Brett, I'm pretty sure I've put forward my opinion towards them in one of the UK forum's debates, but I'll put it up here as well for local content..
So you want to swap one of these
for one of these
Notice that the venture ones don't have a pad on the end of them?
This is what the Venture camchain guides look like...
The tensioner shaft end exerts its pressure on the extra part of the lower guide as per this diagram..
Something that it has been designed for.
The XS1100 camchain guides look similar to the upper guide in the photo, and have been designed to work with a plunger with a pad on the end of it.
Without the pad, all the tension from a Venture plunger will be exerted on a tiny point in the middle of the XS11's front guide run.
My second point I'd like to put forward comes from a mechanically sympathetic way of thinking.
Take your bike out for a ride on a typical very warm day and get everything nicely up to temperature. All the engine's components get hot and expand (Specifically, the camchain in this instance) It gets hot and stretches a bit.
With a standard tensioner (adjusted correctly) the slight extra length is catered for by the curve designed into the rear guide and when it cools off, everything reverts to its original size.
With an automatic adjuster, however, the chain may expand to the point that the tensioner is able to sneak another click of its ratchet while hot, but when things cool down, the tensioner will not go back to the former position, so the chain will then exert a LOT of load on the guides until everything warms up and expands again.
My final critisism is the fact that all the automatic tensioners have a lot more travel than the standard unit, so the unit will do its job in total silence, possibly way past the point where a standard unit would run out of travel with a worn chain, and still keep things quiet until a severely worn chain broke and killed your motor, so you still have to keep a check on things at regular intervals (which means removing the tensioner to measure and reset) to avoid potential disaster
I suppose if you fitted the motor with a brand new, quality camchain when you fitted the new tensioner, that would be part of the last argument against, quashed, for a while anyway
Just something for you to think about
