Testarossa's 78 KZ1000 Fighter Build

did i mention it made me piss my pants.....streetbikes can be scary to crash too...you know it's bad when you come to stop and your peeing freely.....like a bad doggy

Damn Craig, all I can say is that someone hates you :ohmy: To put a newbie dirt rider on a YZ490 in the dunes is a recipie for disaster and straight up irresponsible! My experience is quite the opposite.....and the one crash out of hundreds that sent me to the hospital was on the street.....and if it weren't for my experience in the dirt, I surely would have died on that mountain. I can't count the number of times little things like slick spots or emergency braking have caused my street bike to become unsettled or loosed traction, and my experience in the dirt where the bike is routinely unsettled and you are constantly loosing traction made recovery easy and instictive....instead of the more common "now my shorts need a change" situation

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but it sounds like it was a poor situation with the wrong bike. A YZ490 is akin to a KZ1000, its an old school big bore bike. You don't put a new street rider on a 1000 in the rain, and you don't put a new dirt rider on a 500cc class 2 stroke in the sand.

porchev914 wrote:

Damn Craig, all I can say is that someone hates you :ohmy: To put a newbie dirt rider on a YZ490 in the dunes is a recipie for disaster and straight up irresponsible! ...

:blink: Yeah man...that's some "HOLY SH*T" stuff there! I'm not kidding at all. A YZ490 is a formidable weapon to this day (in the hands of an expert), that'd be like putting a first-time street-bike rider on a 1995 2-stroke Grand Prix bike (200 bHp) and saying 'go have a wonderful day riding the canyons on this'. Should be a crime to do that.
A YZ490...seriously??? Talk about a violent bitch on the pipe...wewwwwwww *shiver*!!! I'm glad you're alive!

in all fairness i am a product of the BMX and mountain bike days and was at home on the bike almost right away.... that day under my buddies supervision i was flat tracking and built up my own 100 ' figure 8 berm section and was doing 30 ft rear end brodies steering with the bike fully counter steered and tank to the ground....i was thinner then but still to big to ride the cr250 that was there imo... giant flattrack roosters within the first half hr...so my buddy who thought of me as "meat with shoes"and kinda indestructible cause of my countless streetbike crashes..so he let me go into the dunes alone...we also were fairly good and buzzed....the fault was mine as i knew i had not gotten to where i could keep my feet on the pegs as the bike would get air off of smaller dunes...and i just did the cardinal sin of dune riding and went over a dune that was unknown......


And i'm not knocking dirtbikes per say....but when i worked a yr at a kawi shop that sold KTM and huskies too...there were a lot of good customers for all types of dirt/enduro stuff......i saw a lot of people hurt compared to street bikes...and most folks i talk to that are lifetime dirt riders have some knarly scars....just an observation...........

i still believe dirt bikes give a street rider a head start...but are not a given that a dirt rider ...even a good one...can fly on a street bike.......full tilt backroad riding is a skill all its own imo......and takes a degree of mental slow down and in the groove ....the price for a mistake is so high that changes the need for sliding and rearend steering to a lucky accident and not a needed input...

i rode with great dirt riders on better street bikes than i had and they would loose sight of me within a few corners...i would have to find a turn out and wait 5 minutes....and i never grew up on motorized dirt bikes...go figure

Well...as a life-long dirt-bike rider I have some gnarly scars to back up your theory! Ha-ha!!! But, I have to say that I'm always going to ride dirt...AND street...
(you could be on to something!)
-KR

hey anyone wanna hijack another members thread...i feel i've done my best on this one for now...


solly cholly

Every time I go away for the weekend you guys pillage my thread. For punishment I will unleash the might of the US Navy on your dirt bike ridin' asses.












I always wanted a dirt bike when I was a kid. My folks never had the money. Oh poor me. Now the thought of crashing seems painful.

Guess where I spent the weekend?

See Josh, thats what you get for leaving....we hijack yur shiznit :laugh:

can't turn your back for a minute!





leon

I finally got a chance to play with the bike a little this evening. I was intent on changing my pilot jets back to the #20s since it seemed too lean with the #17.5s. Well, when I loosened the first drain plug to empty the float bowl on #1, there was no fuel. This got me wondering if my newly installed fuel tank was actually flowing. So I pull the fuel line, open the petcock and get nada. I guess that my fuel filter is either intended for a high pressure system or it is already plugged. I can blow air through it easily in both directions, but no fuel will flow by gravity. So, new fuel filter in place, and guess what, she fires right up.

Now, with the pilot screws set at 1 3/4 turns out achieves the highest idle speed. It is super happy now. It seems to pull cleanly from idle all the way to 3/4 throttle. No cloud of gas fumes, and no flat spots.

I could really get used to this bike. It idles so smooth and quiet that you hardly even know it's running when you pull up to a stop sign. When you whack the throttle it comes alive in a hurry. Not like my zx-10r, but that bike makes more than twice the power. It is so much more peaceful to tool around the neighborhood where the ninja wants to go 100 mph everywhere. One thing that caught me off guard is the fact that I'm used to the slipper clutch on the ninja. You can bang it down into 1st gear and just dump the clutch with no drama. I instinctively did this and locked up the back tire on the KZ. It was funny, I stopped at the intersection and a little cloud of tire smoke passed me by before I took off. :laugh:

when I was a mechanic I used to do that on purpose when test riding Goldwings. The shaft drive resulted in tire-hopping, squealing madness

Nelson wrote:

when I was a mechanic I used to do that on purpose when test riding Goldwings. The shaft drive resulted in tire-hopping, squealing madness

I got a pretty good chirp out of it. I need to go back tomorrow and see how much of a mark it left.