- Location
- Ontario, Canada
I have had a Kawasaki JS300 lol...it was very fun and super light but a 300 single...very very low power lol. I had a Kawi 440, dog. I had a 650sx...dog until I modified the crap out of it and then it really became fun. I learned a lot on it. The thing I really disliked about it though was sketchy electrics. If you push the start button too hard it would kick out the starter, a lighter pressure and it would fire up all the time, but they were also known to keep the CDI/coil (Kawi calls it igniter) charged so if you did not ride in a week or two, the battery needed to be charged. Last year I had the displeasure of riding a 750sx. The steering throw was terrible, very limited on turning radius and it felt like I was balancing on a pencil. It was very prone to rolling over and again was a real dog for the engine it had. Also the 750's had a lot of electrical gremlins that seemed to never fully go away for any real length of time. I worked on one just a couple of months ago and spent almost a month troubleshooting electrical issues. Get one issue cleaned up and 2 more arose. I've never seen such a thing to deal with before.
The SX-R 800 has good power right out of the crate but put a pipe on it and then the crank starts to see excessive stress. I believe Kawi has tuned that engine to it's full potential in terms of running the ragged edge on crank reliability. A friend of mine did nothing more than put a B-pipe on his 800 engines and every year the pto connecting rod would snap and saw the crankcase in half. He went through 4 SX-R 800 engines! It's not the first time I have read about this too, I believe Group K also has a write up on this somewhere on their site. I used to be a big Kawi supporter and mainly because where I live it's almost all that is available since Yamaha did not allow sales of the SuperJet to take place in Canada. But after I found my SuperJet and set it up nicely, it was easily twice the potency of my buddy's stockish SX-R 800. He loved the power so much he sold his and went on a hunt for a 96-07 SuperJet...but he ended up getting a Kawi couch to take his wife out on long cruise rides. The moral of the story, Yamaha has proven themselves to have excellent electrics and easy to diagnose, and very reliable crankshafts. Plus the parts availability both oem and aftermarket are almost endless, not so easy to locate Kawi parts by comparison.
http://www.x-h2o.com/index.php?threads/sxr-800-broken-rod.50595/
http://www.pwctoday.com/showthread.php?t=156519
Group K quote "It is common knowledge, among stand up racers, that modified SuperJets have considerably better crankshaft life than modified SXRs"
http://www.groupk.com/k849.htm
The SX-R 800 has good power right out of the crate but put a pipe on it and then the crank starts to see excessive stress. I believe Kawi has tuned that engine to it's full potential in terms of running the ragged edge on crank reliability. A friend of mine did nothing more than put a B-pipe on his 800 engines and every year the pto connecting rod would snap and saw the crankcase in half. He went through 4 SX-R 800 engines! It's not the first time I have read about this too, I believe Group K also has a write up on this somewhere on their site. I used to be a big Kawi supporter and mainly because where I live it's almost all that is available since Yamaha did not allow sales of the SuperJet to take place in Canada. But after I found my SuperJet and set it up nicely, it was easily twice the potency of my buddy's stockish SX-R 800. He loved the power so much he sold his and went on a hunt for a 96-07 SuperJet...but he ended up getting a Kawi couch to take his wife out on long cruise rides. The moral of the story, Yamaha has proven themselves to have excellent electrics and easy to diagnose, and very reliable crankshafts. Plus the parts availability both oem and aftermarket are almost endless, not so easy to locate Kawi parts by comparison.
http://www.x-h2o.com/index.php?threads/sxr-800-broken-rod.50595/
http://www.pwctoday.com/showthread.php?t=156519
Group K quote "It is common knowledge, among stand up racers, that modified SuperJets have considerably better crankshaft life than modified SXRs"
http://www.groupk.com/k849.htm
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