American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 174 January 2014 | Page 21

T Bob Wood, the Founder and owner of Wood Performance, travelled to Germany to attend Big Bike Europe to meet his European customers who are an important part of the company's ongoing success serious engine tuners looking for serious horsepower improvements. He says: “The rise in fuel injection has been a blessing in disguise. When I was growing up, we didn’t have the choice. We had to figure out what a motor liked. In certain areas we couldn’t tune it because with certain exhausts there is no back pressure,na and it affects the bottom end and fuel curves always follow the dip. With fuel injection you can take that out. You can have any manifold fuel pressure at any rpm simply by giving the injector the information it needs to open or close. So actually, fuel injection is the best thing that ever happened.” However, he is also aware of a potential downside to the technology. “Now it is so complex that 90-95 percent of the shops can’t work on it. The biggest problem we have in the industry right now is finding shops that have dynamometers and are capable of tuning fuel injection systems. “Carbs are good, but they are very timeconsuming to tune properly. I’m glad fuel injection is here, because I want to get away from tuning carbs. With our cams it doesn’t matter if the engine has a carb or fuel injection. Cams don’t know they are just a dumb piece of metal.” n order to make it easier for customers buying Knight Prowler cams to get their engines tuned to make the most of the changes, Bob has developed his own dealer locator software to run on the Wood Performance website. It lists regular dealers and also platinum dealers. The latter are familiar with the high performance products made by Wood Performance and who have Dynojet tuning centres to ensure fuel injection systems are properly set up. The dealer locator software is not simply restricted to the domestic US market, it also covers Canada, Australia and European countries that have Wood Performance dealers. Indeed Europe is a significant market for Bob: “I know there’s over a million Harleys in Europe; it’s an extremely important market. We use now Technomotion as our distributor because we wanted to protect our dealers’ pricing structure.” However, this does not mean that domestic sales are suffering. Indeed, Bob explains the situation is the exact opposite: “Our domestic sales for the past 18 years have continued to rise. The recession hasn’t touched our business. A guy that rides a Harley doesn’t want to get his ass kicked by anybody. He’ll skip child support, alimony, house payment etc., just so he can go ride, and he’ll put a cam in that bike, an exhaust, and an air filter, and then go and ride.” It is that attitude of the company’s customers, along with a consistent record of producing dyno competition-proven parts, that is keeping Wood Performance at the forefront of Harley engine performance tuning. I www.AMDchampionship.com WOOD PERFORMANCE Cropwell, Alabama, USA Tel: [phone] [email protected] www.woodcarbs.com AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE DEALER - JANUARY 2014 21 ieme Festner opened Technomotion because his cousin was fed up with machine shops taking up to eight weeks for a simple job like honing a cylinder. Four years ago Tieme was approached by his cousin, who was overhauling Harley about going into business together, as he was so frustrated by waiting on machine shops to do engine work for him. The result was Technomotion; part motorcycle repair shop and part precision machine shop. Success came quickly, and Technomotion now has a staff of seven and is producing custom billet aluminum Harley engine parts such a nose cones, rocker boxes, and bottom end parts. It was building custom engines that led Tieme to contact Bob at Wood Performance. Tieme was looking for high-performance camshaft supplies on the internet when he saw that the Knight Prowler cams by Wood Performance had the kind of profile he was looking for. Tiem