Has anyone used or had experience of SFS Performance hoses? They seem to be a lot cheaper than Samco, but are they as good?
I've fitted a few sets to customer bikes and there's nothing wrong with them at all. Very nice kit, fit well and good value
How do you judge the performance and quality of a hose? I'm just interested. I think that Samcos look great but if they were black I wouldn't bother. It's just a piece of tube for liquid circulation isn't it? What is a "performance hose"?
Something that can take a greater pressure, be harder wearing and last longer. Any decent silicone hose manufacturer should be able to top a stock hose. To an extent a hose is a consumable, they don't last forever and they do perish with age and temperature. Silicone hoses should have a much longer life. Ducat's don't have a vastly pressurised water system so really apart from latent engine heat they should really last a long time. I have silicone hoses on my 748SPS and whilst they look good I only really used them because they were just as cheap as buying a replacement stock set I felt when I was doing a full rebuild of the bike.
Silicon hoses, a bit of a moot point. I have them on my 748, but only because when I first had the bike it was a bit of a mess and had garden hose as well and proper rubber hose on the cooling system. I found it easier to replace them with a set of cheap silicon hoses, this would also then replace the other perished hoses too. What I tend to see in the racing community is that silicon is frowned upon, its expensive and isn't particularly sturdy. On a well plumbed race car/bike you would have aluminium hard pipes, and very short joiners, usually rubber. This means that a failure could be easily replaced with another short joiner, rather than the whole of a costly custom hose. The other thing to bear in mind is that you need to be very careful with selecting the right type of hose clamp for silicon too, the edges need to be chamfered and deburred. Stay away from the hose clips with punched racks as they will destroy the hose as soon as you tighten the clip. However, one thing that few people see is that they tend to be quite a bit lighter than a rubber original.
Maybe manufacturers b******t but apparently they help the engine run cooler than stock hoses, by up to 5 degrees..........
