Why you should NOT buy the CRF450RL

what is going on everybody welcome to the video so we're gonna have a little story time here and it's gonna be about my experiences with the 450l i'm sure a lot of people are gonna be triggered by this and that's okay let's get right into it so flashing back about a decade ago i was just getting out of high school and i wanted to start getting back into riding i had a sport bike at the time that i never rode and i knew ultimately that i would get into some trouble on so that needed to go unfortunately i couldn't get rid of it fast enough story on that later but i was always fortunate enough to have dirt bikes growing up so i was always riding but when i got older i didn't have any friends that rode so you are who you hang around with i lost interest in writing but after all of the that you deal with and school was done i got back into my own interest and wanted to ride again started out with the yz-125 ended up getting rid of that bought a klx 110 just to mob around on and have some fun i had always wanted a pit bike growing up so that was a bucket list thing no regrets there the 110l was an absolute blast fast forward a little bit i wanted something bigger that i could ride on the street so i started looking at dual sports i stumbled across a channel called accidental broadcast and he was a guy in hawaii that wrote a wr250r and man did he sell me on that bike now i didn't know a whole lot about motorcycles at the time and i was always curious as to why they did not have a street legal 450. ktm husqvarna they all had them but why across the pond did they not the more i dug into it the more that i learned about emissions restrictions and why bikes like the drz-400 the xr650l still exist to this day those bikes are grandfathered in so they literally can't be changed because they wouldn't pass today's emission standards that's why we've only seen graphic changes for the past 20 plus years for those bikes and there's others like that you still have the tw 200 the xt etc so after all that research the hopes of getting a street legal 450 was just non-existent so i ended up settling for the wr250r i was super excited about it accidental broadcast sold me on the athena kit if i ever wanted a little bit more power just throw a new jug and piston on but long story short that never happened and that goes back to the sport bike incident so subscribe down below if you want to hear that's a pretty good story so that incident happened more years went by i had gotten the pit bike to play around on met alexis ended up buying a kx250 so if you see the theme here i stuck in the dirt for a while the kx250 was fun it just wasn't practical ended up blowing that up got another 110 so alexis could learn to ride and after rebuilding the kx250 i wanted to get rid of that because there was no purpose i did not race motocross and it was the least trail friendly bike which i wanted to get into so i ended up getting a trade offer for a drz-400s but for some reason i turned it down and i ended up not even selling the kx and i ended up not even you dude god damn years went by and i ended up buying a honda grom a lot of that was fueled by the content that i was watching full again photogrammer they just made those bikes look so fun and after what had happened i just wanted something with a little bit of power that i could go play around on learn how to wheelie i was kind of obsessed with wheelies at the time i think lee stewart is the one that fueled that so that's when me my mom my dad and my girlfriend we all went and bought 2018 honda groms and no regrets there by any means those bikes were so fun i still have it sitting next to me over there i learned a lot on that bike and there's a phrase that i love it's more fun to ride a slow bike fast than a fast bike slow a lot of those sport bikes at least on the street unless you want to go to jail you're not really ringing those things out versus the grom you can wring that thing out all the time in their blast just to rip around on but moving forward i still had that itch to ride off-road i wanted a dual sport i had rode my grom off-road quite a bit but the suspension is terrible it's just not practical and i actually wanted to do some riding so i came across another fantastic deal and bought my crf250l that bike definitely needs an honorable mention because that was a huge factor in growing my channel so many good memories on that bike still have it to this day i love that machine i did a lot of riding on that bike that not a lot of people were used to seeing so that really grew my name and kind of gave me respect in that world i was riding that thing like an enduro bike and i was having a blast doing it so another couple years of that i progressed a lot in riding and the bike eventually started limiting me so fast forward to may of 2018 those dreams that i had as a little boy getting out of high school wanting a street legal 450 finally came true honda announced the crf 450l and man let me tell you i was ecstatic i was like a kid on christmas in the eyes of the dual sport community this was going to be a bike that literally did it all from the trails to the street what was gonna be the excuse now before it was the lack of power the weight and honda was pretty good with marketing they really made it seem like you were gonna get a motocross bike with a plate and millions of riders were automatically sold for those that weren't into the euro market and wanted something that was tried true reliable had that japanese stamp on there the 450l was the answer and i was sold as well until i saw the price tag so as soon as i saw that msrp at ten thousand dollars i knew that it just wasn't going to be practical i did not have that kind of money at the time and that's just the sticker price once you get it out the door with dealer fees tax title you're looking at 12 grand and i could buy a lot of things for 12 000 and a 450cc detuned street legal dirt bike just wasn't one of them so september of 2018 the bike was released i really didn't watch too much content about it as i just didn't want to get myself down because i still really wanted that bike so i just kept doing my own thing riding the 250l having a good time two years passed in september of 2020 i started seeing some used models pop up i was finding them well under msrp and i ended up finding one in a neighboring state for a really good price that i couldn't pass up so we loaded up my grandpa's truck alexis and i headed to morgantown west virginia to pick up my new to me crf450l i didn't even have reliable transportation at the time that's how bad i wanted this freaking bike when i say it was my dream bike i am not kidding like this was everything that i'd ever hoped for i thought this was gonna be a bike that i would have forever ride it rebuild it so i was super ecstatic went paid cash got the 450l brought it back home but during that time i was in the process of remodeling my shop my garage i had nowhere to really store the bike at the time and this was a main priority for filming for working on stuff so this took all of my time and the bike literally sat in the basement for three four five months i don't remember to be honest but it was a long time and i'd already uploaded the video of me buying it so i was just getting bombarded with questions about the bike which was driving me crazy because i really wanted to ride it but i had priorities i finished the shop i had somewhere to store it so in may of 2020 i dusted off the red beast threw on my gum boots and strapped on my gopro for my first initial ride and review the bike felt absolutely amazing it had so much more power than the 250l the suspension was fantastic i took it over a couple jumps right away where i live is pretty flat so i was just flying around the open fields and really just feeling how much power that bike had and even in the stock form it was plenty of power so i wasn't going to waste any time i like the slow technical riding so i dropped down into the creek bed where i've tested some bikes in the past and this is where things started to get rough i definitely feel like i'm going faster on the 450l it's deep and we stalled it the bike was really hard to keep running at low speeds i was slowing down to navigate through a few wet rocks i rolled on the throttle really quick to stabilize myself and pop that ain't no good my first flame out happened and i had never had a big bore four stroke before i'd always rode two strokes growing up so at first i was kind of confused i didn't know what was going on huh try to turn that up a little bit just tighten the throttle tube i didn't know if it was warmed up all the way i didn't know if it was acting up because it sat for so long but no it wasn't just an isolated incident throughout the next 100 yards of riding through that creek i think i flamed the bike out like three times oh it's deep and we stole it god this thing's pissing me off damn now i know what a lot of you are saying why the hell would you buy a 450 if you liked slow technical riding well back to my initial point i wanted a bike that i could do it all i wanted a bike that i could take from the trails to the street i wanted to have good suspension so i knew it wouldn't be the best at the low speed stuff but i thought i could at least get by and boy was i disappointed fan kicked on i'm struggling a little bit guys uh stalling a lot that was a pretty depressing ride back to the shop as soon as i got back i hopped on the internet right away turned up the idol tried that and i fully expected the 450 to be choked up from the factory they have to to get past the emissions regulations the 250l is even choked up but with an airbox mod and an ejk that's all you really needed for the 250l also let's talk about the clutch pull a 12 000 bike does not come standard with a hydraulic clutch i'd like to think that i wouldn't have been as frustrated with a hydraulic clutch but i still don't think that would have stopped the flame out so on top of the flame out the bike's weight was really starting to show the 450l weighs a good 45 pounds plus over the 450r i mean that's only 20 pounds less than my 250l with a freaking street bike engine so that's another thing that i was disappointed with it felt heavy but that's another thing that i thought i could deal with like i had no problem with the weight of the 250l i fully accepted it but it didn't feel 20 pounds lighter than the 250o but i wasn't ready to give up yet so i hit the internet hit the forums and sure enough a lot of people were having this issue and it all came down to one item that you had to get to really bring the bike to life and that is the vortex ecu this was like an 800 dollar piece of plastic and that's just the ecu you really need a full exhaust system to let it breathe and if you know the price of exhaust systems they're not cheap so the only solution was to spend more money and at this point i'd already added another five hundred dollars in protection items so the last thing i wanted to do was throw away another two thousand dollars just to get my bike to run properly no i mean think about it if you're buying one brand new you're spending twelve thousand dollars out the door yes i know you can get better deals here and there but i'm saying worst case scenario you're spending twelve thousand dollars out the door you have to spend close to two grand just to get it to run properly and you still have a bone stock bike with stock tires that are worthless that you're going to snap levers as soon as you lay it down on the trails so you add bark busters a decent skid plate radiator guards realistically it wouldn't be that hard to get up to fifteen thousand dollars so fifteen thousand dollars for a dual sport that feels like you have your nephew on the back nope not for me i sold it within a couple months after riding it i did a few trail rides with it in my opinions just further worsened the stupid things hold their value so well that i got all of my money back and i ended up on team orange that was ultimately the best decision that i'd ever made and at the end of the day guys it really just comes down to where and how you're going to be riding for me at that point i was gonna be spending most of my time on the trails anyway and like i said i like the slow speed the technical rides the enduro stuff which i was able to do all that on the 450l don't get me wrong you can do it it's just not the bike for the job there's never gonna be a one do-it-all machine it just doesn't exist so that was the biggest lesson in owning the 450l the better option is just to own multiple bikes buy a bike that's built for the task that you want to do it seems pretty obvious but a lot of us out there still want that one bike that will do it all but i promise you it does not exist you can do it all but it's not going to be good at everything and the 450l was just that you could do everything but it was also mediocre at everything i still appreciate what honda brought to the table and that can only further competition within the market and i hope the evolution of the 450cc dual sports just gets better but whenever you're looking for a bike if you have the opportunity to ride it before you buy it i highly suggest doing so but who knows i can sit here and say all of this but i might end up with another one someday i found one for six thousand dollars and i contemplated buying it doing the vortex the pipe and just getting a second opinion so who knows we might end up doing that someday but that's just it a lot of my arguments were based on price so for six thousand dollars you're getting a hell of a bike for the money and it's a bike that would be great for a lot of people but just wasn't for me so for now having multiple bikes is the answer i just picked up this beauty in the back i'll have a video on that soon of why you might want to buy the 300l over the 450rl but that's gonna end my rant on the big red money pit i hope you all enjoyed if you'd like to see more videos like this flies man if you'd like to see more videos like this drop a comment down below hit the like button it really helps out the channel subscribe for future content and until the next video adventure daily and we'll see you then [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Adventure Daily

Views: 90,492

Rating: 4.7124372 out of 5

Keywords: crf450rl, crf450l, 2021 crf450rl, 2022 crf450rl, 2021 crf450l, crf450l vs crf300l, crf300l vs crf450rl, crf450rl vs crf300l, crf450x, crf250l, 2019 crf450l, crf250l vs crf450l, dual sport, comparison, dual sport comparison, crf, honda, honda crf250l, best dual sport, adv, adventure riding, enduro, motorcycle review, review, dirt bike, crf250l supermoto, 250l, street legal, honda crf450l, crf450l review, 450l, 450cc, honda crf450rl review, dirtbike, Why you should NOT buy the CRF450RL

Id: fPfmfQpyX_o

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021