Anyone use California Scientific Windshield?

[lifeisabeach]

I just put the largest windshield Cal Sci produces for the Gen II FJR the other day, man what a beautiful thing this is. I changed out my stock shield right after I got the bike last year and was happy for the most part with the one I purchased. I was reading what others had to say about the Cal Sci shields and thought even if half of what they said about it was true, this would be even better than what I'm using now.

One thing that really bugs me is the buffeting the replacement shield did while riding down the road when it was real windy out, I was always afraid the buffeting would weaken or break the uprights holding the windshield and deposit it who knows where once it did break. The people at Cal Sci have cut a relief vent into the shield at the bottom that not only looks nice the way it's done, but it also is responsible for getting rid of the back pressure and buffeting we all get when the windshield is in the full up position while riding down the highway.

When I added this new windshield I got rid of the buffeting along with the dreaded back pressure, and now I can even hear what the bike sounds like going down the road where before I couldn't. Yeah it cost $200.00, but unlike me if you replaced your stock windshield one time and one time only you would be that much ahead of the game. So far from what I've seen and felt, I'm thrilled, it's money well spent. I can actually ride sitting normally in my seat where before I was always hunched over hiding behind my smaller windshield on colder days because this shield is just a little larger. All I can say is when riding I am so much more comfortable than I used to be just because of a windshield.

If you have put one of these on your bike, how has it worked out for you? I'm happy with mine, but wonder if anyone else has encountered any problems once they installed the Cal Sci shield on your bike. If interested you can see them at www.calsci.com and they produce windshields for a quite a few different bikes. Oh, I don't work for them nor do I get anything from them if someone buys one from them, I am just a satisfied customer.

[RRA]

I have one on a 2005 FJR I aquired last fall. I only put about 500 miles on it but I love it. I put the stock windscreen on for comparison, it did not take more than a couple of miles to figure out the CS was the way to go.  

RRA

[SLK50]

 I have about 9K miles behind the Cal Sci on my 06. Huge improvement over stock. Nirvana is a sweet spot with the shield raised about 2/3 of the way up. Mostly smooth, quiet air at any speed. Small adjustments allow for hot , cold, rain, etc. Greater width provides good coverage for hands.
 Unless it gets damaged, I have no desire to change.
 BTW, Mark's size recommendation worked well for me.

[Playinthestreet]

I have the +9 on my Tiger and am well pleased for reduction of noise/buffetting and general cold/wet weather protection.  

[throttlemeister]

I had one on my FJR and sold it within a few weeks. Looked like sh!te and caused too much instability at speed.

[RRA]

I had one on my FJR and sold it within a few weeks. Looked like sh!te and caused too much instability at speed.

What kind of "speed" are we talking about?

RRA

[Tyrroneous]

I can't comment on the quality or effectiveness of a CalSci screen, but this little tidbit from their website is interesting:

Fairings
For those of you who are interested in history, here's where the word "Fairing" comes from.

Early in the development of aviation, it was realized that the important thing for an airplane was to have a lot of lift and very little drag. An enormous amount of drag happens if you lose laminar flow - that is, if instead of smoothly following the surfaces on the airplane, when the air breaks away from the surface it will form spinning vortices which tumble around and wreck the airflow all over the place. This is called turbulence. The exact same problem was known from laying out the keels of ships, for water flow around a ship hull is a lot like air flow around the skin of an airplane. This problem was analyzed by mathematicians. They learned something: they could predict the points at which the air flow (or water flow) would break away from the surface and start to become turbulent.

A curve which has no breaks in it is called "Continuous" by mathematicians. A curve which has no sharp corners in it is called "smooth" by mathematicians. Smooth means the first derivative of the curve is continuous. At any given point, a curve has a radius of curvature. If there are no sudden jumps in the radius of curvature, the curve is called "Fair." A Fair curve has a continuous second derivative. It was learned that turbulent flow always starts at a point on the skin where the curve has an abrupt change in the radius of curvature, that is a point where the curve is not fair, or a point where the second derivative is discontinuous. So, you can't just stick a wing onto an airplane fuselage - the sharp corner where they meet is not even smooth, much less fair. The designers found they had to locate places like this on the aircraft skin and cover them with some smoothly curved sheet metal. These pieces of sheet metal are called "Fairings."

In the '70's, when gas mileage became important, automotive companies quickly hired some aircraft designers to help them make their cars have less drag. Shortly after that, the automotive companies started putting pressure on the computer programmers to make certain that all the curves on an automotive body were fair. Some companies became quite obsessed with this: Honda at one point announced that they had determined that surfaces which had a continuous fifth derivative were most pleasing to the eye, so they wanted their CAD/CAM systems to only design curves which were smooth, fair, and also had three more levels of derivative continuity. I don't think they got very far, as very few programmers can handle the mathematics of C5 continuous surfaces.

Of course, until about 1970, there basically was no such thing as computer aided design. To lay out the curves for the hulls of ships and large bombers, Boeing many years ago built a building with an unbroken wooden floor which was bigger than a football field. They would clear this building, and draw a coordinate graph on the floor. Then, the designers would tell them exact points where they wanted the hull skin or aircraft skin to be. The engineers would hammer nails into the floor at these points. They would then take very long, very thin strips of oak, soak them in water, and tie the oak strips to the nails. The oak will naturally form a shape of least energy, which happily enough is a shape which is both smooth and fair. The engineers would wait for the oak to dry, then trace the lines on the floor of the building. This then became the master drawing for the bulkheads. The thin strips of wet oak were called "Splines," which is why today curves in McDraw and Autocad are called splines, although essentially none of the programmers know this either. Most of our bombers and battleships in WW II were laid out in this building, because this was what we had.

In General Relativity, Einstein assumed that the universe itself was curved, but in a smooth and fair fashion. His reasoning: anything else would have been mathematically ugly, and he didn't believe God did ugly things. Since then, several people have made alternative theories of gravity where the universe does not have to be smooth and fair. None of them have worked worth beans, however. It seems God does in fact have a sense of aesthetics. Later, it was pointed out to Einstein that his theory included the possibility of points where the universe was neither smooth nor fair. These points are called singularities, or more popularly Black Holes. Not all scientists believe in black holes, and Einstein was skeptical.