TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

I’ve been a huge fan of KTM motorcycles since shortly after I started riding bikes in 1999. At the time, I had a 265 Volvo station wagon with a 5.0 Ford V8 in it, and when I moved back to California, I could not get it registered because it would not pass a smog test.

So I bought my first bike, a ’78 Yamaha XS500, an 8 valve twin with a 180 degree crank, the Wretched Excess. I loved that bike and it was the beginning of a long period of years where I was a rider only, with no 4 wheeled vehicle. Next was a 1998 Honda Superhawk, a big 90 degree V twin, which I also loved, but unfortunately totaled in an accidental wheelie (long story).

Then I bought my first KTM, a 2001 Duke II that had been crashed and was missing the front end. I figured it’d be easy to find forks and a wheel on Ebay, but it took a long time to get the correct parts. I had bought a second XS500 for parts, and what do you know, the steering stem bearings were the same as the KTM, so I mounted a ’77 Yamaha front end to the 2001 KTM! There is no limit to the dumb things you can do with motorcycles.

I eventually found an earlier Duke front end, which had 41mm forks instead of the 43s on the DII, and then finally found the right set of parts. That bike was absolutely killer on goat path roads like Fairfax-Bolinas road (I lived in Fairfax at the time). The Duke motor was not so great though. I had to rebuild the crank at about 15,000 miles, amongst other regular problems.

I took the Duke on a Baja adventure for Christmas in 2006, which was kinda dumb, as it was a supermoto style bike, not setup for sandy whoops and dirt trails. I had some small trouble on that trip… I’d replaced the chain and sprockets beforehand and I think I got the wrong front sprocket… which resulted in a large and constant oil leak. Then I crashed in the whoops in the dark on the road to Mike’s Sky Ranch, and broke the front brake lever. Being a dirt newb, I hadn’t brought spare levers. But I managed a genius repair the next morning, using a chain press (that I brought for some reason?) to clamp the broken lever to the remaining stub. It was freezing on the way back north and sleet hitting your cheeks though an open face helmet sucks, let me tell you. Then I crashed on wet railroad tracks in the dark in Tecate, right before the border. Super fun ride!

I decided to get a real dirt bike, and bought a KTM 525EXE, which was way more bike than my skill level was prepared for. But it had a license plate, so I didn’t need a truck. Ha! I rode the thing from Fairfax up the 101 to Upper Lake to ride with some new internet friends on the trails in the Mendocino National Forest. After getting a right good laugh out of them for showing up in a one-piece Roadcrafter style riding suit, I managed to fail the first big hill climb. I ended up riding on my own, looking for easy trails so the guys didn’t have to babysit me all day. By the time I got home, after another 115 miles on the highway, I was totally used up. I started truck shopping the next day.

I also bought a supermoto kit for the 525 and completed the one and only motorbike race of my life, at Stockton kart track. Friends talked me into it, and I told the organizers I wanted to start from the back, but they made me go from the front row! Crazy how much grip that bike had there, I could ram the footpegs into the track till they folded up, the plastic peg sliders grinding away.

Then there was a 2001 KTM 400MX-C, which was a much better bike to advance my skills on, and then a 2009 400 XC-W, which was even better. Though my purchasing skills were very poor, and I got a bike that had a ruined motor, which I had to immediately rebuild. Those 400’s are awesome dirt engines and the short stroke crank makes them feel very light compared to the 450’s and 500’s.

My preference for buying project bikes led me to the next KTM, a 2003 950 Adventure with a crap ton of miles on it. The bike had been to Patagonia and was probably one of the most widely traveled 950s on Earth. I rode it to 120,000 miles before I finally got tired of working on it… let’s see, how many places was I stuck with the tanks off? Butte, Montana… Niceville, Florida… Jackson Hole, Wyoming (twice)… Severance, Colorado (twice). Petaluma, California (the last time).

It was a good thing I had the spare 400 to ride to the parts store or the post office!

In 2020 bought a 2017 1090R Adventure, which is what I’m still riding today. Or I would be riding it today, if it weren’t broken down in the driveway. Fortunately, it stopped running before I rode off, so I didn’t need to get towed back to base.

I don’t work on cars with computers, that’s one of the few rules I have about what kind of car projects to accept. So here I am with a modern, computerized bike and no tools to deal with the electronics. It isn’t giving me any error codes to work with, it just won’t fire. I read up on the common failures on the Orange Crush at advrider.com, and decided it was probably the fuel pump. So I replaced it and guess what, it still won’t run. Now I’ve got to start pulling sensor plugs and checking resistance values.

Can’t someone else do it?

So, I’ve got to check the crank position sensor, the pulse coil? I don’t even know what that is!

Gotta wrap up this post now to go see if I can figure something out before dark. Hit me up in the comments if you’ve got any troubleshooting tips for this bike!