D
deepdiver
Well-known member
Are you being a quipster?
I voiced some of the same questions with a non SLP company in re to their cans. They use the exact same Polaris stock can flow rates as per their testing. They are surprised with Polaris's tone in re to aftermarket parts especially cans. I emailed Polaris on the can issue and asked them to flow test different cans...This would only take minutes to do and could clear the air in that respect. This is the only time I got "no reply" from Polaris. I suspect that if they "blessed" any aftermarket product in re to emissions then they may open thierselves up to some legal liability. How they approve SLP must be a bedroom move.
Pipes on the other hand would take considerable testing. What they Polaris could do is release the specs and requirements of what would be acceptable flow restrictions in re to pipes and let the 3rd party guys test and document.
Then again...my friend has a very modified Dodge truck...when he has had to take it in for warranty work he spends close to a day getting it..how should I say this..."servicable"
Here is a email response from a top aftermarket company. I removed the Company idents as it was a confidential email.
EMAIL RESPONSE: We are just as surprised as you are. We have decided to not establish any theories until we see the concrete evidence and what Polaris decides to produce for 2010. As for your machine, we don’t even know what to say about the relationship between SLP and Polaris and their advocating the SLP as the only other choice for an aftermarket silencer. This seems a little weird to us. We have also decided to see how the updates fair and if the fix is long term or it is just another stab at the problem. The issue of warranty is somewhat typical to aftermarket silencers from the manufacturers standpoint. The odd thing is Polaris offering a warranty on the SLP in addition to the OEM. We will continue to produce a silencer for whatever they end up offering and it will be a quality silencer that is true to what we have been selling. We design and build every single product in our company which includes the entire silencer line. This includes the coatings. It will end up being each customers call whether they stay with SLP, OEM, or go to some other silencer. It’s a bad deal for all of you who have purchased ours or other companies silencers and don’t want to stay with them. It does have the feel of a forced buy. I know there are some silencer manufacturers that are not making good products, but, on the other hand there are some besides us who make a quality product that would work on these machines just fine. To some degree, this adds to the demoralized feeling people have as Polaris owners.
We’ll have to see what happens in the next month or two and we’ll be able to make more determinations as time goes by. I know some 800 RMK owners that are not going to do anything right now. They are going to wait and see how things develop and if the “fix” works or not.
We have not made any comparisons of flow between our silencer and the SLP. I can tell you that our silencer development is done primarily off of flow rates compared to OEM. Most of the people we deal with in developing and testing our silencers all agree the engine is an air pump and we are building a product to flow the same amount of air as the OEM. Not everyone sees it this way. We have built a large number of prototype silencers over the years and have extensive experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Our silencers were tested by Yamaha and have passed the Yamaha requirements. We also have one of the few silencers that really work on XP’s. We have been through all of the realms of Dyno testing on many machines using engine dyno’s and track dyno’s. All in all, we have found dyno testing to be only moderately helpful and very misleading. We have tested our silencers on dyno’s using third party’s to do the testing to find out we had gained 3-5 horse. When we took this same machine on the snow it wouldn’t work. Now, we base our testing actually on the snow and flow rates. The newer engines which have fuel injection and computer control do not allow the exhaust flow rate to be tampered with. Anyone who tells the truth about silencers know these silencers will not produce horsepower and the benefits are a major weight loss and a modified sound. They also allow more room and with ceramic coatings a cooler engine compartment. Every year we send our silencers all over the snow belt to be tested in actual conditions comparing the performance to OEM. We design our internals to allow the same flow as the OEM’s. In many cases we will modify a design and make a running change. This is mostly on our sound damping line to make them quieter but it will happen on our other line as well if we have found the same performance with a lighter design. We are in the process of purchasing a new, larger flow bench to aid in our testing and development but the real test for us will probably always be on the snow comparing to OEM making sure we are running the same engine dynamics as seen by the OEM’s. Having said all of this, it is hard for us to believe our silencers won’t work on these updated machines. We already have applications to cover the updates they are proposing.
I probably rambled on a little but Polaris has thrown a curve to the industry. It is however true that no company states they will warranty a machine with an aftermarket silencer but almost all of them do. In our experience, if a silencer isn’t right, the machine just won’t run very good or you would notice a difference in performance.
The OEM’s have all had problems that many people blame on silencers or aftermarket parts. Bogs or hesitations could be caused by bad silencer design but in many of the cases this was an OEM problem to begin with. Still, the strange irony to this situation is that Polaris has offered a warranty on a private companies silencer and not anyone else’s. Maybe they had to do this because their own factory silencer keeps failing??? You would think this would cause as much damage or potential damage as an aftermarket silencer.
I suspect there are a lot of upset Polaris owners. I am one of them.
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