burying speedo on downhill bad?

[tooblue1439]

can you rev the engine too high? will it blow, if your going downhill

[Kami no Chiizu]

If you have something like the CDI that eliminates the redline, I would think it could blow the engine if you were too hard on it. But I don't think you would have the problem otherwise, if you take good care of the engine and service it regularly.

[Dandy Dan]

Our resident wise man, Chanito, said once that he expects our engines would chew a valve at around 12,000 RPM and that's probably the first thing that would go. If you are bombing hills, I'd say keep it under 10,000 RPM to be safe. If you don't have a tach...that's about 50mph unless you've modified your gear ratios (ie. variator, Met gears, different tire sizes).

In the long run though, higher revs will wear your engine out faster so it's best to not cruise at high revs. If you have the power to pull high revs then you should consider modifying your gearing. It's somewhat common for the crankshaft bearings to go in our engines which may be partially caused by extended high RPM running but it's also likely due in part to people using too thin of oil (don't use thinner than 0w40) and dirty oil (change it often, especially in a 03 - 05 Ruckus because the oil gets dirty quick in those scoots). 5w30 oil is really too thin to run at our high oil temps (appox 70 C degrees) with our high revs IMO.

Oh and

[tooblue1439]

cool, i font think i pushed it quite to 50, but it was over 45....It sounded like it was reved pretty high, Ill prob take it a little easier on her going downhill

[chanito]

By the way the people at Honda were nice enough to put a rev limiter on our scooter engines 03-05 is 8k and 06 and up is 8850, at which time the ECM (computer) will cut every third ignition spark, obviously if you have an aftermarket CDI that will not happen as the CDI will take care of the ignition
By the way my stock ruckus capacitor fires 80 volts to the coil, but the aftermarket barely 50 I have to finish my parallel firing system so both the factory and aftermarket capacitors fire

[timberwolfmadcat]

chanito said:

By the way the people at Honda were nice enough to put a rev limiter on our scooter engines 03-05 is 8k and 06 and up is 8850, at which time the ECM (computer) will cut every third ignition spark, obviously if you have an aftermarket CDI that will not happen as the CDI will take care of the ignition
By the way my stock ruckus capacitor fires 80 volts to the coil, but the aftermarket barely 50 I have to finish my parallel firing system so both the factory and aftermarket capacitors fire

Or get that 06 ECM and CDI..... ;D

[Dandy Dan]

chanito said:

the ECM (computer) will cut every third ignition spark...the stock ruckus capacitor fires 80 volts to the coil, but the aftermarket barely 50

Dang! That's cool info...how did you find out about the 'every third spark' thing? I knew it was messing with the spark but I never knew the specifics.

[chanito]

8-)That is courtesy if a very useful little tool called an oscilloscope ;D

[jabba]

In the long run though, higher revs will wear your engine out faster so it's best to not cruise at high revs.

I remeber reading an SAE paper many braincells ago that said that wear loading on a motor increases as a square of the increase in revs. example: if you increased the operating rpm of a motor from 6000 to 1200 (twice the revs) wear would increase 2X2 or four times as great. High revs do truly kill. Its the curse of our lives.

[Dandy Dan]

Our engines rev about 3x as high as a normal Honda car cruises at so putting 100,000 miles on Ruckus is like putting 300,000 miles on a Civic...or 9x as much (3 squared) using Jabba's formula which would be 900,000 miles. My old Ruckus has about 25,000 miles on it now.;

[azbrandon]

dandydan said:

Our engines rev about 3x as high as a normal Honda car cruises at so putting 100,000 miles on Ruckus is like putting 300,000 miles on a Civic...or 9x as much (3 squared) using Jabba's formula which would be 900,000 miles. My old Ruckus has about 25,000 miles on it now.;

It's even more than that since the gearing is so short. Best way to look at it is engine revs per mile. The Ruckus will be spinning an average of what, 8500rpm at 35mph? So in one hour you'll cover 35 miles and spin the engine 510,000 times, or 14571 revs per mile.

A car on the other hand driven in suburban traffic may average 40mph and an average engine speed of perhaps 1700rpm. So in 1 hour you'd cover 40 miles and have reved 102,000 times, which is 2550 revs per mile. If you're highway cruising, well, I know my car turns 2800rpm at 75mph, so that's a mere 2240 revs per mile. Just counting engine revs alone, the poor Ruckus motor will spin an average of about 6 times as many rotations per mile driven as a car. That's a lot of revs, especially when you factor in they're at peak horsepower and right around redline!

[Dandy Dan]

A stock Ruckus would be spinning at about 7800 RPM at 35mph but you're 'revs per mile' calculations does seem like the best way to look at it. We're essentially revving 3-4 times as high as a car while travelling at maybe 2/3 of the speed on average for a 'revs per mile' factor of 4.5-6 times a car.

[chanito]

I love it, i keep saying the RUCKUS ENGINE HAS WAY MORE IN COMMON WITH AN ENDURO RACE ENGINE THAN WITH YOUR CIVIC, but nobody listen so in order to avoid sounding like a broken record i will not say it again
Azbrandon way is the correct way to figure out wear potential on an engine, but there is some very significant features on the ruckus engine that make it more wear tolerant, your car engine have flat bearings that need a hi pressure oil film (it is impossible to have full cage ball bearings on the middle bearings) we are lucky since we only have one cylinder, it is possible to install ball bearings and have them being lubricated in an oil bath, so if your oil is clean and not contaminated by gas, it laugh at wear, the down side is that any dirt that gets in the bearing is going to kill it, that is why i keep insisting on 600 miles oil changes (or 1000 kms) also with the engine being so small the stresses are also smaller, i have taken apart some ruckus engines and in one case (Sanjuro's) i measure wear very carefully and it did not show any i could measure, so wear is not such a big issue on our engines, so much so that the nice people at Honda have not bother to make any oversize piston for people to install once the cylinder wears down, because it will take so long to happen, more than likely the rest of the scooter will be junk by then, 50k miles from a ruckus engine seems like a piece of cake

[azbrandon]

I think this may be a dumb question, but does the Ruckus use an oil filter, or does all oil just keep recirculating in the engine unfiltered? I know in the early days of the automobile nobody ran oil filters, that it wasn't commonplace until 5-10 years after cars started becoming common.

[Dandy Dan]

There isn't a filter which is part of the reason why frequent oil changes are so important. There is an 'oil screen' on the front of the engine but the screen is pretty coarse so anything smaller than an ants head will get through. In my experience, the screen is always clean. You're supposed to replace it every couple oil changes.

[azbrandon]

Yeah, that would do it. So do larger scooters like the Big Ruckus use an oil filter?

[chanito]

The only place that gets oil under pressure is the rocker arms, and installing a filter will kill the oil pressure and damage the weakest link on our engines
So just make sure to CLEAN (not replace) the screen every other oil change, and i think that is overkill, as i have yet to find any kind of dirt or grime there in all the times i taken that screen out , but better safe than sorry

[Dandy Dan]

Yeah whoops...just clean it....except it's never dirty.

[KazeSim]

chanito said:

50k miles from a ruckus engine seems like a piece of cake

How many miles, grand total, could I expect to get out of my fairly new '07 Ruckus? (bearing in mind that I plan on taking very good care of it)

[tuesdayclub]

Alot..... :-)