I agree. I own a dynojet kit for my 55/65. And from what I can gather from you, other riders, and the racing community, the K&N pods for the GS1100's are big enough to not be a signifagant restriction.
Horsepower is a function of torque and acceleration.
Horsepower is a fuction of work over time. There is no acceleration component to horsepower.
I have removed almost three ounces off of the flywheel.... bigger dyno numbers
Did you read what I typed? I said that by reducing flywheel weight you will make an inertial dyno show bigger numbers.
I did this comparison delibirately because someone told me the same thing you say. My sled is consistantly quicker on the timers with the liteweight magneto.
And I also said the bike would accelerate quicker. However it is NOT making more power. This "may" not be true on a 2 stroke as altering the shape of the crankshaft can have big effects on breathing, and I don't know what you did to lighten your crankshaft.
The bottom line is output at the end of the crankshaft will increase with lower "rotating" mass.
So until someone can prove my dyno experience wrong- I say your wrong if you think a lighter crankshaft assembly wont increase horsepower and performance.
The problem is you used an inertial dyno. Which means you will SEE a performance increse on an inertial dyno by reducing flywheel weight. I don't see how going to a dyno twice and changing flywheel weight and seeing the difference I said you'd see means I'm wrong. The information you just quoted, proves my point.
Yes, you accelerate faster. No, you don't make any more power. If you need an example of where the difference matters, there are two examples I can think of. Climing a hill is about power, If you're at full throttle climbing a hill, two motors that put out the same horsepower on a brake dyno will climb at exactly the same speed. (I should do the calculations on this, the numbers will be suprizing..) If one motor has half the flywheel weight, it will appear to be a MUCH stronger motor on an intertial dyno, yet it still will only make 50hp.
The other example is top speed. At top speed you're not "really" accelerating. As rate of acceleration slows, weight of rotating components means less and less. Eventualy reaching "it doesn't matter" status.
Or, if you need another example. An intertial dyno is essentially a drag race. The intertial dyno knows how much the car weighs, measures how long it takes your to push it up to speed, and from that determines horsepower. If you cut half the weight off, and don't tell the computer that, it will think you've got twice as much horsepower. You can test this with any online drag race calculator you like. Or a high school physics book.
Without a brake dyno you really can't get an accurate measure of your engines performance. Inertial dynos are great, they're cheap, they make the run very quickly, and they're very consistant. That's to say if you do two back to back runs, you're very likely to get the exact same readings both times. That's a good thing! However because the weight of your driveline is an unknown the dynos software has to guess at that number. Which means that if you change the weight of anything in the driveline, you'll see different numbers. That isn't true with a brake dyno.
I will admit I have never bothered to look at 77-82 550. But every GS I have seen had basically the same crappy airbox that pretty much any kind of pods could out flow.
Don't. The design still makes me sick to my stomach. The 83-86 airboxes are much much better. And in my case, there isn't much room to make things any better. There isn't really even room for decent pods!