In an effort to quiet and smooth the airflow over the front of my Concours I installed a Rifle windshield and base. It was a big improvement over the stock shield, but still wasn't great. I finally noticed that the Rifle was blasting all its air right up a very narrow path in the center of the air pocket behind the windshield and none to the sides at all, resulting in a lot of noisy air hitting me right in the face when I had my helmet face shield opened a little. It got me to wondering how things would be if the air could be more evenly distributed behind the windshield.

So I took an old aluminum cake pan lid and cut out a couple of small air vanes, intuitively picked a spot in the center vent area of the Rifle, and attached the vanes with some duct tape. Much better, smoother air was the result. To find out if the vanes were in the best place, I made a number of passes up and down a 3-mile stretch of highway and felt the airflow across the different portions of the windshield. At the end of the 3 miles, I stopped, noted my observations, untaped the vanes, retaped them with a different spacing or angle, and tried them again. Through an iterative process, I finally came to what seems like the optimum configuration.

The final test was a 2400-mile round trip to ride in the Utah 1088 endurance rally. The air splitters worked very well, allowing me (while wearing glasses) to ride with my visor mostly open so I could more fully enjoy the scenery and more clearly see when riding into the setting and rising sun. The airflow around my helmet was also much quieter which made the ride more relaxing. Success.

The directions for making your own air splitters:

Copyright © 2002-11 Randy Bishop
Last modified: January 2, 2011