From the start I told myself that when building out this bike, I wasn’t going to do a big bore kit, wasn’t going to try to tune it, anything like that. I wanted this bike to be reliable and when it comes to tuning and adding more horsepower, I knew I was just going to make things worse. I’ve read so many stories on forums about people doing this and ruining the bike or even blowing the motor.

So for a long time, the idea of a reflash never crossed my mind. I saw a YouTube video in my recommendations about cheap performance mods, and I like seeing what others do to their groms so gave it a watch. He was talking about reflashing the ECU and how much easier and cheaper it is compared to adding a fuel controller. He even did a top speed run and compared it to stock and to a fuel controller, it did better with the reflash!

So I dug around more and saw that there were a few companies that offer this service; you send them your stock ECU, tell them what kind of intake/exhaust setup you have, and they’ll mail you back your ECU setup to handle it, plus some performance tweaks to the stock setup. Many state that the stock ECU runs inherently lean, and I know I’ve probably made that worse over the years with my slip on exhaust and carbon intake. DHM was one of the companies offering this, on top of that they were having a sale. They offered a performance cam with a reflash specific for it, and there was a lot of positive feedback online for this reflash. Sold!

I’m guessing a lot of others took advantage of this deal, because almost immediately their website was sold out and after a week of no response I emailed DHM and they responded that they were out of cams and my order would be shipped once they received it. A few weeks later I get the cam and ECU and dive in.

I was a bit hesitant to jump into the install, because I knew the timing and valve adjustments needed to be spot on and I know from checking the valves in the past, the adjustments were a pain, even with the specific adjuster tool. Thank God for YouTube, because of course there a few install videos and each had a couple of tips. In one video, they zip-tied the chain to the cam gear to ensure timing was on. There is enough space to wedge the cam gear back so it doesn’t really need to be pulled out. Another tip was to simply loosen the cam chain tensioner rather than pulling it out completely. The tensioner has a washer and spring behind it that like to fly away from you. All told this job took no time at all and within an hour I had everything tightened up and valves checked.

All that was left was to plug in the ECU, reset it, and test ride! I know from previous mods that resetting the ECU takes some time and mileage for it to learn the system. So I took it around some local roads, a few that had speeds high enough allow me to go through all the gears. Right from the start, I could tell the bike was getting more fuel. The sound alone told me that, it almost sounded like it was bogging. From a standstill, that was certainly the case. I didn’t let it worry me at first because it was idling well and had no hiccups or limits through the rev range. However, 25 miles later it was still acting like that. I was starting to think that’s just how this map runs, and I will have to live with the bike’s bog off the line and sluggishness through 2nd gear.

Then mile 26, I pull up to a stop light. By the time the light turned green, the ECU definitely learned the system, because there was no more bog! It instantly became so responsive at any rpm. It was all smiles after that! I rechecked the valves the next day, had to loosen them a tad back into spec, but overall install was trouble free. I now have probably 50 miles or so on the setup, smooth sailing!