Yes there is! With a parade fan and an oil cooler you could sit in traffic at idle all day and never "cook" your engine. And adding a fan assist to the oil cooler will help even a little more.

My bike never actuates the EITMS (approx 290 deg cyl head temp) with the parade fan running even on 100+ deg days regardless of how long I let it idle. And yes, the EITMS is enabled.

 

With all due respect to everyone (and I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically), entirely too much time is wasted worrying about engine and oil temperature. With one or two exceptions on this forum, I ride more miles a year in more traffic than everyone else. I don't own (and will never own) an oil temperature gauge. I change the (synthetic) oil every 5,000 miles, regardless of how hot or cold out it is. In 40,000 miles of used oil analysis (done by Blackstone Labs), there has been utterly no indication of any issues with the oil or the engine.

 

I agree with Train, too much paranoia over heat. These motors can take it, it's the oil that can't. Whether you're running 180° or 250°, dino or synthetic, as long as you change the oil when it needs to be changed your motor will be just fine!

 

Its all in what a person wants to achieve with their own ride, aint that what its all about, customizing these bike to our own preference. While true these air cooled powerplants can take about any heat a rider can tolerate, without experiencing catostrophic failure. No it isn't necessary but there is no denying there are lubrication, mechanical, performance, and rider comfort benefits to cooling. Niether side of the debate is wrong, just a different thought process and different goals. Just because someone has an oil cooler, parade, fan or a temp gauge, does not make them thermal hypochondriacs, paranoid, or hysterical, and just because someone doesn't have these things doesn't mean their mill will expire prematurely. I'll be the first to admit that in the past I've been pretty agressive at defending the pro-cooling side. I have significant knowledge and experience in this area, and I just can't sit by and say nothing while myths, half truths, and flat out lies are being posted about cooling. I do find it peculiar that folks who insist on building and tuning perfection to squeeze every ounce of TQ/HP, and then blatantly ignore the performance benefit of lowering operating temperature. Oh well, there's always PM, I'm pro-cooling and willing to have a productive discussion on the topic with anyone. Cool, don't cool, either way you aren't wrong, Peace.

 

A cold front came through and it was 62 degrees. Put a fast 60 miles on the bike and when I stopped the oil temp read 175 degrees.

Again it is a TC96 with oil cooler, stock cams, stock compression and Cobra Fi2000R programmer.

 

While a cooler intake charge will generally make more power, there's just not much performance benefit from adding a parade fan. If you're talking about maximum performance, that's at speed, when the engine's being cooled by airflow. A fan does nothing for you then. I don't think an oil cooler's a bad idea. My Limited came with one, I added a Jagg 10-row to my high-compression Night Train.

Fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of thousands of stock bikes out there that aren't melting down. No one needs an oil cooler with a stock motor. With a good Stage One, you've corrected the VE tables, and there's no need for any additional cooling.

You start getting into high compression and sweating performance (which is flat-out silly on a Harley, but I'm as guilty as the next guy), then there's some logic in an oil cooler, but otherwise it's not a big deal.

Especially not for the typical 2,000 mile a year Harley rider. My Stage One FLHTK has sat in DC rush hour traffic at 105 degrees for 2 hours and nothing bad has happened.

 

Can someone please direct me towards the statistics showing all the TC motors that are blowing up due to high oil temps?

 

There aren't any.

 

Exactly

 

No real argument with most of what you've said there, since it's pretty much what I said in the post you quoted. It is interesting that you project a general anti-cooling sentiment, and you have an aversion to parade fans and temperature gauges, yet you some how find justification in the oil coolers you have on both bikes you own. While not particularly attractive, a parade fan is far more effective at cooling; they lower CHTs and as a secondary result they lower oil temp. Oil coolers only cool the oil; at best they barely slow down the rise in CHTs, you just can't cool the oil enough to control CHTs. There is no predictable correlation between oil temp and CHTs. In southern summer riding I can have oil temps in the 205-215 range and still have CHTs over 340* after just 2-4 minutes of dead stop traffic. This is not theory, this is my observation from 4 riding seasons and about 20K miles in the south east, with a custom monitoring system which gives me the ability to observe front and rear CHTs, and oil temp at multiple points. When I first started my cooling project, I believed engine temp could be controlled with a really good oil cooling system. Unfortunately I was wrong, but my pursuit still led me to develop the best oil cooling system in operation today, and it was fully functional 2 years before the release of the Jagg fan assist system and a couple months before the Ultra Cool. Both Jagg and UltraCool graciously declined my collaboration offer, otherwise the Jagg system could have come to market 2 years earlier, and both systems would have performed better. Anyway that ship sailed, but my current project is a new twist on the old parade fan and this one won't get away. The real shortfall of the parade fan is the manual toggle switch; a fully automatic switch based on vehicle speed and temperature would significantly enhance the effectiveness of a parade fan. CHT rises so rapidly when you slow down and come to a stop its difficult stay on top of switching in stop and go traffic, besides how many parade fan users actually have CHT gauge so they will know when to turn on the fan. Another observation, about natural air cooling while you're moving, which will be really hard to sell cause I'm probably the only person who can actually see it. There is a relatively narrow speed band when your bike is effectively naturally air-cooling, of course there are many influencing variables, but with a stock tune from about 50-65 MPH your engine is shedding the same amount of heat it is generating. Below 50 MPH there is not enough air moving to cool the heat being generated, above 65 MPH and your engine is generating more heat than the air at that speed can carry away. I’m sure you and others will have a difficult time digesting my claims, but since you don’t believe in temperature gauges and don’t have one, you have no basis to refute anything I’ve said. I know you possess great experience and knowledge in the tuning arena I surrender the utmost respect due, because I do my own tuning also. I have dedicated just as much if not more energy to the science of cooling the Twin Cam as you have to tuning, and I probably know more about the subject than the cooling product manufacturers. I’ve got no reason to make up BS just to waste time posting on this forum. I try to share my knowledge and experience and for the most part it is widely rejected because I operate outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. In due time folks will look back and realize what they thought they knew about Twin Cam cooling was wrong, and hopefully someone will remember that they heard it from me first. Nope, no vast landfills full of heat killed Twin Cams, so they must not NEED any additional cooling. Pre 07s aren’t dying off left and right from oil starvation but a bunch of ‘em have improved Fueling oil pumps installed that they don’t NEED. We don’t need a fish finder in the bass boat, we don’t need unlimited calling text and data, we don’t need brand name corn flakes, we don’t need 37 pairs of shoes, we don’t need $4k wheels, $10k engines, $2K chrome gee jaws, $1K tuners, really we don’t need any modifications, and we don’t need to flush the toilet after every use. Our Lives and our bikes would be pretty lame if we only had that which we NEED.