It's a hoot, aint it?? And, it's NOT over, Part VI is next month!!
I think you summed up the recommendations so far.
NOW, somebody is going to have to 'splain it to me how the hell a colder plug is going to cool the motor?!?! Assuming it's not detonating to start with, it won't mean jack!
Every once in a while good ol' Donnie throws out a piece of misinformation like this that eliminates whatever small amount of respect for his opinions that I may have developed. It's not hard to see why wives tales like this refuse to die, when you have supposed experts making blatantly wrong statements in national media. I know I've tried to do my part in more than one thread around here to dispel the heat range myth (colder plugs makes the engine run colder), but I'm sure there are still a bunch of believers that will now start the argument again and quote Donnie Petersen as the infallible source.
For the record, a colder plug will
not make the engine run cooler. It will lead to more fouling of the plug, since keeping the electrodes at a lower temperature will not burn off deposits. The heat range of a plug refers to the rate the plug dissipates heat through the shell and into the head to maintain a certain electrode temp, not to how much heat is produced by the combustion process.
What I would like to see Mr. Petersen explain is how H-D should have eliminated the problems in the stock design, not just tell us what we already know about defeating the emission system to richen the mixture and thus lower peak combustion temps. Most of us already knew how to do that long before he started this CVO110 epic. What he seems to be saying is exactly what I've been bitching about for years about H-D, if you want it to run well and hold up for any reasonable amount of time you will need to rebuild it yourself as soon as you buy it. If the answer is always going to come back to defeating the emission system to make the POS run and last, Harley is going to have a severely restricted future when EPA stops looking the other way and really cracks down on tampering. What happens when your state starts requiring a sniffer test to get your registration every year?
What's the legal fix Donnie? We could have told you the illegal fix two years ago (and in fact if you read this site on a regular basis we already did).
Jerry