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Difference between revisions of "Kawasaki KH400/reviews"
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Although the 400 isn't as quick as the 350, the handling is worse. Initially our model had a tendency to fall into slow corners — which was cured by playing around with the tire pressures — and would weave rather too eagerly on long fast bends. The wide open spaces at the track made this much more noticeable, in the generally slower conditions on the roads the 400 felt a lot better. | Although the 400 isn't as quick as the 350, the handling is worse. Initially our model had a tendency to fall into slow corners — which was cured by playing around with the tire pressures — and would weave rather too eagerly on long fast bends. The wide open spaces at the track made this much more noticeable, in the generally slower conditions on the roads the 400 felt a lot better. | ||
Originally, with heavy steering caused largely by soft | Originally, with heavy steering caused largely by soft tires, the triple was bad in slow bends and really had to be driven through bends and really had to be driven through, making pretty hard work of it. Suspension ravel is quite short and although the springs damping give a fairly comfortable ride, handling in general felt sloppy and imprecise. After increasing both pressures at the front and 2psi at the rear, the fault condensed into a more definable weave. This is exactly the same as our 500 racers — each improvement tightened up the weaving until we were left with a reasonably firm feel and a minor weave at high speed. | ||
On the 400, it seemed that this is as far as you can go without changing the swinging arm — by trying to twist the wheel in the frame you can actually see the swing-arm flexing. NGK B8s are recommended but because we run the motor pretty hard on track and on the dyno we asked for a set of B9s, just in case they were needed. The day we picked the bike up we took it to the track and it just wouldn't pull full throttle — the plugs were a bright yellow. Having just collected the bike, we didn't know what fuel was in it (it turned out to be four-star) so couldn't tell if the plugs were fuel-fouling or just running too hot. Either way it seemed safer to stick the B9s in — it then ran perfectly up to peak revs in top and we left the plugs in for the entire test period. Even then, running it on 2-star fuel, in traffic and so on, there was no sign of any gassing up and cold-starting was invariably a second-prod affair. | On the 400, it seemed that this is as far as you can go without changing the swinging arm — by trying to twist the wheel in the frame you can actually see the swing-arm flexing. NGK B8s are recommended but because we run the motor pretty hard on track and on the dyno we asked for a set of B9s, just in case they were needed. The day we picked the bike up we took it to the track and it just wouldn't pull full throttle — the plugs were a bright yellow. Having just collected the bike, we didn't know what fuel was in it (it turned out to be four-star) so couldn't tell if the plugs were fuel-fouling or just running too hot. Either way it seemed safer to stick the B9s in — it then ran perfectly up to peak revs in top and we left the plugs in for the entire test period. Even then, running it on 2-star fuel, in traffic and so on, there was no sign of any gassing up and cold-starting was invariably a second-prod affair. | ||