PANDAMOBILE UNDER THE KNIFE: KTM 450 XCW Rally Lite build

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MaxThePanda

Race Dog
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Location
Cape Town
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Vespa (all models)
It's Friday, it's the 1st of August - exactly 3 months to the day to Amageza departure - and a big box of bike bling is leaving the US today. All good reasons for the start of a build thread for my Amageza 2014 bike!!

This has been six months in the planning https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=146747.0 and much longer in the dreaming. I'm no hard core racer... I'm an over excited, naive and probably very foolish amateur play-rallyer. Sound good so far?

When I entered Amageza this year, I owned this:

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Best bike I ever had my sticky little mitts on, and I absolutely loved it. She took me round Angola:

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... on some awesome rough touring locally:

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...and was quite handy in the rough stuff!

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But after thinking long and hard, I decided that she wasn't the right bike for me for Amageza, or perhaps my needs going forward. Although she was already quite farkled, she didn't have enough fuel, and adding fuel to 690's is fark-off expensive. In fact, adding most anything to bikes is expensive, but 690s pretty much take the cake. Research indicated she'd need fuel, a new bash plate, a new rear suspension linkage, possibly a Rally Raid front fork cartridge and then a fairing system to go with what ever fuel tanks I chose. A better solution would have been a new 690 with a KTM Cape Town rally kit. But that's a yowser-R160k bike!

I've also been doing more and more really rough, slow speed touring lately. My idea of fun is a trailer to Springbok and then 200-500km days in the sand and rocks in the wilderness, not 800km touring days on open gravel. That's more 450-class than 690-class riding. I also figured that for Amageza, much more time would be gained with a light bike in the really rough parts of the specials than would be lost by giving up 10-20km/h in top speed to the 690 in the open stretches.

And 450's already have pure off road suspension, less fragile bits to break, and are much cheaper to buy parts for.
[Cough. Don't mention engine rebuilds.]

So, the question was which 450?

There's no right answer and lots of good options. I've loved owning a KTM - they're readily available, great to work on, have top quality components, suspension and engines, incredible aftermarket support, and are by far the most popular choice for rallying worldwide. Perhaps most importantly for this kind of riding, they also have wide range 6-speed gearboxes.

I narrowed it down - either a good older R35k bike - in which case brand wasn't such an issue - or a 1/2 year old KTM 450/500, the best of the bunch.

I looked at a few BMW G450X's - they're unloved, great value and perfect for rallying. There are quite a few good CRF's and older WR's around. CRFs are especially good value. But the older 525's seemed over priced to me. R35-40k buys a 2006 KTM 525 with 10,000km... but then I found a 2013 KTM 450 with only 17 hours for R65k (after a bit of who's your daddy). The reviews on the newer bikes seemed fantastic, the fuel injection promises lower consumption and thus smaller tanks, and the chance of something going terminally wrong would be much lower with a fresh bike. Amageza is a horribly expensive investment - I want the best possible chance of finishing.

One can go on debating until the cows come home, so I transferred a wad of cash and Time Freight pitched up with this:

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Yes, it has horrible orange hubs and rim tape and is boringly standard, but I think a blank canvas is probably a better place to start if you've got fixed ideas about where you're going.

As much as I like the experience of riding fully faired bikes on fast open sections, and the rally perv in all of us loves the look of them for sure... I decided that I wanted to go with a rally-lite setup rather. Seems to me, the trend internationally is towards more enduro-oriented riding in rallies. Stages are getting more intense, the bikes lighter and smaller, and unless you're doing Dakar you don't need the extra support for Irritracks, Sentinels and the like.

My mantra quickly became crystal clear: MOTO MINIMALISM! Small, simple, light... and as robust as possible.

I also wanted a bike that I could throw a Giant Loop over, and easily convert for rough touring trips - and even perhaps an off road/enduro race. Let's be honest, this rallying lark is a once or twice a year thing at best.

So, this thread is going to be about the mutation of what you see above, into something like this, fully ready and charged up for whatever Alexander "Dingaan Corporal Commander The One Great Leader and Ruler of the Universe" Nel throws at us, come 3 November. Come along for the ride:

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