Although my KTM 640 Adventure hasn’t seen much dirt since the Trans-America Trail ride, it has proven to be a good commuter over the past few weeks. With the price of Premium Unleaded hovering around $4.50 per gallon in Park City plus the nice summer weather we have been enjoying, I have been riding the bike to work two or three times a week. It would be better if there were some dirt roads to get me to and from the work place, but all things considered, it adds a little fun to the work week. I just bought a new Dunlop 908 Rally Raid (RR) to replace my worn out rear. The previous Dunlop 908 Enduro tire didn’t last long, only about 2,000 miles. I’ll probably wait until the next dirt adventure to install it, so stay tuned for a full evaluation after I get some miles on it. It appears to be quite a bit beefier than the old 908, and Bartman has had good luck with one on his 950 Adventure, a bigger and heavier bike.
Archive for the 'KTM' Category
An affiliate adventure posse from Oregon, led by Rob McCready, sent in some photos and commentary about a recent outing in Oregon. Rob had looked me up, after hearing about our recent Trans-America Trail ride into Oregon, wondering if we had crossed the Discovery Route and ran into any snow. Turns out, Rob used to work with my friend Gary Huck at Summit, and Gary put us in touch, being familiar with itsallaboutthebike.com. Rob and company were taking the Discovery Route #4, from Prineville to Seneca, Oregon, all on dirt. And mud. And snow, as you can see below. Rob was riding a silver KTM 950 Adventure, his buddies on various BMW GS models: Scott Norton on the red GS, Pete Day on the black Adventure, and Dave Combe on the black GS. Click the photos below and they will link you to these and some more recently uploaded images of this adventure in our Flickr gallery, along with colorful commentary from Rob.
Photo by Rob McCready
Photo by Rob McCready
Photo by Rob McCready
After returning from the Trans-America Trail trip, I had very little desire to touch the KTM let alone ride it. It was a reliable steed that saw me through some good times and some trouble, so it was nothing personal. Part of it was that last day from Burns, Oregon to Park City, Utah all on the pavement. Seemed like my wrists and hands were still buzzing after a week. Also, the bike needed some maintenance. My Dunlop D606 front tire and D908 rear were totally hammered, both from the aggressive and sometimes rocky off-road riding, as well as the road riding. My rear sprocket is worn to the point of replacing, and I decided to have the dealer do the 2nd big service, because it involved a bunch of things over my head, like checking and adjusting the valves. The head KTM mechanic at the Edge Motorsports, Victor, seems like a really good dude, passionate and knowledgeable, and most importantly, certified by KTM. They did forget to rebuild my clutch master cylinder, which is one of the main reasons I brought it in, but that wasn’t Victor’s fault. The service guy who wrote my ticket must have spaced it. That’s about it for the boring maintenance report. While I was picking up my bike, I just had to check out the new KTM 690 Super Enduro and ponder how it would have performed out there on the Trans-America route. No windscreen might have been tough to handle, but with enough room on the tail for some soft bags, this thing looks like it would have devoured the dirt.
3/4 view of the new 2008 KTM 690 Super Enduro. Big, bad, dirtbike. I like.
Clearly, Darth and Obi-Ben have pulled their weight by uploading some of their photos to our Flickr Photostream. And clearly, I should have gone all the way to the coast, based on what I missed out on. After viewing all 500 or so photos, I missed a lot of action on the trip after Crater Lake. And some fine dining. Posh lodges. Bad haircuts. Getting bikes stuck in the sand.
Great Basin National Park, Day 2, Trans-America Trail. Photo by Ben Rafferty.
Keeping the posts updated on the road proved to be a challenge. Until I have a chance to go back and place images in the context of the posts, you can see a sampler of photos I took with an iPhone on Flickr:
When Darth and Obi-Ben return to civilization, we’ll upload some of their shots and video.
Spent much of the day today getting gear sorted. Made two small repairs to the KTM 640 Adventure:
1. Adjusted steering bearing. First I had to lift the bike up on a crate to get the front wheel elevated. Then had to loosen five bolts on the upper double clamp of the fork, then adjust a tightening nut (very much like the process on a mountain bike!), then check for play, then finally tighten everything back up to spec.
2. Replace bent clutch lever. This was a little dicey, as the KTM dealer didn’t have an OEM prelacement lever in stock when I was there, but had one “they thought would work.” So precise, these guys at motorcycle shops. It fit just fine, and it seems to eliminate the leak of mineral oil from the seal on my clutch master cylinder.
Now for the bad news. Rode the bike into Park City to run some errands and make sure everything was running tops. Came out from the post office and when I saddled up and pressed the starter, nothing. Definitely electrical. Called Bartman, he said try to get it rolling down Swede Alley and pop start it by letting the clutch out while in gear. Nothing. I scurried off into a parking lot and tried to kick start it. Nothing. Called Bartman again to bail me out with his trailer. While waiting a few minutes, I tried the ignition button again just for the hell of it and it started right up. When I got it home, I turned it off in the driveway, then tried to start with the button and got denied again. A few hours later, I cycled it on and off and it started every time.
You can imagine this is putting a serious damper on my enthusiasm to depart on a 10-day slog westward, through some remote road and trail on the way to Oregon. Bartman says definitely don’t go unless you know what the problem is. Darth Nater says what’s the worst that can happen? He always says that.
Today, I experienced a contrast so stark and revealing by comparing experiences with two local Salt Lake City motorcycle shops. One good, one not so good.
I have been shopping online for the perfect pair of adventure dualsport riding pants. After striking out on my search for Rukka Allroad pants, which I determined after extensive research to be possibly exactly the pants I was looking for, I turned my attention to another brand and model, the Rev’It Dakar pants. Rukka is a legendary Finnish brand known for quality workmanship, 5-year warranty, and of course, a certain Euro cool factor. In my mind, they also stand out for being virtually unattainable. As Darth Nater can attest, Rukka gear does it all. The only problem is, there is only one place to get them in the U.S., from a distributor in Arizona. Said distributor had nothing in stock when I called to inquire, and their online store is so archaic, it didn’t inspire confidence to say the least. Bartman recommended giving Rev’It a look. I was pleased to find out that Salt Lake Motorsports was a stocking dealer of Rev’It gear, as well as being the local Ducati dealer here in the Beehive State.
I settled on the Rev’It Dakar model and was able to visit their store and try on the pants, which resulted in a purchase. I wanted to try them on with my Sidi Crossfire SRS boots to make sure the fit was right. The young woman who helped said no problem, take them home and try them on with your boots, and if you have second thoughts or any doubts about size or fit, just bring them back. She put them on a hanger and zipped them up in a Salt Lake Motorsports garment bag, as if I had just bought an Armani suit. Now that is what I call friendly service.
The not so good experience was with one of the local KTM dealers, Edge Motorsports. I called to inquire about getting my bike in for an oil change and minor service in advance of the Trans-America Trail trip, with the May 17th departure date looming. The surly voice of the young lady on the phone at their service department assured me they were three weeks out on being able to work on my bike, and I was basically SOL. I have a hard time imagining there is no way they could squeeze it in, but it was the attitude of the person on the phone that turned me off the most. Take it or leave it. So I am going to change the oil myself and probably wing it on rebuilding my leaking hydraulic clutch master cylinder. Too bad Salt Lake Motorsports isn’t a KTM dealer.
The stock grips that came on my KTM Adventure 640 were paper thin rubber and offered no cushion or vibration dampening. After a full day of riding, when you feel like you have been straddling a two-wheeled 400-pound bees nest, your hands could use a little love. I bought some new grips from Sommer KTM in Deutschland last summer, and finally got around to putting them on this past weekend. What I learned is this: the easy things on motorcycles are not always as easy as one might think. Slow down. Take your time. There’s no rush. The hard things are not that hard to figure out, if you don’t have any other alternative but to relax, get inside the problem and figure it out.
When you install new grips on a mountain bike, both grips are the same size on the outside (OD, for “outside diameter”) and they are the same size on the inside (ID, for “inside diameter”). Motorcycle grips are not. Since the throttle handle is a floating sleeve over the bars on the right side of the handlebar, it has a larger OD, thus requiring a grip with a larger ID than the right side. But when you take the new grips out of the package for the first time, they look the same from the outside. When you are looking at two things your hands are going to spend a lot of time grabbing onto, you are focused on the outside (the shape, the taper in the center that will help keep your hands relaxed, the softness of the rubber that will help deaden the buzzing bees). You don’t look inside.
A friend told me to use grip glue, which I purchased from the Honda dealer in Park City, Summit Honda. There are two ways to keep your grips from sliding if they get wet: grip glue, or wiring. Grip glue provides some lube when you are first sliding these on, then it sets up like concrete and makes it impossible to ever change your grips again. Wiring involves tightly wrapping a few strands of thin gauge wire on the ends and in the middle of the grip, and twisting the ends so tight that the wire helps fasten the grips to the aluminum bars. I went with the glue. You see where this is going.
After putting the right grip on the left and realizing it would take a lot of glue to keep that grip from twisting and staying put, and after realizing there was no way in hell the left grip was going to stretch over the throttle sleeve, I quickly undid the mess I made by swapping the grips to their proper places. In the process, I made an even bigger one. With the smaller ID grip now correctly positioned on the left side, I muscled the right grip over the throttle sleeve using generous gobs of glue. A few twists of the throttle and everything seemed fine. A few twists later when the glue had set up, and the throttle would not return to neutral position like it’s supposed to. Stuck wide open, not a good thing on a motorcycle. I had to disassemble the throttle handle clamp, exposing the two throttle cables, slide the floating throttle sleeve back off the bar, and carve away the dried cement, followed by sanding with fine grit sandpaper. The good news is after putting it all back together, the throttle twisted and snapped back like butter. So the moral of the story is something like this: look inside, not outside, if you are truly to see how two things can be more or less the same, only different. And wear rubber gloves when working with glue.
As anyone who has ridden a late model KTM 640 Adventure or 950/990 Adventure in serious muddy conditions knows, it can be devastating when your front wheel stops turning because mud gets clogged between the wheel and fender. I had this happen once at slow speeds on a muddy doubletrack in the Uintas. It didn’t throw me, as I was able to hop off and land on my feet as the bike was going down, but trying to lift the bike and roll it out of the mud bog was like trying to push a 300 orange pig away from the feed trough. That pig wanted to stay put.
So after much research, I threw down $275.00 plus shipping for the Touratech LC8 and LC4 high fender conversion kit. I ordered it online and received it via ground shipping 2 days later. These bikes use many of the same front suspension parts, so the kit is shared between the two models. They also offer it in orange, silver and black fenders. I stuck with the orange. Bartman has a homegrown version on his 950 Adventure, but he had to do some serious mods to make it all come together. His solution to the dual rotor issue on the front was to remove the right side caliper and rotor. When asked about how that works, he said “fine on the dirt, not so good on the road.”
Let’s just say, it was an all day job. The directions were spartan, and translated from German. Non-linear would be one way to describe it; there were several steps I did that had to be undone after moving on to the next steps revealed that I had done something wrong. Also, ending up with extra parts is usually not a good thing. Bartman came over and checked it out and thought everything looked good, and wished that he had bought this kit when he did his fender conversion. The only thing I would suggest to Touratech is to make a kit for shorter travel bikes with a shorter second brake line. I had to re-route my brake lines several times before I got a combination that worked. The supplied second brake line would have been perfect if it was 4 to 5 inches shorter. Check out the pics:
This is a before photo of the old low fender. Also, check out the Dunlop D606 front tire. You can see there is not much clearance there.
View from above of the new high fender kit. Hmmmmmm. Lots of clearance.
View of the fender from down under. Note the stealth black leg protectors and the re-routed secondary brake line to the right caliper.
Close-up view of the double banjo bolt at the master cylinder. This was a beeatch to install, but Bartman says it’s cool. So, it’s cool.
“It was also 90 degrees again, steamy and draining, and by afternoon I had a strong craving for a milkshake.”
-Neil Peart, excerpt from Roadshow
There is something inexplicable about riding motorcycles all day that makes you want to do nothing more than stop at the local dairy bar in a small town for a good milkshake. Almost always, when you bring it up to your riding partners, they say they were thinking exactly the same thing at the same time. More on this later.
Lord Darth and Moto set out for an all day ride, part of our prepping for the May Trans-America Trail trip. We started with a greasy breakfast and a mapping session at the Silver Summit Cafe on a sunny but chilly Saturday. Our original plan was to ride from sunrise to sunset and explore as many dirt roads in the west desert of Utah as possible, but because we were still on the tail end of a long and amazing ski season, it was still a little crisp in the morning for the riding to be enjoyable, so we took our time getting started. We rode from Park City, through the Heber Valley, on our way to Lehi and then Cedar Fort for the last gas up before we hit the dirt. After passing through a few towns with names like Faust, we ended up on the Pony Express Trail. It was hard keeping up with Darth on the loose gravel at first, but after we stopped at the Simpson’s Spring Pony Express monument, I started to get in a groove and let the bike go a little bit. I am still riding the stock Sahara 3 tires that came on my KTM, and I am looking forward to more rides like this with some knobbies on the wheels, hoping this will help me close the gap on the wide open dirt sections.
After stopping at a crossroads in the dirt to stretch and check the map and GPS, Darth took a picture of an Alta sticker on one of the road signs, thinking it would be cool to send this to Connie from Alta. We were only 39 miles from Delta, and decided to continue on to the Little Sahara sand dunes and eventually hit pavement somewhere near the little town of Eureka, an old town in the Tintic Mountains. It was right about this time, we started to think about milkshakes.
One thing the GPS unit does not tell you is what lies ahead when it suggests routes by “the shortest ride time.” In this case, we tried to make it over a mountain road that was snowed in. This time of year, you always have to consider that anything over 6,000 feet might have some snow left over. The telltale signs were more and more deep ruts in the road from trucks and ATVs that had come before. After getting turned around, we backtracked and made our way to Eureka, but without the requisite time to stop for that elusive milkshake, since neither one of us wanted to ride back up Provo Canyon in the dark. There will be plenty of chances for milkshakes on the Trans-America Trail, I suppose.