory).

 

Wife's bike and mine both have OE dunlops (not original tires, but OEM replacements). I am too old to start learning GPS crap. LOL I will use the old mile markers along the interstate to check the speedo and Odometer on both bikes. Been doing that in cars since the late 1960's and it always seems to work. I'm not ready to start with the GPS stuff though. I kinda like being lost when riding, and would not want any kind of electronics telling me where to go. LOL