I am curious if anyone is running one of these on an EFI softail. Is it a ridiculous idea to run no air filter? I love the look but am not interested in damaging my motor. Any opinions?

 

They do have a small filter and mesh screen you can run in it also.

 

Velocity stacks look cool for sure, but running with no air filter will eventually chew out your motor. I do not know how effective the small filters/screens are that you can install into stacks. My thought would be that a small filter in a stack would kill performance (very small surface area).

 

Yeah, but they look sooooo cool!

-Barry-

 

I've searched through the forums here and there are tons of people saying not to run one which I get. But There has got to be someone running one of these. If they were only for show bikes there wouldn't be so many companies mass producing them. I wish someone running one would reply to let us all know if they are as bad for a bike as you would think. The RSD catalog has a pic of one on a softail being jumped on a dirt track

 

Roland Sands is pretty hard on his bikes....
read the article in this months AI

I thought about getting one... but my filter gets so dirty now...
I am afraid of all that junk getting in the motor and screwing things up!

that being said...if he offered a filter for it... I would be all over it!

CC

 

I read that article. The 03 softail in his catalog he is jumping is actually that bike in AI crazy!

 

I am sure RSD and PM can afford to chew out a motor for the sake of some cool marketing images. I would guess that running filterless would start to actually reduce your performance after 10k+ miles due to early piston ring wear from large contaminants ingested into the motor. So yes, it would look cool for sure, no question here, but blowing smoke from a worn motor ain't too cool.

 

I'm not so sure there are "a lot of companies mass producing" them, but there are a lot of guys that run drags strip that don't accumilate massive miles like the average rider. Sounds like you are trying to convince yourself that it's okay. Please accept the fact that "a lot of companies mass produce air filters" for a reason. Dirt is bad for da motor.

Now if you are doing it for a performance thing, look at the Doherty backing plate. It has a small velocity stack that sits behind the filter.

 

Good call on the drag strip thing. That actually never crossed my mind. There probably is enough of a market in racing to justify why I see so many ads for them when you run 1/4 mile at a time I guess dirt would be about the last thin on their mind As far as justifying one I'm more just curious to see what the results of running them long term might be not what we think they would do. I'm with you I think they would be bad on the motor but has anyone here run one long enough to have trouble with a motor?