There has been a lot of talk about a liquid cooled touring bikes. What about other strategies to cool an air cooled bike? When I look at my RK I see room to double or triple the size of the oil cooler. There's room to double the size of the oil filter too. Now we have a five or six quart bike. Put a fan on the oil cooler. It also seems possible to install a fan that sucks the hot air off the heads and ducts the air out the back of the bike. I have an 04 bike so heat is not a problem for me but it seems some of the 07+ bikes could really benefit from some of these ideas. With the new single exhaust bike could the now nonexisting exhaust be reinstalled as a heat exhaust duct?

 

In my personal opinion, which means nothing, I think people go overboard trying to cool their bike. If you ride down the rode, the air moving across it keeps it plenty cool. Of course sitting in traffic changes things. Even so, the engineers test and design everything to handle that. They test in the summer in Arizona. After riding for hundreds of miles, they'll park a bike surrounded by cinder block walls to prevent wind and let it idle. The engines survive. There is such a thing as a designed operating temperature. The temperature to which the engineers designed everything to work well. I ride year round and find that I get better mileage and my bike seems to run better in the summer than it does in the winter.

Now there is something to be said about getting that heat off the rider. I'm not as concerned for the motor as I am for the inside of my thighs. At speed it's no big deal but sitting a traffic jam in 100 degree weather, it can cook you.

Now having said all that I do run an oil cooler because I get stuck in traffic on an almost daily basis. When it does get a little hotter than normal, the oil cooler helps bring it back down to that designed operating temp faster once I get rolling again.