dan williams

Account settings and display name should do it I think.

A 125 is fine for skinny school boys but I suspect you’ll want something with more grunt. You can detune the big bikes but they are still hard to kick so you must take good leg bad leg into consideration. As pointed out Betas kick on the correct side while all the others, well I don’t know what they were thinking.? Best thing is to try a few. If you can get to a local event there are always bikes for sale. If you haven’t tried a trials bike be prepared to be surprised. They respond instantly to input. I’ve watched a lot of experianced riders flip them thinking they’re weak little toys.

I’ve done a lot of gigs as a freelance sound engineer. It’s amazing how many college electricians will blithely connect the power distro up with ground tied to the neutral bar. “It’s the same thing.” No Chucko, it’s not. I’ve learned to inspect it myself to protect band and crew. I did get to watch one guy drop a big screwdriver into the live power panel of a hockey rink once. That was impressive!

If you're not a skinny little dude a set of heavier springs with less preload is the way to go. I'm not well versed on progressive vs linear fork springs and the rear has a rising rate linkage so it's progressive even with a linear spring. Just make sure the front and rear work together because if one is stiffer than the other the handling can get rather interesting.

As an aside the technique for going up a steep hill is to squat over the back wheel. It seems counter intuitive but think of it this way, if you are standing up you are a longer lever than if you are squatting with your tail low just above the seat. That long lever wants to pick up the front end so you lean forward which unweights the rear wheel and you get spin. Watch videos of the top guys crawling up a steep hill and they all have their asses hovering as low over the frame as possible.

Much depends on the path of the current and the dc current of a high voltage battery is a very different beast than the pulsed current of an ignition system or even 50/60Hz ac. Edison used an electric chair as an example of the dangers of dc when he was selling his ac distribution system in competition to Westinghouse's dc systems. Edison was kind of a jerk. Current directly through the chest can stop the heart with as little as 100mA dc. That's why they tell you to only touch things with one hand while doing electrical work. Watch the Formula1 garages and they are all wearing insulating gloves and being very carful anywhere near the battery packs. You'll also see a couple guys with insulating hooks standing aside to pull someone free if they get frozen by a shock. dc tends to hold you in place once it gets into the muscle. At least with ac you have a chance of pulling off as long as the frequency is low enough. At high frequency like a revving engine... Again from experience I can tell you that you're not going anywhere until the thing winds down and stops. The purpose of the resistance in the plug/plug cap/wire is indeed to reduce radio interference. It does this by slowing the rise time of the spark current after the gap has been ionized. The spark gap is basically a "negative resistance" device. It has incredibly high resistance until the voltage across the gap can form an ionized path. Once that path is established the resistance across the gap goes to milliohms and a huge surge of current jumps the gap while dropping the voltage across the gap. The resistors slow down the current rise time across the gap reducing the peak current as well as the radio frequency energy generated by the current. Originally this was just for radio interference but as engine control systems got more remote sensors it became necessary as the EMF noise from an unregulated spark tends to leak into everything.

Pulsed current. Not continuous power. 1-2mS per rotation on a two stroke and the pulsed current has to be high enough to ionize the gap to start the burn of a non-perfect mixture. Like getting hit with a taser.

Depends on where it goes. 500mA is more than enough to disturb the sinus rhythm and throw you into ventricular fibrillation. When I learned not to pull the wire of a running bike I could feel my heart stop. Not particularly pleasant. Funny thing though was many years later my nephew showed me a paper he’d written for school describing when he did the same thing on one of my bikes he borrowed. The current was sufficient to burn through his leather glove and the pad on the knee of his riding pants. He also said the friend he was riding with said it was the loudest scream he’d ever heard. My nephew said he doesn’t remember screaming and couldn’t hear it because of the loud buzzing in his head. And yeah, after the fact both were pretty funny.

It is?

Who needs Comedy Central when you got stuff like this on Trials Central? Yes you can get a shock. Don’t touch it and DON’T pull the wire off the plug when it’s running. Trust me on this. When it’s not running check the lead for cracks in the insulation.

Betas do have magnetic plugs. The majority of wear on the gears happens as the gearbox breaks in and the gears wear into each other. There’s always going to be some residual particles from that early process in the box since there’s no forced oil flow and lots of nooks and crannies for particles to settle in and the box is never completely purged of residual oil. The tiny metal particles in suspension don’t really cause issues with the gearbox as they are only as hard as the steel of the gears and are coated in oil. Sand or silt from getting dirty water in the gearbox is another matter. Then an immediate change of oil is called for as you now have an abrasive in your gearbox that will wear bearings and the sliding surfaces of the shifter mechanism and other things that can be bound up by sludge. The water itself usually won’t do much as it will settle out of the oil and sit in the bottom of the case. That’s why it’s so hard to clear out milky oil when water gets in. You usually have to run the gearbox to emulsify the oil and change it several times to get most of the water out. Not a problem when the oil is used for engine lubrication as the water will evaporate out. What wears oil in that case is heat and contamination with fuel. I forget where I was going with this?

Not clutch. That’s your Gas Gas Gear Gears grinding off. ?

Maybe once a year. Modern synthetics can go 20,000 miles when used as an engine oil. They're hardly challenged in the transmission of a trials bike. The main concern is water from condensation causing the oil to emulsify. If you ride once a week that's enough to keep a film of oil on everything.

Awesome. In New England it’s usually closed without written land owner permission Here in The Peoples Republic of Massachusetts you need an OHRV registration even to ride on your own land. It feels like off road bikes are the enemy of the state.

Then I have done good? Welcome to the sport. I would imagine you have pretty good terrain in the UP but a fairly short season.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

I bet they farmed this part out to a subcontractor and didn’t know of the problem until they had thousands on the shelf.

So if I sticker the boost bottle will I get quicker dampening in my carburator power bands?

Spray WD40 on ‘em!

Done. Hopefully they will agree with someone from the colonies.

Well I have been on Betas since ‘89. They have been good to me but I have no problem pointing out their foibles.? They are, after all, just a machine.

This is of course a “privileged glimpse of the obvious”’. GasGas is back and TRS and Vertigo are eating market share and electric bikes are soon to be a common sight. Beta is overdue for a refresh.

Reading between the lines, Beta has put about a month worth of development work by the suspension department into the 2019. All of which is transferrable to the next bike. Nothing else warrants the claim of hard work. At least nothing on this bike. I think we see the final year of the EVO. If 2019 sales dog we will probably see an early announcement next year of the new design. Either that or Beta is making enough money on the enduro market to dump trials bikes. I’ve written enough datasheets and press releases to know a placeholder when I see it.

Yes I do. On my own dime and time. ?

Well so far I've just done the indexer so maybe that plus the new cam will work. I'm waiting on a new version of the bearing pin so it'll be a few weeks before I can try it out. I may whine but it is fun to tinker with this stuff.