Have any of you guys on here run the Aries forged pistons on the billet connecting rods using premium pump gas? Al at PVT told me that the Aries might raise my compression so much that I'll require race fuel instead. Can any of you guys confirm this?

I believe it's Arias. We were just talking about this yesterday. Cody was saying you probably would not want to have your heads decked if using the Arias flat tops. It would put your compression up over the level he would recommend for normal use. That is the way I understood his posts anyway. You can see if you take it the same way.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=23122

With your heads not decked and at 0 deck height you will be fine on pump gas. No fifferent than the JE pistons that we used.

Thanks for the advice guys, my heads came decked from MB so I guess I'll stick to the cast pistons instead. I would've preferred to run the forged since I had great experiences using Wiseco's in my old Banshee but I'm just going to stick to the cast for now.

I bet you could trade your IM heads for a set of stockers and enough money to cover installing new valves in them if you really want to use those pistons.

CB is likley correct about trading the heads and for stockers. It boils down to the Arias pistons producing more compression with the IM heads than they do with stock heads that have not been milled down. Detonation is in direct relation to compression ratio. When you approach more than 10:1 compresion then you are getting to the point of needing a higher octane fuel to prevent detonation. A sharp edge on a piston that gets hot enough can cause dteonation also. This is why most drag car engine builders debur the postons to eliminate any sharp points on the valve relief's.

Arias makes some dang good pistons you just have to make sure that the ones you get will work well with your heads and what compression ration you will end up with . To do this you have to know the volume of the cumbustion chamber as well as the piston. Valve clearence also needs to be taken into consideration especially if you are running a higher lift cam than stock.

All this said is most of this has been tried before so a search on here should yield what heads the Arias pistons will and will not work with. As for forged versus cast, the forged pistons will not expand and contract like a cast piston will thus ring clearance on the cylinder walls will stay more consistant over the operating temperature range. Forged is better but I'm not sure there is a huge advantage on these v-twins and their operating RPM range. Same can be said for roller rocker arms. You may save a little wear and tear due to less side loading on the valve stem but really in the grand scheme of things the gain in due to less friction is minimal and likely not worth the outragious expense of the RR's. If your doing many mods to it well your likely to blow it up long before you wear the valve guides out due to side load.

Sorry this is more than you were looking for but I hope it helps in some way.

Russ