KDXRIDER.NET

Had a race on Sunday, very wet and muddy, bike overheating followed by loud pop and lots of steam in my face. The bleed plug from the left hand rad had blown out!
After some thinking I managed to repair it by threading a stick into the hole and putting some new coolant in, I was at the bottom of a pit at the time with no way of pushing the bike out.

Photo in the gallery at:
http://www.kdxrider.net/forums/modules. ... _photo.php


Anyway, the question is / are - anyone had this happen before (I assume it was a plastic plug as the threads in the rad are intact) but more importantly what improvements are there around for the KDX cooling system (mates KTM 200 stuck to same level but only lost about an inch of coolant).

Chris

Do you ride with a guy named Barney Rubble? I like those kinda fixes. A guy I rode with broke his spark plug once. He reaches over to my tank and pulls a strip of duct tape off (I always had some there to ward off bad spirits), and wraps it around the plug. After I finished telling him that ain't gonna work, he kicks it to life and rides off. The funny part is, I rode with him about 6 months later, and look down to see he's still running on the same plug!

For that plug to blow, it makes me think your rad cap is messed up. It's sposed to blow way before the safety plug. I would replace the stick with the right plug, replace your cap, and make sure your rads are clean and not full of scale. Also make sure your water pump is mighty fine.

I had the same thing happen to me at the Unadilla GNCC. It was on a muddy hill with hundreds of riders trying desperatly to get through the bottle neck. I knew I was overheating but had nowhere to go. All of sudden the plastic plug on the left radiator blew. I shut off my bike, I figured it was the end of my day. So I started pulling other stuck riders out of the mud. About a half hour later a course worker walks up to me and asks if I know what this black plastic plug he found on the ground was. I thanked him, jamed it into the radiator, grubbed some water from a guy with a camelback, and started up my bike. After hauling mud caked bikes uphill for a half hour I was exhausted. I rode the rest of the race as if it was a trail ride. I finnished one 9 mile lap. I think I was 380th or so, but there were almost 200 rider who finnished behind me. I now have a rubber expanding plug saftey wired into that hole, Its been there for almost 2 years.

Sounds like a similar race, spent about an hour pulling people up the hill, air ambulance was called in for one bloke who hit a tree, but no such luck with finding the plug!
Wiring it on sounds like a good idea. WIll check the cap as suggested but it was overheating 'like normal' before with lots of steam blowing through the pipe so I guess it was blowing off, I wonder if it was just the volume of stem that it couldn't cope with?

Last ride,the same thing happened to a buddies KDX. The kickstand bolts are the same thread, although a little too long. It sealed well enough to ride 5 miles back to the truck. Sure fire cure is to use EVANS NPG coolant.