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I love my old 250 EXC. I chalk up its problems due to it being 21 years old. Currently the shock bushing is creaking like crazy and the forks are still leaking/again. Still starts every time, even if it takes 20 kicks 
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May 20, 2022 19:38
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LimaBiker posted:KTMs are hella fun though. I want a friend who owns one so i can ride it occasionally but not deal with owning one. you can ride on the back of mine. ...or just ride it, I don't really care. The distance might be a small problem though.
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May 20, 2022 19:47
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GriszledMelkaba posted:I shopped for DR650s because of all the braying in here. they're so boring. so so boring. I'd buy two KTM 690 Enduros, for high availability purposes, before I bought a single Suzuki DR650.
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May 20, 2022 19:57
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I just think they're neat!
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May 20, 2022 20:07
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dema posted:I'd buy two KTM 690 Enduros, for high availability purposes, before I bought a single Suzuki DR650. Two bikes to travel half as far seems like a poo poo deal
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May 20, 2022 20:46
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I'm here for a good time. Not a long time.
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May 20, 2022 20:48
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Talking of KTM woes, MCN's long-termer has a few issues.
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May 20, 2022 20:48
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dema posted:I'm here for a good time. Not a long time. This. Nothing lasts forever. Might as well have fun
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May 20, 2022 20:51
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dema posted:I'm here for a good time. Not a long time. Calling a tow truck and replacing rocker arms isn't my idea of fun but ymmv An electronic fault that makes the rear preload max out while you ride, very good, love technology *continues madly hoarding 90's bikes*
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May 20, 2022 21:56
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lol just carry your own spare rocker arms and a [mechanics rollbox] toolkit.
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May 20, 2022 22:07
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cursedshitbox posted:you can ride on the back of mine. If i only had a teleportation machine...
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May 20, 2022 22:33
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cursedshitbox posted:This. It's just everyones definition of fun is different. I'm very aware of where my bias (and it is a bias) towards japanese bikes comes from. From age 7 to like 20 or so, I had 3 bikes. I started on a 50cc Arctic Cat, which was powered by a Sachs engine. It was not reliable in any sense of the term, other than reliably making GBS threads the bed. I then had a Suzuki TS185, which should have been reliable, except the PO "bored 'er out" and I was too young, dumb, and full of a burning desire to ride to know that that was a huge red flag. Then I had a Yamaha 360 RT3, the rare Japanese bike that is just terrible right out of the gate. It had an extremely early CDI system that was just not good at all. It wouldn't start when cold, it wouldn't start when hot, it sometimes didn't want to idle, but if it stalled on you in the woods, that was it, day over. I pushed those bikes miles out of the woods, over and over and over, sweating and swearing and getting so pissed, when it was 90 degrees, 95% humidity and I still had a mile of uphill to go. This was before cell phones, so I either pushed it out of the woods, or I left it there. That left me with absolutely zero patience for unreliable bikes. If I get the feeling that I can't get somewhere on a bike, I sell it. If a bike stalls randomly enough times, I sell it. If a bike has boneheaded engineering decisions (which to be fair most Japanese bikes dont), I am absolutely not interested. I'm not pushing a bike out of the woods again. ALL THAT BEING SAID, I recognize that I feel that way for a very specific reason, and not everyone does, and some people can live with the risk looming of a bike that might not make it home, and they can have fun on that bike while it lasts, but I absolutely cannot. McTinkerson posted:Also, make sure that the filter and both strainers are replaced during the first oil change. Case in point, if I found this in even my 1972 Suzuki I'd have it on FB Marketplace that same night
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May 20, 2022 22:44
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I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not you've been broke and had your bike break down at the same time. Bike breaking down is a bigger deal for some people than others. I try to be as unbiased as I can and I constantly recommend bikes I don't 'like' because I know they're good. Ktm's are genuinely really badly built and designed by modern standards; if Enfield or Harley can catch flack for it then ktm shouldn't even be a company anymore yet people keep buying and riding them. Live to ride is marketing to make up for the bike being not that great and people get that. Desmodromic passione is marketing to make up for the bike not being that great and people get that. But if you say something with READY TO RACE is a POS you get Harley boomer levels of denial even though that's just marketing too. I know it's hard to accept, but 'fun to ride' is also a marketing tool, because it's easier and cheaper to make a fun bike than a reliable one. Class leading horsepower is glamorous and marketable, electrical systems that Just Work are boring and lame, but they both cost money. Ktm are exactly, exactly where Ducati were in the nineties - using marketing to increase sales because it's much cheaper and gives a much faster return than building a quality product and waiting a decade.
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May 20, 2022 23:26
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I was wondering today what time is that makes a dual sport/dirt bike stand out as fun when ergos are fairly identical. Assuming suspension is improved, then handling between a KTM and similarly sized Japanese bike ought to feel pretty similar. So what’s left? Is it just that KTM engines accelerate quicker and go faster? Maybe a little more torque? Fit and finish or other things that are more luxury?
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May 21, 2022 00:11
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More horsepower generally. I just want 50+ I don't want 30+
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May 21, 2022 00:14
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I bought a motorcycle to ride it not to wrench on it. Unreliable is not acceptable for me. I also don’t care about engine performance that much, even “starter” bikes are pretty fast all things considered.
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May 21, 2022 00:18
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Slavvy posted:I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not you've been broke and had your bike break down at the same time. Bike breaking down is a bigger deal for some people than others. It was a lot of this for me too. All my bikes were either free as hand me downs or purchased at garage sales No way were we coughing up the dough to take either the Suzuki or the Yamaha to the shop. That’s also why I spent a lot of my teens and early 20’s reading every engine maintenance and repair book I could get my hands on from the local library, learned carbs inside and out and figured out wiring diagrams. I couldn’t pay a shop. It wound up paying off when I accidentally started a business flipping bikes during my college years.
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May 21, 2022 00:30
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LimaBiker posted:If i only had a teleportation machine... I gotta nuff poo poo in the lab to get you here one atom at a time but I can't guarantee they'll all go back into the right place. Sorry, still working on learning more math while compute power increases. try again in a decade. Russian Bear posted:I bought a motorcycle to ride it not to wrench on it. Unreliable is not acceptable for me. Same. I don't own a drz or klr anymore for this reason. Jim Silly-Balls posted:It's just everyones definition of fun is different. And I'm right there with you. but also I like a good problem to solve for, after I've calmed down from the whole 'stuff this motherfucking bag of bullshit into an autoclave'. Donno, I've had a lotta lovely cars, most of my bikes have been what would be subjectively lovely by this subforum with the exception of like, one maybe two. I'm also ridiculously stubborn while patient when it comes to machines that do not want to play ball. I do not have this same capacity involving say, writing software. This is an important distinction to understand in one's self imo. Some vehicles just bounce off the programme and will not play nice no matter how hard you try. gently caress those loving things. Send em down river. Others... can be made to play nice for a while anyway, they too will eventually rear their ugly head. Old hardware can be super rewarding. Like an old log-booked raced-for-decades-in-baja vehicle. it has a certain wear to all of its parts that wouldn't be possible in even the most advanced of machining processes but something that happens organically through use, a character, its also a righteous loving dick to put up with. Its had years of hard use, sometimes good care, other times, the motherfucker had the most farmer's level hacks to make it to the next stage. This all weighs heavy on it as time bears down. Its not for everyone and this is totally ok. Most of your every day used craigslist finds will be nothing of this sort. Some are, if you look hard. Avoid those. Learn that much from me, because its what I go for. Slavvy posted:I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not you've been broke and had your bike break down at the same time. Bike breaking down is a bigger deal for some people than others. been here, did this. lost my car, resorted to the oil-burnin fzr4 while I sorted my poo poo running a small business. that time in life loving sucked. hauling 60+ pounds of tools in a backpack on a sportbike across state borders to do on call repairs. Thankfully I got outta wrenching for a living. I try to avoid recommending ktms to others. I know what it takes to own mine and understand that most do not posses the skill nor the tools to keep something like that in acceptable working condition. acceptable being a stretch here. some of the poo poo this company does is down right asinine. but also they're like rover or subaru. they figured out the driving dynamics at the cost of literally every loving thing else. The driving dynamics is the Siren's song of dragging people back into their sphere of bullshit.
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May 21, 2022 01:47
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:I was wondering today what time is that makes a dual sport/dirt bike stand out as fun when ergos are fairly identical. Assuming suspension is improved, then handling between a KTM and similarly sized Japanese bike ought to feel pretty similar. So what’s left? Is it just that KTM engines accelerate quicker and go faster? Maybe a little more torque? Fit and finish or other things that are more luxury? Ktm prioritize top end performance at the expense of low speed tractability (and longevity), they spring the suspension quite heavy at the expense of skinny people, they skew heavily toward stop-go geometry, they usually have more powerful brakes (the japanese are objectively behind in this area imo). All of this makes for a deeply impressive bike if your idea of riding fast is slamming on the brakes, parking in the corner and accelerating out on the back wheel. The 690 and 390 especially are designed to appeal to stupid learners that way, because they're better in all the ways you notice when you're a dumb learner with no mid corner speed. I think on dirt the better suspension would be the biggest difference but idk how you can even use 40hp there let alone 70.
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May 21, 2022 01:52
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quote:Same. I don't own a drz or klr anymore for this reason. These have probably been my most reliable vehicles. Not bikes, vehicles. I would maybe make an exception for my first Volvo.
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May 21, 2022 02:11
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cursedshitbox posted:
Oh don’t get me wrong, I do love to wrench, but I prefer to do it towards the end goal of reliability. I’m happy to clean carbs on a bike I know will run well in the long term. I won’t beat my head against an engineered-in problem though. Hell, my Elite 250 I received in boxes and had to assemble it like a drat Lego set. I loved it.
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May 21, 2022 03:54
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Some things are hard to describe. But the Duke 890r made it feel like i am a much better rider than i probably actually am. Goes through corners as if guided by a magic hand. No other sports bike i've ridden made it all feel so easy. I can imagine the thing is especially a lot of fun on track because during that test ride i am pretty sure that i exceeded the speed limit at least half the time to 'feel' anything of what the bike is about. It can handle gentle riding (as in 'it won't complain and buck when you're rolling through a village with a 30km/h speed limit') but that's slightly uncomfortable because of the fairly hard suspension and just no fun. The smcr is just BRAAAP! distilled to a high percentage and hella fun for doing hooligan poo poo. But tbh i have no idea what other supermotos feel like.
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May 21, 2022 08:59
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Following my heart, my wallet (and the thread title), I sold my overengineered, farkle-filled r1250r and bought this 2007 Fazer s2 today: I'm very happy with my decision so far, and not just because of the extra money in my pocket.
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May 21, 2022 11:00
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LimaBiker posted:Some things are hard to describe. But the Duke 890r made it feel like i am a much better rider than i probably actually am. Goes through corners as if guided by a magic hand. Yeah but what does any of that actually mean? quote:Goes through corners as if guided by a magic hand. quote:it won't complain and buck when you're rolling through a village with a 30km/h speed limit quote:smcr is just BRAAAP! distilled to a high percentage and hella fun for doing hooligan poo poo Seems to me a lot of this boils down to a placebo effect of “sounds good plus is orange” the way anyone will assume a loud red car is fast.
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May 21, 2022 13:54
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It’s Italian “soul” for a different market. I means it sounds good and looks fast and has nothing to do with the actual performance of the bike. Take the early monster versus the early SV. Plenty would describe the monster as soulful and the SV as soulless relative to it. But the SV is better in every objective measure, and there are still functional examples around today vs every early monster falling to pieces around y2k-ish time periods. It’s all subjective talk. And that’s ok, it’s fine to like a bike for reasons you can’t explain (as an owner of a 72 RV90, I get it), but that’s it. It’s subjective. Objectively, especially over time, it’s easy to tell how good a bike is. Did owners of early monsters have fun riding them? Sure. Were they good bikes? Absolutely not. Suzuki ate their lunch so badly that only one of them are really remembered today. Beve Stuscemi fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 15:15
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I don't know. I just know they feel different from the other bikes i tried, and that it's a difference i'd also notice if all the ktm styling cues were masked with cardboard. I don't think it's always necessary or useful to try and quantify everything. At least for me, there's no point in reading about wheel base, rake and whatever because i have never learned which specification has what kind of effect. The only thing i have knowledge about, is the relation between horsepower, torque and gearing, and how could power a small shunter locomotive with a Hayabusa engine if you wanted to. It's like with hifi systems. The system that has the least amount of distortion and the flattest frequency response, is objectively 'the best'. However, it is not always the system that offers the experience that is closest to what a person thinks is the most lifelike sound, or the sound that is just 'the nicest'. I had some amps that objectively were better (very low distortion, high frequency range transistor amplifiers) i used for a while until i found some PA tube amps, which are objectively bad. Got rid of the transistor amp, because the tube amps make the sound closer to what i hear when i go to a concert. Audio engineers and masterers gently caress around majorly with the sound, to create something that is closest to what most consumers like to hear, even if that's not exactly what you hear when in the studio. All that aside, i think the duke 890r is genuinely pretty fast on a track. Probably faster than my more mushy SV with the stock pogo stick suspension. But my SV is so much more comfy both seat wise and suspension wise. LimaBiker fucked around with this message at 17:02 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 16:50
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Yeah but what does any of that actually mean? Probably the combo of more aggressive geometry, with lighter weight components at the cost of durability, on suspension not-hot-out-of-the-reagan-era. Even if the suspension isn't correctly valved/sprung for our intrepid ktm voyeur it will feel lightyears better than the bullshit cooking oil filled monoshock Honda sticks on everything or the emulsion tube forks that Japan still loves to peddle to the masses in tyool 2022. Jim Silly-Balls posted:Objectively, especially over time, it’s easy to tell how good a bike is. the easy way to learn is by using the hell outta the equipment. Not bolting touratech catalogs to it or looking at it lovingly in a garage while it picks up a measly 1100 miles under the ten years its in someone's care.
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May 21, 2022 16:53
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Slavvy posted:The 690 and 390 especially are designed to appeal to stupid learners that way, because they're better in all the ways you notice when you're a dumb learner with no mid corner speed. That's weird, the only way I can compete with bigger bikes on faster tracks with my 690 is my (actually quite impressive) corner speeds. (They'll still just warp speed past me after they park it in the corners.) EDIT: Oh I see what you're saying now, my bad. Nidhg00670000 fucked around with this message at 18:32 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 18:27
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FBS posted:
opengl128 posted:Tidy. Love it. opengl128 posted:Aaaaand now I've started looking for one as a long distance alternative to the Zero. This one looks solid to me. So that one sold before I could go see it, but I set up a craigslist alert and a 2006 with 39k popped up and I emailed him 5 minutes later. Went and bought it today, but need to go back with a ride to pick it up in a week or two. Should be a nice little beater bike. It's a little grimy but no major damage or issues, just needs a good cleaning. It also just got a new clutch. 
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May 21, 2022 19:59
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Ok yeah most of that makes sense. And I’m not insisting everyone has to justify why they like a bike in terms of quantifiable metrics. It’s just that so often when the KTM/Ducati/BMW/Husky vs Japanese bikes conversation comes up (usually on other forums and in person, not so much here), people say things like “turns better,” “goes harder,” “is more fun,” etc without any clarity about what they mean and why those things are apparently lacking in the other makes. And since so many aspects of motorcycle performance ARE quantifiable and comparable on paper, track, and dynos, unsubstantiated “better than” claims just ring hollow. KTM engines are made with less rotating mass in key places like valvetrain and crankshaft, right? Does that translate to the feeling of the engine being much more responsive?
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May 21, 2022 20:08
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Without getting into whether this is good or bad or the larger implications, just looking at things you can perceive from the rider seat compared to a similar japanese engine, a generic ktm will have: Lighter flywheels Shorter piston skirt Dry/pseudo-dry sump oil system Greater percentage of magnesium parts Smaller clutch Roller rocker valvetrain Cam profile skewed towards top end performance Compared to a similar japanese street bike, a generic KTM chassis will have: A longer swingarm More forward weight bias Taller COG More front suspension travel Heavier springs Laterally stiffer frame Most of these things come with a trade off in longevity or tractability or complexity or corner speed, some of them are just because they can start with a clean slate and don't need to accommodate very old fashioned legacy designs (eg the sv engine is good but it's an awkward clunker that limits the designer on the chassis front). Some of them are philosophical choices carefully picked to maximize marketing potential. The whole bike is optimized to minimize it's crippling flaws during a brief test ride.
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May 21, 2022 20:25
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:
the lighter the valvetrain, the higher the engine's max speed can be, this does not include the cam but only the valves, its springs, buckets, clips, and shims. mass goes up with the square of its rotational speed, this gives you sweet sweet inertia. The crank is but one part of this system, the flywheel has more of an impact on the engine's feel than the crank alone. A heavier flywheel spins up slower, carries more inertia, and is more forgiving of clutch mistakes, however it doesn't feel....lively or ready to race. You'll see adjustable weight flywheels in the 2t/mx line of bikes where you can add or remove weight to the flywheel to suit riding conditions. Desert favors a lighter flywheel, woods, heavier. Road going sport tourers will sometimes run heavier flywheels than their sport based siblings with the same basic engine. KTM cuts their head/rotating mass designs down to the bare minimums and then some at the cost of longevity. Something built to run hard and make-rude-amounts-of-power-for-its-given-weight isn't built for endurance. Weight | Durability | Performance Pick two. cursedshitbox fucked around with this message at 20:46 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 20:35
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opengl128 posted:So that one sold before I could go see it, but I set up a craigslist alert and a 2006 with 39k popped up and I emailed him 5 minutes later. Went and bought it today, but need to go back with a ride to pick it up in a week or two. Should be a nice little beater bike. It's a little grimy but no major damage or issues, just needs a good cleaning. It also just got a new clutch. Hell yeah bike buddies  I'll be curious to hear what you think of the stock handlebar position. Also what exhaust setup is on yours?
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May 21, 2022 21:24
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FBS posted:Hell yeah bike buddies I took it for a spin around the block, they are definitely much more narrow than I am used to. I'll see how I like it once I get a few rides in. It has a Two Brothers exhaust, but I'm actually looking for a stock set. I like quiet bikes these days.
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May 21, 2022 21:29
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Long weekend, motorcycle, ice cream… hard to go wrong. 
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May 21, 2022 22:36
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Dang it’s good Harley week itt
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May 21, 2022 23:36
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All the lurkers with Harleys need to come out of the woodwork and post their potatoes asap
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May 22, 2022 00:32
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I miss the sound my Iron 883 made, but I loathed commuting with it.
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May 22, 2022 02:08
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Slavvy posted:All the lurkers with Harleys need to come out of the woodwork and post their potatoes asap
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May 22, 2022 02:09
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 14:26 |
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 Finally getting some riding weather!. On the way back, riding through a tunnel, a lane opened up for me and I couldn't resist and opened it up...and it was loud? Deep?. Does my bike really sound like that? Slowed down and R1 came past me with a aftermarket exhaust...we'd somehow synced throttle input, so his sound matched.
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May 22, 2022 08:29
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