Quote:
Originally Posted by low&slow
I had been a little frustrated riding it in very windy conditions that would force it out of top gear in order to maintain my cruising speed.
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Using your other gears shouldn't mean a reduction in fuel economy. You don't have to be a slave to 6th gear just because it is the biggest. Your gearing is now more than two gears longer than a stock Ninja! Stock gearing puts 6th gear 70 mph at 8610 rpm. Your new gearing puts 70 mph at 7660. In 4th! It might be fun to connect an old school vacuum gauge and stick it to the dash so you can see when you are lugging the engine. Peak efficiency for accelerating should be about 2 inches of vacuum in whatever gears run the rpm in the range either side of the first torque peak of 7000 for your current speed. This is a little more than too powerful on this bike so you will be back out of acceleration quickly and into a light cruise which will favor the lowest rpm that is not lugging under the given load. You could play with the gauge at different rpms, 4000, 5000, 6000, to see where you reach a point where dialing in more throttle doesn't seem to produce any further results. You might see a sudden curve in the vacuum where it starts out linear with increasing throttle and then starts to dive down showing that there is nothing else good to gain in that gear by twisting further. Which might be barely off idle at 4000. Just thinking out loud again.