Best OFF-ROAD TRAIL BIKE EVER, KTM 350 XC-F Part 3

Hi Jay, here in our last

part

of our

bike

project, one of my favorite

bike

s, this is the

best

all-terrain bike. I like to call it the KTM 350 xcf. Really cool bike, we are starting with a 16 version, here we have passed. this and I've done a lot of things over the last few months on this and now it's ready for Cycle World magazine. They're going to try this to see what they think of it and I think they'll find the same thing. That's what I do, it's a great bike, so we can't wait to show you

ever

ything about this bike right now, so one of the strong points of this bike is this new engine.

The KTM 350 engine is finally really strong and still very light. It is much lighter than the 450 and makes very good power. This bike is based on the sx model, which is their motocross model, but comes a little more off-

road

ready. We went ahead and made it more off-

road

ready for the engine we added. tracks and clutch plates on this we are burning the originals, we also want the lighter small spring, we like the feel of the lighter spring with the Hinson clutch plates and their cover to give it a little more strength and it looks great too , so the motor and this is very good, but for

trail

riding we want to make it a little more reliable, so we added the

trail

tech fan that will help cool this in really tight trail situations, as well as the IMS catch that fits inside the frame, we have the FMF mega pump head on this thing, really good performance with the full FMF system in 4.1 aluminum, there is a CT system, really cool setup, we have the spark arrester and of course we are Good for off-road riding.

It doesn't seem to affect performance at all, plus it keeps the sound a bit quiet. The cb4 hoses really look complicated with these white ones. It looks great with our schematic here on our bike, as for other engine modifications we have the apex piston because our bike had a lot of time on it believe it or not we cleaned this up real good but we put a new piston in to freshen it up and check valves etc

ever

ything was fine but we went and replaced it. the piston for performance we add the vortex with that ECU there we can do a little mapping and they are pre maps of what we are running there we are running there maps number one and five are the ones that It's kind of a change from one side to another, our switch five being the most powerful cycler.

It has a really nice skid plate for this bike that fits really well, so we have it there to protect the frame. It's a shame this bike doesn't. It doesn't come with a protective skid plate, so you have to add one to the rear linkage as well. We found that you really need to have a protector there. We ruined a dog bone when we bought the bike, it was already ruined there without you knowing. We're used to K rigs with PDS, those bikes don't have anything hanging out to hit rocks and logs. If you're going to ride this bike seriously, you're going to need to have some kind of protection here, like this one quickly. to protect the rear linkage and the knuckles, okay, so if these KTM for a few years here we have had the four CS forks, they have not been a very popular fork, I really liked the previous fork for off-road, now they call it their adventure fork. but these four CS forks, a racing technician went through these things and basically took out all the four CS things and made them more like normal conventional forks which as we know they like a lot, the only difference is that on both forks our rebound is both on the top on both sides and the compression is on the bottom on both sides, so so far the performance of these things is really good, they feel like spring forks, like you would feel on a Yamaha or a Older Honda, which really Enjoy a very nice upgrade by getting the race tech to make the forks and shock on this bike, so up here on our bike for our checks, we really like to rent the whole fat 6 bar: 04, allows us a lot of space if we can.

Look, we have a lot of stuff here on the bars, so we want to have a lot of room so we don't go through a cross bar. We have also added in our psych rrah ultra pro pro bin hand guards that wrap around. I insist on running a wraparound handguard for trail bikes because if you drop it you don't break anything and it makes it really nice when you're on the trails, so I insist we have their mounts here, you can cut the pad off the bar. As you can see, we've made it here so that everything fits nice off-road bikes.

Many times you are customizing a lot. We have added what we call our emergency light. Trail Tech has a really cool light that they created here this 70 millimeter light, it's like 2500 lumens or something really powerful and it has a high end low beam that will last a couple of hours on a battery. We have mounted the battery on the back of the front number. license plate, but you can see where under the stickers here we have a couple of four rivets here that hold this battery to the back of the front license plate. The reason we did this.

I didn't want to steal power from this bike. We have a very strong stator, so you will not be able to operate a light without an upgraded stator. We didn't want to go down that route so we thought we'd add a separate light battery setup that wouldn't stay plugged in. I would just plug it in, keep it charged, just plug it in when we needed it on the way back to the truck if we were leaving late and it will last a couple of hours to get us back to where we need to be really great. light configuration on the top of the bars you can also see our vortex switch.

This is where we switch between maps and adjust the vortex under the seat and with our switch we can switch between two maps on the fly so the seat is on. On this bike we experimented with a shorter seat, what I didn't really like is that on this bike it's shorter than older bikes so I'm pretty happy with a stock height bike seat added with some folds for us on the top. The stock seat is too slippery for most uses. I don't know how anyone would like the original seat cover so with this seat cover it grips really well and that's done where you can see it touching our IMS tank.

IMS makes oversized tanks, this tank was actually designed for the SX model on this model, a little bit of clearance, it fits very tight around the fan, so we have to do some custom molding there to make it fit well and The bike only gains about a quarter to a half of a gallon of fuel on the XC model, so it's not a major upgrade if you already have an easy and obvious addition to give this bike a real clean good look, we chose a brand new plastic from Sacre, they have a complete kit, we chose this all white kit with orange attack graphics, we have some orange to highlight this and it looks really brilliant.

With this good new plastic from Sacre and the graphics we've custom made for our psycho world, a bike is fine, so for the rear of the K team here at the swingarm we want to make this really strong and durable on all terrain. rocky road conditions bulletproof makes a guard here for this rear to the swing arm bolts that hold the chain guard we have the gear design piece here and around the swing arm for real durability on this thing we have our chain main drive with o ring running around this bike with our rental wrist double ring sprocket, now our gear on this bike we played with, the original gear is a 50 in the rear, we went up to a 52 , this allowed us to be in first gear and really feel good about it.

At that point, the gap allows us to stay in second gear a lot more on our tighter trails, so we're pretty happy with this 52. I don't see a big reason to change for the type of trails we're doing. I think if you're riding more open stuff in the desert, I think Mom and you'll probably want to go down to that 50 that comes standard, but if you're riding anything tighter than that, I think you'll want to go up. at a 51 or 52 at least for the air filter installed on this bike, we have the Uni air filter with a new configuration that they have from KTM.

It's also very cheap to buy a two stroke air filter cage, this eliminates the counterproductive screen so it's a really good and cheap modification to your bike that you can do on any of the new KTM four strokes, you just buy the two stroke cage for an off road bike, another good important modification to make is some good radiator guards, unless you are really good and not going to fall, which I am not and I fall quite often, so I run. I have some trail tech spoke protectors that actually encapsulate the radiator and keep it from being damaged in a fall and also helps prevent sticks or large branches from coming into the front to puncture the radiator, so the tires are very important.

We run on our trails. We will be using this new Dunlop MX 3 S. The tire, which is our type of motocross tire, has really good grip and will perform well on many terrains. We also use a test rear tire in any of the rocky Rudy conditions we are in and tend to race. I want to run. a tire sheds a lot more than this and that's why I'm going to lean in, but in this case we've got the new Dunlop mx3 s tire up front, we've got the new Dunlop 8081 tire which works really well and it's just a wide range of terrain.

Ok so let's take a quick look at all these

part

s and as you can see a lot of parts cost a lot of money but if you can afford a new KTM 350 you can add some good parts to it and make it the

best

bike we have. I'm going to go see what Cycle World thinks about this right now, rap our KPM 350 xcf, build a really fun deal with Cycle World, check it out in the magazine.