Hahahaha!!!!!!!!!! Good times!

 

Uhhhh didn't you have to replace most of the motor? LOL

 

I think my dirt naps are the hardest thing on the bike and rider. But the only time I felt the bike's limitation was a climb of over 1000ft in less than a mile topping out at about 10,500ft. It was rough enough I could not keep the speed high up to stay in the power band. Maybe I should have put the 13T front sprocket on. The DRZ400, KTM500 and XR650 I was riding with didn't have any trouble with the climb for some reason.
Old adage: No replacement for displacement.

 

you can't fool me...... I once saw you with the front wheel off the ground

 

More like how hard my KLX rides ME!

My KLX and its cohort - deep sand - rode me like a bull and put me on the ground and in a cast!

 

Oh god, THAT, LOL! I know the feeling. I'm usually the one who "does it" but then like you said, the more you start to ride with other skilled riders...


Just the other day, I was trail riding with friends and came to this section with a really steep down hill. I sissy'd out and turned back to go down a different way, mostly because I couldn't really get a good look down the hill from where I had stopped and didn't want to be committed if it was too steep or the bottom wasn't "ideal", if you know what I mean. I guess my excuse there was that I was very new to the KLX, that being only about my third time taking it in any serious off road, and only having owned it for three months... Anyway, I'd gone back about 50 yards and I looked back and one of them was doing it. Of course then I went back and did it too, and it wasn't even that bad. I've definitely had scarier down hills on my other bikes.

One time on my DR200, my friend and I were on a ride, and we both stopped our bikes at the top of a huge, VERY steep hill that went down into an area we weren't sure there was any other way out of. It would have been impossible to get the bikes back up that hill under their own power. We both stood around, looked at it, and thought about it for probably at least five minutes lol! Finally one of us (me, that time) decided FK it, let's do it. We both made it down without crashing, although several minutes later we went down a short section, about 10 feet or so, that was even steeper, and slightly off camber. Both of us lost our front ends (slid down and sideways) going down that, but were OK. The latter hill was so steep it was actually really difficult to get back up it on foot, after having climbed down to get a better look.

Another time, I was going down a huge hill on my DR200, that had to have been at least a hundred feet, and was very steep, with even steeper sides that also dropped down a hundred feet or more. I started out slow like I usually do but started building a little more speed than I had intended. I was in first gear (which on the DR200, tops out at about 20 mph), so once I broke 20 mph - totally out of control at this point - the rear wheel was locking up and I was SLIDING straight down this hill at about 25 to 30 mph, on a bike with no suspension. At about the point which the wheel started sliding more than turning, it hit some really bumpy stuff and my whole lower body got bounced up off the seat and pegs. So for the last third or so of that hill, I was basically laying on the seat/fuel tank/handlebars, with my legs flying out straight behind me, superman style. Somehow I managed to make it to the bottom in one piece WITHOUT coming off the bike or crashing, although the side of my knee was bleeding through my pants, from where it had smacked into the fuel tap. That was a wild one haha! I think it probably takes the cake for "craziest", but it wasn't on the KLX so in this context I guess it doesn't count.




Probably even scarier than these intentional down hills are the tiny, two foot wide (sometimes less!) ridges that we traverse on a frighteningly regular basis in the hills here in Beaumont/Cherry Valley, CA. Sometimes we go through sections where you are climbing UP, with your rear wheel spinning and tending to want to slide sideways, DOWN TO the side that drops off stuff that's too steep to ride down. A screw up on some of this stuff could easily result in some kind of injury, possibly even life-threatening injury. Sometimes in the middle of those things, I wonder why the hell we do it, lol!

 

No replacement for displacement- EXCEPT FOR PROPER JETTING! LOL just kidding Capt! Inside joke between us I guess I'm sure the big bore probably would have made it easier. Hope you can find a setup that you like!

That's kind of a spin-off of one of my favorite sayings that I came up with: No replacement for displacement, except for proper engineering and superior technology! Cracks me up every time I think of it :_) I came up with that when one of the guys in my high school hang-out group was trash talking Japanese engineering, saying the usual stuff like "Jap crap" and "rice burners", and of course "NRFD". He was bragging about how fast his dad's big *** Harley was. Thinking about a finely tuned turbo Hayabusa totally obliterating and embarrassing the Harley compelled me to come up with that response... Don't get me wrong, in and of itself, NRFD is a fine saying, and there's nothing wrong with it. It is certainly true in some circumstances.

 

No replacement for displacement, except supercharger, turbos, rider ability, proper tires....suspension...

 

While this post has been running for a bit, it got me to thinking. For me the conclusive answer is..."hard enough".

 

I finally rode mine hard enough to make the fan come on, multiple times.
It was 80º and humid, and I was climbing a wet, slippery, and very steep mountain. The kind of steep, where if you stop, you have to turn back down to the last flat spot and try again.
Other than that, I've banged back out my radiator guard braces after a crash on late spring ice and I have a couple of dents in the rim from trail rocks I didn't see or were the lesser of two evils. I never flatted when I got those dents either (pre-Tubliss).