So over the holiday week, I was able to ride the new bike at Ocotillo wells in S. Cal. For any one that doesn’t know Ocotillo is made up of a wide range of terrain between sandy washes and harder packed rocky trails. I was able to put ~120 miles on the new bike over a 6 day stay. I swapped riding between the new bike and my 04 crf250x. The new bike has had the throttle stop and Catalytic converter removed as well as some of the other smog stuff. The stock restrictive air filter was left in as well as the o2 sensor still connected and the 40 tooth main gear was changed out to the 50 tooth gear.
The bike ran really well for the most part. It seemed to have as much power corked up as the 250x does. The stock tires were horrible in the sand. It felt like I was riding on ice in the washes. On the trails and anything else it didn’t do too badly. The rear tire had decent traction but the front tire was all over the place. This will be the first thing that will get changed, soon! The front brake has a lot of stopping power. There was many times if I had any steering in the bike and hit the front brake the bike just locked up the front tire and slide, especially in the looser stuff. The front brake is way more powerful then my other bike.
One of the negative things I had going on was when you back off the throttle the engine would really go to an idle instantly. This would make the bike slow quickly and it always felt like I was going over the handle bars. After a while this really made my arms tired. I was always getting this back and forth arm pounding. I’m not sure if a smaller rear gear would help this or maybe adding any flywheel weight would help. It didn’t seem like the bike has as much “flywheel” effect as my X does.
One not so good thing that started to happen was about 10 miles into my last ride for the week. With a mostly full tank of gas, the bike bogged out like the fuel pump wasn’t getting any fuel to the engine. The odd part was that the tank was mostly full and when the bike did this I was on flat ground so there was not a lot of fuel sloshing around at the time. It did this a couple of times in different locations. It didn’t feel like the engine was shutting off like I’ve read others doing, but this was more like a miss in the firing or it was sucking air instead of fuel. This really had me worried being out in the middle of nowhere. I just keep wondering if I would make it back to camp or not before the engine shut down but that never happened, thankfully.
Speaking of fuel my tank gave me about 44 miles till the low fuel light came on. This was much sooner then I figured it would after reading some other posts. This was with the stock fuel setting and as stated above, the stock F.I. mapping as well.
So that was my first dirt riding experience with the new bike. Over all I’m pretty impressed and have no regrets in buying the bike so far. The next step is to change the tires as well as adding a pipe guard (since I burned a hole in a pair of riding paints), change out the air filter and add the jumper for the power up mapping and see what happens next time.
Doug
The bike ran really well for the most part. It seemed to have as much power corked up as the 250x does. The stock tires were horrible in the sand. It felt like I was riding on ice in the washes. On the trails and anything else it didn’t do too badly. The rear tire had decent traction but the front tire was all over the place. This will be the first thing that will get changed, soon! The front brake has a lot of stopping power. There was many times if I had any steering in the bike and hit the front brake the bike just locked up the front tire and slide, especially in the looser stuff. The front brake is way more powerful then my other bike.
One of the negative things I had going on was when you back off the throttle the engine would really go to an idle instantly. This would make the bike slow quickly and it always felt like I was going over the handle bars. After a while this really made my arms tired. I was always getting this back and forth arm pounding. I’m not sure if a smaller rear gear would help this or maybe adding any flywheel weight would help. It didn’t seem like the bike has as much “flywheel” effect as my X does.
One not so good thing that started to happen was about 10 miles into my last ride for the week. With a mostly full tank of gas, the bike bogged out like the fuel pump wasn’t getting any fuel to the engine. The odd part was that the tank was mostly full and when the bike did this I was on flat ground so there was not a lot of fuel sloshing around at the time. It did this a couple of times in different locations. It didn’t feel like the engine was shutting off like I’ve read others doing, but this was more like a miss in the firing or it was sucking air instead of fuel. This really had me worried being out in the middle of nowhere. I just keep wondering if I would make it back to camp or not before the engine shut down but that never happened, thankfully.
Speaking of fuel my tank gave me about 44 miles till the low fuel light came on. This was much sooner then I figured it would after reading some other posts. This was with the stock fuel setting and as stated above, the stock F.I. mapping as well.
So that was my first dirt riding experience with the new bike. Over all I’m pretty impressed and have no regrets in buying the bike so far. The next step is to change the tires as well as adding a pipe guard (since I burned a hole in a pair of riding paints), change out the air filter and add the jumper for the power up mapping and see what happens next time.
Doug
