6 days onboard the KTM 500 EXC? The wrap-up!

g'day folks i'm back from six day ride on the bike so today i want to look at the question just how suitable is the ktm 500 as an adventure bike up to six days two and a half thousand kilometers on this bike i reckon i might have an answer for you if you own a 500 you probably will have heard all of these comments before and if you don't own one but uh you know i'm an iron about getting one you've probably made these comments fuel fuel capacity not enough you can't get enough luggage where am i going to put all my luggage what about the weather protection the thing's a trail bike the vibration is going to kill you just too small it's too cramped and the biggest one of all i'll give you a hint it's actually in the manual server schedule change the engine oil and filter every 15 hours every 15 hours yes it's the oil change interval now i don't know how many pages of forums and discussions have gone on about this topic but it's a big deal for a lot of people but is it really i've just done six days on this bike nearly 50 hours in the saddle through cold heat rain mud dust so let's talk about how i set the bike up the gear that i took and any issues that popped up so some context for this trip it was 2 600 kilometers total there's one day that was it was a bit short because that's the day that it rained and we uh we'd had enough but every other day it's the the big caves and their lots of hours the the terrain itself was mostly open gravel roads lots of that lots of little back roads uh quite a few bitumen little back roads there was a few hours on the main highway and there's a little bit of track in different places like short sections of twin track to sort of keep us interested the temperature ranged from zero absolutely like so cold in the morning up to 30 degrees the basic setup for the bike i used my moscow moto 40 pannier system i had a small tank bag on the front and a backpack so on the dash i had two two gps's i had the the gps on the rhino the small one that was i kept that zoomed in and i have the montana on the right hand side which i i leave zoomed out i'm really liking that setup now see what's coming literally within a couple of hundred meters you know which way the road's gonna go but you can also see you know where the nearest town is there was three of us on this ride two of us had the cena 50 series intercoms so we we kind of used that when we were close enough so the third guy only had uhf two of us with the ceno intercoms used the the little bluetooth dongle to talk you know from our uhf through the center to the other guy so let's talk about why i did this ride but i wanted to do this ride on the 500 i wanted to do a six day ride i wanted to do a long period of riding on the bike just to see what worked and what didn't work if things work out later on this year i'd like to do a longer ride a couple of weeks in the in the desert so i this was a real good test of of how to carry stuff and what worked and what didn't work i wanted to address some of the issues that you heard back at the start of this video you know with regard luggage and how do you carry all your stuff and how do you do oil changes so the oil change itself that was a big one i've i have not done an oil change on the road on this bike so i just i just needed to get that clear in my head how i was going to do it let's talk about the issues that i had on this trip and there were three one of them was the wiring issue and just the little battery terminal thing had fatigued snapped off that was an easy fix the next two issues were caused by rain my trusty garmin montana gps and the rain just got in into the screen the other issue that the rain caused drums with was with the center intercom it just started changing modes open mesh channel one mesh grouping obviously the mesh button had had had got water in it or something and one as soon as it dried out it was fine as far as the bikes go we had three bikes no flat tires no bike issues whatsoever nothing at all there was one thing that was a problem on the 500 that's the dash and it kept resetting now i have spoken about this before i don't know what causes it maybe it's just the battery in there i'm not sure anyway it was just annoying because it means that the trip meter resets so i can't use the trip meter for my de facto fuel gauge i have to remember or write down what the the actual odometer reading was now to address some of the some of those concerns that you heard at the start as far as luggage goes if you have less room you'll take less stuff and then the whole thing is just it's lighter and it's more compact and it's surprising how little gear you actually need i'll roll a short clip here on what was in my moscow pannier system those starting in the front got their little endura stand tank bag going great i redid the strap mounting things i moved the clips up here and went on to the end and now it just wraps around the frame easy to get on holds tight it's great moscow 40 panniers this side pocket i have my tool roll at the top easy to access and a tube at the bottom that i want the rear tube and the little pouchy thing underneath i've got the front tube and a little padlock first aid kit all my clothes are in this little the little eight liter bag on the top there that's my pub clothes and toiletries all in there one bag so at the end of the day it's one bag and that's it the other side pocket i've got uh some spares like a air compressor a little battery pack a jump start pack duct tape spare gear lever just a few random bits and pieces of spares the top half of this pack is my wet weather gear in this little bottom pocket i've got a a pre-oiled air filter just sort of rolled up and shoved in there in a couple of plastic bags to keep the water out of it um and in the top of that i've got a little tin of chain lube and in here i keep a uh a visor rag and some visor cleaner in there and the the main pocket currently holds my pub shoes and thongs well actually my thongs are up here pub shoes are in there but this this gets wet these don't get wet and then the backpack got water in it i got my spare gloves in there um you know wallet and a couple of really basic tools like a couple of little spanners allen keys if i need to adjust something really quick for the most part those two side bags they never got used i had to take out my tool roll once when when i was doing the oil change and i had to take out the the other bag i had to open that up to get my wet weather gear out obviously that's it the rest of the time i lived out of that small top bag if you're staying in pubs you don't need much camping yep different story you would obviously need more gear we weren't camping wasn't a problem uh some of the other concerns are fuel will obviously you put a bigger tank on seat you change your seat out you put a a seat concept or a fissure or you get one made up like i did that solves all that problem suppose the secret to turning the 500 into a lightweight adventure bike is to actually spend some time on the ergonomics and get it set up for you get it set up for you so for me it's about the bar height i do have uh i have risers as part of the with the steering damper steering damper made a big difference for me on this ride i use that a lot and i adjusted it quite a lot on the go as well when the roads opened up and they were just you know straight gravel roads i'd just crank it right up then you can just relax and you just let it move a little bit on the road and it's not you know it's not going to get away from you when that when it gets a little bit tighter on some of the the single track just turn it down again and you get you know you get a bit more movement back i've got the small screen on it which keeps that wind off keeps the rain off another key thing about reducing the fatigue in yourself in your body is to do all you can to minimize vibration now this is it's a big single it's gonna vibrate that's just that's the nature of the engine but if you can do things to minimize that vibration it's gonna help you a lot so for me minimizing that vibration starts with balanced wheels you've got to balance your wheels i have bar inserts i know bark busters do an end cap as well obviously there's flex bars there's rubber mounts the biggest thing that i did on this trip though was these grip puppies they are just absolutely brilliant six days i did not have sore hands sore fingers at all i've done three four day rides before and i know after probably the end of the second day my fingers are starting to get really sore particularly with my my lighter enduro gloves which are a little bit thinner and you just feel the grips a lot more but these grip puppies brilliant another thing you can do to reduce that vibration is change your gearing so i run a 50 tooth on the on the back of this bike obviously that's not going to change very often but the front sprocket is pretty simple to change i swapped between 14 and 15 typically this ride i knew it was going to be a lot of open roads i put a 15 on it that just drops the revs reduces that little bit of vibration helps with fuel economy fuel economy on this trip is between 21 and 22 most times should be a screenshot here one of them dipped down into the 19s but i will only say that more speed equals more fuel and we'll leave it at that okay let's talk about that oil change the official interval is 15 hours that's probably two days riding that's not much i can't stand here and tell you you can safely go for a week or you can safely go for 5 000 kilometers well i can tell you what is what i did what i usually do i usually change it somewhere around the 20 hour 20 to 25 and probably about 1200 to 1500 k's that's my usual interval on this trip i did it at about the 1800 kilometer mark and that's just because the plan that i had in place to do the oil change kind of didn't really work out so what was that plan so because of the 1.2 1.3 litre capacity what i did was i brought the 0.3 in a little little container from home i had that in my panniers and i had planned to just buy a liter of the same oil at a bike shop now i knew where the bike shops were that was all good except the fact that because of the rain we ended up in that town too late all the shops were shut and we left early the next morning before that opened so i missed that town now all the other towns along the way didn't have that particular type of oil so that meant i just had to go a little bit further to get to the next big town where i could get the oil that i needed and one of the things that i did learn from this trip is maybe lower your expectations a little bit on the oil that you're going to find in some of these country towns now i carried a fully synthetic oil here so i can't mix that with a semi-synthetic semi-synthetic is kind of everywhere out there but fully synth not so much so that's one of the things i learned i won't carry i won't take a fully synthetic you know partial bit with me next time i'll either carry the whole lot or i'll carry a semi-synth one of the other things that you can try is maybe one of these fuel bottles these primus fuel bottles they're designed to hold fuel i guess that means they can hold oil this is a 1.5 liter bottle there's your capacity and it slides perfectly into the lower pocket on the moscow 40s so there's an option for you as well it just means you've got to think a little bit about it where you're going to do it how you're going to carry the oil that's all i mean the exercise itself is 15 minutes most bike shops are probably going to let you just you know change it out the back and dump it in their oil collection pan so it's not really a big deal you just got to think a little bit ahead so that's pretty much my summary on this ride and if i go back to what was i hoping to achieve at the start of this trip was to find out just how capable this thing is as an adventure bike for a for a longer trip i was perfectly comfortable on this bike not fatigued not tired not sore at all it did everything i needed it to do carried all my gear never let me down what more can you ask this bike is an excellent adventure bike thanks for watching i hope you've got something out of it stay well ride well i'll see you in the next video bye for [Music] now [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Keith Jobson

Views: 16,754

Rating: 4.9452057 out of 5

Keywords: ktm 500, ktm, 500exc, ktm 500 excf, 500exc-f, 2019, adventure motorcycle, ratchet riders, 2019 ktm 500 exc-f, adv light, ktm 500 exc-f, dirt bike, adv lite, ims tank, baja xl80, mosko, reckless 40, mosko reckless, high country, topline, highwaydirtbikes, hdb, giant loop, panniers, enduristan, sandstorm 4x, nsw, KTM 500 EXC 6 days

Id: YM-i1AKfHd4

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021