5 reaons why buying a Duke 390 was one of the best decisions of my life

1. Reliable
Whenever someone asks me ‘How’s the bike?’, my first response to them is not the speed or the performance of the bike but one word, that it is fucking reliable. Trust me when I say this, you can take this bike out for a long ride on any given day without having a slightest worry or doubt about its performance on a long ride or whether it leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere. For me, this peace of mind is what matters the most when I ride. So far my longest ride has been a 1700km over 3 days. It had mix of terrain and I never faced a single problem with the bike and its performance, not even a clutch cable breaking. I wasn’t even carrying the basic spares but that’s how much I trust this bike. I am yet to take it to Leh and that will be a different review altogether but so far over the 27000km I have ridden on this over last 1.5 years over all kinds of roads and terrains, this bike has performed way beyond my expectations. 

2. All round performer

If you are riding it in the city, you will love it for the quick acceleration punch it gives required for quick overtakes in the city traffic. Or its ability to maneuver across the traffic because of its light weight and superb handling. The gear-box is six speed but for city riding you will never cross 4^th gear (unless you ride in low rpms like me). Feels good to leave everyone behind at every traffic signal halt :P

Now talking about highway riding and touring on this bike. No doubt the seat is hard and it’s not the ‘most’ comfortable seat for touring, but I have noticed that over these 1.5 years of owing the bike the seat has taken the shape of my but and I feel that too soft a seat is not good for your back and a seat little hard like this one keeps you in alert mode over long rides and doesn’t make you fall asleep. I won’t deny that there were slight cramps in my thighs after the long rides but I guess that’s the case with most of the bikes- please correct me if I am wrong. Talking about the riding position, it is slightly aggressive and your feet rests slightly behind the regular position but over the time I have got comfortable with this riding position and I can’t deny I like it this way. Makes it easier for me to stand on the foot pegs too.

You can easily cruise on this bike throughout the day at the speeds of 110/130kmph which are according to me is a safe range for touring on Indian roads. Although it can still reach a maximum of 170kmph but why push it to the limits when the job is getting done in much less load on the engine. Find a patch of smooth roads and you can easily cover at least 70-80 km in an hour.

Have taken this bike for lot of off-roading as well and it has performed superbly. Durable and rugged performance. It’s not a very heavy bike so you can easily lift it in case you fall.

3. Low maintenance cost

As I mentioned above the bike is very reliable, this means less problems with the bike. This doesn’t mean you don’t pay attention to it and skip the regular services. That will be silly and do not expect any bike to perform if you ignore its regular service visits. But looking at the other general problems which other riders face on their bikes, I can say that I haven’t faced such small problems so far like breaking of clutch/throttle cable, breaking of chain, oil leak, wheel locking etc. and so I never spent money to fix these problems on my bike which are very common otherwise. You will however spend money on changing the tyres very soon because the Metzelers which come as a stock tyres with this bike wear out very soon. They are just wonderful tyres and there is no doubt about it but a new set of Metzelers will cost around 16,000-17,000 Rs. which is very expensive. Many of the Duke 390 riders shift Michelin tyres and they are very close to Metzelers in performance and are much cheaper. Anyways going back to the point, daily riding on Duke 390 is free from majority of common problems.

4. It's a headturner

It’s not a beautiful gorgeous and best looking bike but you will still find people asking about the bike and giving a second look to your bike. May be it’s the looks of the bike (same as Duke 200?) or may be the sound of the bike, I don’t know. I am just happy with the attention I get in the traffic :P

5. Value for money

I was all set to buy Duke 200 when Duke 390 was just about to be launched. I was expecting it to be around Rs. 2.7-2.8 lakh on road price and that was far out of my budget. But I was shocked to see that Bajaj launched the bike at a much lower price and I paid Rs. 2.03 lakh on road in Chennai. You find it expensive ? I will say the for the whole package of features of the bike along with the world class engine performance, this bike is a steal and a GREAT value for money. This bike is a clear winner in terms of value for money when you compare it with other brands in this class. 

All I can say is that I am very happy with this bike. Ofcourse nothing is perfect in this world if you want to know some of the negatives associated with this bike, head to RiderZone by our star moto writer Mr. Akhil Kalsh and click here to read the article. I am just mentioning him just because I love all his articles and I'm a fan :P

Nevertheless, whatever motorcycle YOU buy or are riding, RIDE SAFE! 

How Horse Power works

This is something I read on HowstuffWorks.com and its really a great article in which engine horsepower , rpm is explained in a very simple way. 

Chances are you’ve heard about horsepower. Just about every car ad on TV mentions it, people talking about their cars bandy the word about and even most lawn mowers have a big sticker on them to tell you the horsepower rating.

But what is horsepower, and what does the horsepower rating mean in terms of performance? In this article, you’ll learn exactly what horsepower is and how you can apply it to your everyday life.

The term horsepower was invented by the engineer James Watt. Watt lived from 1736 to 1819 and is most famous for his work on improving the performance of steam engines. We are also reminded of him every day when we talk about 60-watt light bulbs.

The story goes that Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these animals. He found that, on average, a mine pony could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. He then increased that number by 50 percent and pegged the measurement of horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute. It is that arbitrary unit of measure that has made its way down through the centuries and now appears on your car, your lawn mower, your chain saw and even in some cases your vacuum cleaner.

What horsepower means is this: In Watt’s judgement, one horse can do 33,000 foot-pounds of work every minute. So, imagine a horse raising coal out of a coal mine as shown above. A horse exerting 1 horsepower can raise 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a minute, or 33 pounds of coal 1,000 feet in one minute, or 1,000 pounds 33 feet in one minute. You can make up whatever combination of feet and pounds you like. As long as the product is 33,000 foot-pounds in one minute, you have a horsepower.

Y­ou can probably imagine that you would not want to load 33,000 pounds of coal in the bucket and ask the horse to move it 1 foot in a minute because the horse couldn’t budge that big a load. You can probably also imagine that you would not want to put 1 pound of coal in the bucket and ask the horse to run 33,000 feet in one minute, since that translates into 375 miles per hour and horses can’t run that fast. However, with a block and tackle you can easily trade perceived weight for distance using an arrangement of pulleys. So you could create a block and tackle system that puts a comfortable amount of weight on the horse at a comfortable speed no matter how much weight is actually in the bucket.

Horsepower can be converted into other units as well. For example:

·         1 horsepower is equivalent to 746 watts. So if you took a 1-horsepower horse and put it on a treadmill, it could operate a generator producing a continuous 746 watts.

·         1 horsepower (over the course of an hour) is equivalent to 2,545 BTU (British thermal units). If you took that 746 watts and ran it through an electric heater for an hour, it would produce 2,545 BTU (where a BTU is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water 1 degree F).

·         One BTU is equal to 1,055 joules, or 252 gram-calories or 0.252 food Calories. Presumably, a horse producing 1 horsepower would burn 641 Calories in one hour if it were 100-percent efficient.

In this article, you’ll learn all about horsepower and what it means in reference to machines.

If you want to know the horsepower of an engine, you hook the engine up to a dynamometer. A dynamometer places a load on the engine and measures the amount of power that the engine can produce against the load.

Torque

Imagine that you have a big socket wrench with a 2-foot-long handle on it, and you apply 50 pounds of force to that 2-foot handle. What you are doing is applying a torque, or turning force, of 100 pound-feet (50 pounds to a 2-foot-long handle) to the bolt. You could get the same 100 pound-feet of torque by applying 1 pound of force to the end of a 100-foot handle or 100 pounds of force to a 1-foot handle.

Similarly, if you attach a shaft to an engine, the engine can apply torque to the shaft. A dynamometer measures this torque. You can easily convert torque to horsepower by multiplying torque by rpm/5,252.

You can get an idea of how a dynamometer works in the following way: Imagine that you turn on a car engine, put it in neutral and floor it. The engine would run so fast it would explode. That’s no good, so on a dynamometer you apply a load to the floored engine and measure the load the engine can handle at different engine speeds. You might hook an engine to a dynamometer, floor it and use the dynamometer to apply enough of a load to the engine to keep it at, say, 7,000 rpm. You record how much load the engine can handle. Then you apply additional load to knock the engine speed down to 6,500 rpm and record the load there. Then you apply additional load to get it down to 6,000 rpm, and so on. You can do the same thing starting down at 500 or 1,000 rpm and working your way up. What dynamometers actually measure is torque (in pound-feet), and to convert torque to horsepower you simply multiply torque by rpm/5,252.

Graphing Horsepower
If you plot the horsepower versus the rpm values for the engine, what you end up with is a horsepower curve for the engine. A typical horsepower curve for a high-performance engine might look like this (this happens to be the curve for the 300-horsepower engine in the Mitsubishi 3000 twin-turbo):

What a graph like this points out is that any engine has a peak horsepower — an rpm value at which the power available from the engine is at its maximum. An engine also has a peak torque at a specific rpm. You will often see this expressed in a brochure or a review in a magazine as “320 HP @ 6500 rpm, 290 lb-ft torque @ 5000 rpm” (the figures for the 1999 Shelby Series 1). When people say an engine has “lots of low-end torque,” what they mean is that the peak torque occurs at a fairly low rpm value, like 2,000 or 3,000 rpm.

Another thing you can see from a car’s horsepower curve is the place where the engine has maximum power. When you are trying to accelerate quickly, you want to try to keep the engine close to its maximum horsepower point on the curve. That is why you often downshift to accelerate — by downshifting, you increase engine rpm, which typically moves you closer to the peak horsepower point on the curve. If you want to “launch” your car from a traffic light, you would typically rev the engine to get the engine right at its peak horsepower rpm and then release the clutch to dump maximum power to the tires.

One of the areas where people talk most about horsepower is in the area of high-performance cars. In the next section, we’ll talk about the connection there.

Horsepower in High-performance Cars

A car is considered to be “high performance” if it has a lot of power relative to the weight of the car. This makes sense — the more weight you have, the more power it takes to accelerate it. For a given amount of power you want to minimize the weight in order to maximize the acceleration.

The following table shows you the horsepower and weight for several high-performance cars (and one low-performance car for comparison). In the chart you can see the peak horsepower, the weight of the car, the power-to-weight ratio (horsepower divided by the weight), the number of seconds the car takes to accelerate from zero to 60 mph, and the price.

You can see a very definite correlation between the power-to-weight ratio and the 0-to-60 time — in most cases, a higher ratio indicates a quicker car. Interestingly, there is less of a correlation between speed and price. The Viper actually looks like a pretty good value on this particular table!

If you want a fast car, you want a good power-to-weight ratio. You want lots of power and minimal weight. So the first place to start is by cleaning out your trunk.