By Enti Bracamonte
Posted: February 26, 2022
The Project Bike
After the red fiasco, came my KLX250R.
This was a project bike. I liked that it was a four stroke, so I bought it. There were tons of mods available for this bike. Larry Roeseler loved these bikes and made all kinds of kits for them.
My KLX was purple when I got it—the indignity!… the unholiness!… I know!… (bringing the back of my hand to my forehead and tilting my head back)—but that didn’t deter me; I had some pretty elaborate plans for this bike. I pulled it apart in my living room—down to the last screw—and painted the chassis aluminum-gray myself (right after I had it sand-blasted).
I bought the 300cc conversion kit from Stroker (Larry Roeseler). As soon as the kit arrived, I took out the cylinder sleeve and put it in the fridge. At dawn, the next day, I took the cylinder block out and left in direct sunlight all morning. Come the time to bring the two together, I quickly lined up the frozen sleeve with the heated block and, without wasting any time, I put a wood block on top and whacked it with a mallet… my little pony became a proper steed that thumped everything in its path.
While I was at it, I also shaved some weight off the flywheel and had the cylinder head ported for added snappiness. I also replaced the stock, vacuum-operated carburetor with a Mikuni pumper carb—that took a little fabricating and a whole lot of cursing!
See the exhaust header? that ain't stock either; it is an oversize from Stroker.
Please do notice the green gas tank still atop the KLX; it would soon be replaced with an oversize, see-through gas tank from Acerbis. Hundred-kilometer+ races became less of a logistical nightmare for me after that.
I also replaced the shock spring (a rather unnerving affair with improvised tools of my own making) and the fork springs for my weight. The fork bars were inverted but did not have a rebound adjustment knob, just the compression clickers (I never replaced the valves because I did not think I was qualified to do it).
Ultimately, it was the lack of a rebound adjustment knob on the fork bars that led to my decision to sell the bike. I actually traded it for a freshly-painted and oven-baked Chevrolet Caprice—which was a thing of beauty, as well.
It became clear to me that I had outgrown my little sewing machine. It was time to part ways. I was riding my flying broomstick at full throttle all the time, but the suspension could not keep up. It was starting to get dangerous for me and so I needed a more serious ride…
You may be under the impression that this was just a designed obstacle in a racetrack; it was not. Our posse came to a grinding halt right at the very edge of it. So no, getting stuck like that was not an accident.
I was stranded for some time. Finally, I had to pull my feet out of my boots and then wiggle “them boots” out of the mud one after the other. The mud cemented around my boots pretty quickly.