BMW R18 Horsepower Upgrades and New Product - LJE Products

Hi, I'm Len Johnson from LJE products. We are a accessory company and we actually make a lot of stuff for snowmobiles but we are starting to dive into the performance market based on my past experience with modifying motorcycles. I've owned a lot of bikes in my career and I've always done exhaust and back in the day when we had jets I did carburetors and jets and separate air cleaners and it was all about improving the performance from the factory. So right here I've got a 22 BMW R18 bagger that I purchased myself and after riding it stock I decided it could use a little help. So what I did is I reached out and got some slip-on exhaust and then I reached out to BT Moto and got their tune. I also got the DNA air filter for it as a way to get additional power and better drivability just like a lot of people like you guys do. So we'll talk about that air cleaner real quick to show you how choked the factory intake system is and how much of an improvement there'll be when you do the DNA air filter and then of course the BT Moto tune because you have to retune the bike when you increase the airflow. So the factory designed this as a retro bike to to give it that old school look and by doing so they actually put the air cleaner on top of the engine up in here within the aluminum cases of the engine and if you look down here this is the air that's coming into the engine to feed that air cleaner and in my hand I've got the stock air cleaner and if you can look at this real quick this is the factory intake you've got 1,802 cc engine sucking air through these tiny little openings and they actually drilled holes in the top of the air cleaner cover as a way to improve airflow to the engine. There's a couple of problems with that. One is that the stock air filter is a paper element does a good job but it's restrictive. The DNA air filter kit replaces that whole assembly and it allows the air coming through those front vents to come right over the top and get sucked down into the throttle bodies which gets into the engine. So with that being said the air comes in through those front vents and it does improve the airflow but there's opportunity for even more airflow on this and that's where I'm going with what we're going to talk about how we're going to improve the airflow even more to obtain even more performance out of the motorcycle. Behind the 1,800 cc emblem on this bike and on all 1,800 r18s is this access port right here. This is a cover that allows you access to these screws and these screws is how you are how it's like a cover that you pull off to get in there and access components like service in the air filter and things like that. But it's quite a bit of space in here on both sides. My theory on this and I'm not the first to think of this I've seen other people playing with this idea is what if we let the air coming in come back out creating a venturi effect pulling cool air through the motor because you know the heat from the engine is going to heat the air in here and hot air and cold air intake you get what's happening here. We want fresh cool air coming through but the problem with the design of this because it's a retro style design is that the air comes in but it really can't get back out so it's kind of not flowing through there and it's not staying cool only when the engines sucking air. So my idea is to create some kind of plate here that can allow us to keep that airflow through there keep it cooler create a denser air charge which makes more horsepower pretty simple. So what I've come up with is what we're going to call performance plates. If you look we have a very unique design we went through quite a few prototypes to get to this. This is a pre-production prototype of what we're going to do it's made out of solid billet aluminum and they're made right here in the USA. Anodized this particular one has unanodized ports and the concept is going to be completely black with a machine surface here on each of the louvers to kind of recreate the original look of the stock name plate that was on there the 1800 because it's actually an 1802 cc we actually put that in there that's machined into it also. So these are going to be performance plates they're going to come in black with a machined surface right here which we'll call the O of the opening and we're also going to have a chrome version which is all chrome because a lot of bikes are actually have a lot more chrome than this bagger version does. So we're going to have two initial versions available for sale and the whole concept again air comes in through the front flows through here allows cool air to come into the intake system of the motorcycle keeping the components in there a little cooler and allowing for more power. So as you can see on this side of the bike we've installed the chrome power plate so that'll give you guys that are looking to have a chrome version what it actually looks like. Again these are pre-production the machining is pre-production the machining during the on the finished product will be much nicer and much better. We're using billet aluminum made right here in the U.S. they're actually made in Maine by a friend of mine who owns one rig design and he's also a snowmobile products guy but he owns a very good CNC machine shop he has all the stuff to do this we're going to make them really nice and that's what this is all about. Performance plates to improve airflow through the BMW RAT motor to take advantage of the BT tune and the DNA air filter. You can go to ljeproducts.com to learn more about it and pricing and these will be available probably by the end of June. So thanks for checking this out and I ride snowmobiles but in the summer obviously we've got to ride something else so I ride motorcycles and I'm here to share this product with you we hope to see you guys on the street.