Wet vs Dry clutch

[luga00]

Here's a question for the tech boys.

Every bike I've ridden so far has been of the wet clutch variety and I'm led to believe that because it resides in a 'bath' of oil that there is much less chance of damaging it.
This has probably been a good thing for me as I actually slip the clutch a quite lot and ride on the 'bite' especially in ultra slow traffic and in slow controlled manouevers.

The Beemer is the first bike I've had with a dry clutch and was wondering what the advantages are of a dry clutch (if any) over a wet clutch.

Also, has anyone installed a ceramic clutch at all?

cheers for any replies - I'm still learning.
luGA

 

[Greg Masters]

The dry clutch has the benefit of lower production costs and is altogether a simpler arrangement. Single plate dry clutches have to be fairly robust and there are some fairly chunky springs pushing clamping the pressure plate towards the flywheel with the friction plate in the middle. They are also fairly large diameter - they need to be to transmit the torque - but that leads to a large flywheel effect.

Wet clutches require multi-plates mounted within a basket. All fine engineering stuff. Multi-plate means that the torque loading can be shared between several plates - spring loadings can be less and the still work in a bath of oil - provided that it doesn't have commercial friction modifiers. A reduced flywheel effect makes them a natural for sports bikes, but the cost is higher.

F1 cars use multiplate dry clutches BTW.

G

 

[needlongerlegs]

Yer Missed One GM

Dry Multi Plate Clutches - Worst of Both worlds

Great for mad blasts but US for normal riding or traffic

Had the dubeus honour of owning a bike or two (Ducatis) with these. Noisey as hell, slips and drags when it gets hot.

I'm a bit of a clutch abuser myself but I've never killed a BMW clutch yet, I fink some on this site might have, but generally its Oil contamination that ruins them (so warm the bike up before thrashing).

G....