A no chain Bandit??

[icemakk]

The rear fork(s) would have to be new or heavily modified as they would have to be moved out a lot for a wide enough belt to come even close to handling 100+ hp. Most drive belts and chains are massively underdesigned for bikes... they ought to be much larger but generally get away with it since we rarely put much more than a small fraction of top engine HP through them. If the roads had speed limits of 130mph we would be changing chains several to many times a year.

Another problem is that rubber doesn't like the high speed impact it gets from the drive sprockets at, say 100mph up. At speed, rubber starts to behave in a much more brittle fashion when impacted.

All sprockets are subject to something called "Chordal Action". They look round but are really polygons with a flat sided drive action. You can see this when you see a chain under heavy load... impossible on a bike but easy on a stationary machine where you can see the chain seems to vibrate up and down at the sprockets, (especially as the sprockets wear).

I may be wrong, but I believe that sport bikes should/will never be using belts, (the V Rod is no sport bike, methinks).

Thanks for the info. The Bandit is not really a sport bike any way. It is a sport-tourer and has its power band set up for more mid range. I road with a guy on Buell last summer and his bike had similar HP and torque numbers and he had no problems with his and he did long highway trips. Just what I am doing with mine. Getting rid of the chain also means more luggage space so I can have clean undies for a few more days!
 

[Red01]

I checked out the Scootworks site and looked at their Hayabusa conversion.  I was surprised by how narrow the belt was.  Narrower than what is commonly seen as OE on big cruisers.  It appears perhaps it is compensated for by having longer "teeth" in the belt.  The burnout video didn't really impress me much though... the belt only had to take the initial shock load of breaking the wheel loose, after that it's not that different from cruising down the road.  If they campaigned it for a season's worth of racing and didn't have any issues, that would be much more impressive.  Call me skeptical, but I'd like to see more testing before I'm sold.  The price seems pretty reasonable, $550 for everything you need to change over.

[gunzip]

 the scootworks conversion was listed on their website for a while then disappeared. I would love a belt drive bandit !!