I'm interested in hearing the experiences of those who have used the X9R 018.

What do you think of it?
What pipe manifold have you found worked well with it?
Do you know how it compares to the R9R and R9R EVO?

If that news was published a week ago I do not think any true experiences are known yet....

A guy I support with made parts and knowledge did use this year to test other brands after the quality of OS did let him down at the beginning of this season. The R9R was one of them. It was a hard to tune engine but there are more complains about the used carburettor with as example REDS engines (look up the offroad topic about REDS). Switching it to an OS or the old always working Novarossi did improve the tuning but still a rich low/mid range did exist. This is a complain more people have...
After measuring the timings I had an idea how to solve that but they ditched the engine already.

The crankshaft is super wide timed from which we know with the OS does work but the transfer and exhaust ports were very low. So with the large crank window it was made to get in a lot of fuel but due the low port configuration probably (my theory) not made to get it all out again. Also with a huge stack of headshims there was enough room to raise the sleeve with a 0.2mm to get more in range with a better port timing as used on many other engines.

I may hope they did solve the issues with the X9R. That they are searching/experimenting may be clear as I have seen 3 different R9R engines over time.

Roelof

The X9R, X9R 018 and a special edition have been available for a while now.

A friend has the X9R 018 special edition and what you described with the R9R is what we experienced.

Just try an OS or something else carburettor.

Maybe an idea to create some timing measure tool.....
https://www.euronet.nl/users/tooms/timings/timings.htm

What I saw with the latest engine was: Crank 20/72, as most engines like OS are in the range of 25/70 up to 22/71 you can imagine 20/72 is huge but still the limit is not there
But while the exhaust with most engines is at 92~94 the NOVA has 90 And also while most engines have a transfer of 65~66 the NOVA has 64. Adding a 0.1mm sleeve shim will raise the ports with about 1 degree so 0.2 is a good thing.

You can always try a sleeve shim w/o knowing the timings to see if it does improve.

We have tried an OS carb, it is better but only because it doesn't use a hex driver to adjust it.

The next step is to shim the liner and try a longer manifold.