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COPYRIGHT 2001 Ehlert Publishing Group
Its connecting rods are the largest the company has ever made for a production vehicle, two-wheeled or four. Same with its pistons and exhaust valves. The 41-pound crankshaft is so big it exceeded Honda's existing manufacturing capabilities, requiring a special production line be set up just for it. If the engine's 101mm-by-112mm cylinders were cloned three times to make a V-8, it would displace 438 cubic inches; clone it twice into a V-6 and it would be a 328.
Perhaps you're starting to get the picture.
This ain't no 1,340, or 1,450, or even 1,602. It's bigger than the next biggest motorcycle in its class by 193cc. It's the Honda VTX, 1,795cc of smokin' V-twin, and on our dyno at the rear wheel it made a stump-pulling 97.4 pounds-feet of torque at 3,250 rpm, and 87.4 horsepower at 5,200. Look at the dyno chart, and you'll see that most of that torque is available from just off idle to 5,000 rpm, too. That's not Only a bushel-basket more powerband and peak torque than its direct competition, it's more than Honda's own Valkyrie flat-six and the asphalt-buckling Yamaha V-Max V-four.
Class dismissed.
OK, so where have you been, Mr. VTX? Harley-Davidson, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Victory and Yamaha have all fired off V-twin cannons with 95mm-andlarger bores long before now. Sure, Honda fans have been getting by with the 1,520cc Valkyrie cruiser, but that thing's really a Gold Wing, right? And while the good-looking Shadow 1100s hold their own in the style department, they lack the cruiser clout that only a liter-and-a-half of V-twin muscle can provide.
Whether Honda put more stock in the big Valkyrie's barrel than it should have, or it needed more development time for the VTX, no one is saying. My guess is that it was a little of both. But the VTX is here now, and the question is, was it worth the wait?
To that end Honda hedged its bets by treating concerns on all four fronts -- performance, comfort, style and reliability--with apparently equal concern. Underneath all of that chrome the VTX's liquid cooled, 52-degree V-twin uses Honda's traditional SOHC, three-valve cylinder head design, with a slick automatic decompressor incorporated into the camshafts that allows a minimally sized starter motor. Screw-and-locknut adjusters ease valve-lash maintenance every 8,000 miles, and combustion chambers have fairly conservative 9.0:1 compression and two fancy iridium spark plugs each. A throttle position sensor and digital 3D fuel injection and ignition maps for each cylinder optimize the mixture and spark advance, and good fuel atomization is assured by Nippondenso injectors with 12, tiny 0.1mm holes each, a production first.
To keep engine height to a minimum and...
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