Kawasaki Can’t Have All the Fun
Recently the publication BikeSocial hunted down some designs from Honda that show the company is working to develop a supercharged Africa Twin.
The patent was recently filed with the Japanese Patent Office. Actually, it was three patents that all show some seriously interesting designs. There’s an engine-driven supercharger and a dual injection system that uses both direct and indirect fuel injection. These systems will make the Africa Twin more efficient and it will boost power.
You can see that the Unicam 1084cc parallel-twin remains, but that there’s a supercharger attached as well as the pipework to make it function. This is a move from Honda that few expected.
Superchargers on motorcycles are far from new, Kawasaki’s H2 is a perfect example, but this supercharger is different from the Kawasaki supercharger. It’s a twin-screw design, which is what’s known as a positive displacement supercharger. This design moves a fixed amount of air with each rotation. That means you get the same amount of pressure whether the bike is idling or revved up.
What you get is close to maximum boost all through the rev range. You get more consistent power and a fat torque curve, which makes more sense for an ADV bike.
Honda also added an injector to the cylinders. This injector fires straight into the combustion chamber. This new injector will help Honda with fuel consumption, performance, and emissions. The engine will be able to modulate which injector is used to get the best performance while using as little fuel as possible.
Honda has experimented with superchargers before, but this is the most extensive design we’ve seen yet, and the fact that it’s on a current production bike and not some random concept or amorphous model gives us hope that this design will enter production soon.