First Ride

For our first ride on the 2016 Kawasaki KLR650, my son and I took turns switching between the KLR and my Versys 1000 on the famous Central Florida Green Swamp Loop. The loop is 172 miles/4 hours. This loop was all paved, but it includes some of the roughest roads in Florida.

I wrote the above loop on Tyre-to-Travel which was a free service that came with my TomTom Rider GPS. Unfortunately, the Rider mount isn't well suited for sustained rough roads or trails. I'll need another GPS for the KLR. I have an old Garmin Nuvi 550 to use until I get the SatNav situation figured out.

Initial impressions and observations on the first ride are as follows:

Wobble: There's a minor but distinct wobble in the front at speeds north of 65mph. It might be due to the Continental TKC80s that I had installed. First thing will be to check the steering play based on the procedure outlined in the Service Manual.

Gearing: The gearing might be a little too tall. It seemed that I had to drop it down to 2nd for the most minor maneuvering. I'm not sure that's going to be very effective when we start putting the KLR into the sandy, off-road conditions.

Shifting: The shifting seemed heavy. It could be that I'm used to the Versys, but it was definitely noticeable. Let's let the running in play out and see what we think at 1,000 miles. Also a switch from mineral oil to synthetic may be helpful.

Temp Gauge: The temperature gauge seemed a little wonky. See gauge at the right below. Essentially, when riding the motorcycle, the pin would drop to just above the C line, then when stopped and idling, it would slowly work its way up to mid-range between C and H.

As you can see, the gauge doesn't show the actual temps. However, the Service Manual indicates that the temp at mid-position of the gauge is 100C/212F. It doesn't provide any other information about the temps along the range of the temp gauge. However, I found a vendor that offers an overlay that includes the actual temps. For $20, I'm not sure it's worth it, but here's a look at it below.

Note that (i) while the values are in increments of 30 degrees, the range between temps is smaller below 180 and (ii) the temp range doesn't go to zero; it goes as low as 120 degrees.

Using the overlay above, I believe I can make a good guess on the temps I was experiencing. So, running at ambient temps of 67-72 degrees and at speed of 50-65 mph, I'd estimate that the temp was down to about 165 degrees. That seemed very low until I read that the thermostat opens at 157-163 degrees. So the air cooling and coolant combination literately might put the normal engine temperature at 165-170 degrees when riding at speed. Once the bike was stopped and idling, the temp pin rises slowly to around mid-range which is 210-220 degrees.

While wonky looking, it actually looks okay. Hope my dealer agrees when I discuss it with them. :)

Suspension/Seating: On a couple other common points, I thought the suspension and seating were both better than expected. As mentioned in Dirt Bike.com, these were two areas of improvement for the 2016 model KLR. Naturally both take some time to get dialed in, but I was pleasantly surprised not to be diving into hard stops or having to stand to relieve pressure on the rear.

So far, so good!

Let the good times ROLL!