Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/807546
36 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com The hubs blue and the frame black. Building this bike as an enduro ride, I added hand guards, 1.3 gallon auxiliary gas tank as the front number plate and front and rear tugger lift straps. Making it woods-legal also required a spark arrestor so I purchased an FMF for a Honda CR500. The connecting rod was replaced and when put- ting the engine back together I ran into my first major issue: the bottom of the rod scraped the cases since it was too thick. I looked at the old connecting rod and noticed that it was grounded on the bottom to clear the cas- es. RB-Designs was then able to remove the rod and polish the bottom to clear the cases and rebalance. Finally, putting the top end back together, I found the piston hitting the cylinder head. Measuring the distance, it seemed it need- ed several millimeter of extra clearance as the optimal squish was 1.2mm. This was too thick to stack base gaskets since it would potentially be too weak and blow out. RB-Designs created a metal spacer plate where thin gaskets were added to the top and bottom. Then helped achieve the 1.2mm of squish clearance. Essentially the motor was complete but now it had to be put into the frame. The frame mounts are not an issue since they are identical for Mai- cos from 1985 and onward. I did run into an issue when put- ting the swing arm on, though. The engine was too thick by the clutch case side to fit. I remedied this by grind- ing part of the swingarm down a few mm to ac- commodate the larger engine. These engines run hot, especially when you trail ride these big monsters. To mitigate these issues, I use Evans coolant and heat trip fans mounted on both radiators. I hide the battery in the airbox which initially did not hold the air filter. I used a univer- sal UNI clamp on since the 70mm rear of the carburetor was not able to connect to the air boot. Finally, once I had the exhaust pipe mount welded by Cycle Metrics, it was ready for its initial start. These "bigger " than traditional big bores require a spe-