Who Says Riding Has To Be Expensive?  By  w650 (Read 1,221 times)

Great looking small cycle. Appears good for most any travel short of highway speeds. That's a shame. If it could actually top out over 80, and cruise 70+ it would be a real "keeper"! However, it's still in the "older generation" Chinese 250 scooter class for speed. My old Kymco 250 has 19.5hp and will do a little better, topping out at 80+ and cruising 70 but ONLY on the flat, with no wind. My scoot could use another 10 ponies and so could this otherwise swell little bike.

If they'd only "Siamese" two of those cylinders on one block, making it a 500cc vertical twin, THAT would be sweet!

Don't know WHEN or if I'll get my old scoot back running. Too many health issues with me and the Missus to fool with it now. Hope to be back riding "Minnie Mouse" next spring!

Ride safe!

Leo in Texas

Wheelbender6,

Absolutely!  If ONE cylinder on this Chinese ride puts out over 16hp, a twin should offer over 30 ponies, and THAT puts it in the ballpark of the classic old Brit 500 and 650's we loved in the 1960's.  They'd do around 100 and cruise 75 all day long.

The appeal of this Chinese 250 to me, is that it's decidedly "old-school" in its no-frills construction, appearance and features.  Bare-bones 2-wheel transportation.  Within its limited speed range, it truly shines as a welcome step "backward" to where motorcycles came from in my youth.

I doubt if there is much of a market in America for such "practical" rides, but what there is of its 250cc design, I really do like it!  And it's affordable too...  It's small, skinny and light-weight...  If my old scoot finally gets too heavy for my aging bones, I might even try one... It really does offer more appeal to me than a 150 scooter...

I stay with step-through scoots because of bad arthritis making it hard to climb over and onto a cycle, but this little wheezer is light... similar to the old Kymco "People 200" I rode as a loaner.  This one, I could lay over almost on its side to climb on and off...  Cheesh… Getting old does suck!

Leo (just 'cause you can't ride WELL doesn't mean you don't want to ride at ALL) in Texas

A little history here. The CG 250 engine in this bike is a derivation of Honda's overhead cam 250 motors converted to pushrods for the third word. It was made for those parts of the world lacking in service facilities and is built to take the worst. I have my doubts about that sixteen horsepower rating. It's almost in the same league as a 250 Honda Rebel. Fourteen is more like it.

I think that it being lacking for interstate travel comes down to where you live. It's well known that Leo lives in the land of eighty mile an hour speed limits where ninety is the norm. I traveled on the interstates with my fourteen horsepower, four hundred pound CF Moto Fashion at sixty mph quite comfortably. Also how broken in is the CSC at five hundred miles? It might be capable of seventy at a thousand miles. Of course a pushrod 250 single might never go that fast but I'll be curious to see how it is when they report on it down the road.

I do know this. With pushrods, chain drive and a slide-needle carburetor it won't suffer from technical difficulties down the road. Also I'll bet even if the kickstarter won't get it running it would be real easy to push start with a dead battery.

Lots of those on a 150cc and 200cc configuration around here, they are based on the Honda CGL125 design, that engine is made by Zongshen, it comes as OHV or OHC, I had a dual sport 250cc with the OHC version of that engine, it was torquey but not fast, max speed around 90kmph, the gearbox was indeed a bit annoying, neutral being almost impossible to find with the bike running, the top end needed a rebuild at 20k kilometers, as with our Chinese scooters, they are too made of chinesium.
They are great little bikes if you are not putting a lot of miles on them, also good as learner bikes or backup bikes, as every day bikes, you will be wrenching a lot.

Way back in the Stone Age of Asian bikes, do you remember that weird, feather-light, slightly yellow shiny BRITTLE metal Honda parts were made from? Don't know if it's true, but the dealer I bought my 1967 305 Super Hawk from told me the stuff was trademarked as "HONDA METAL"... Not sounding trendy enough, it was re-trademarked as "JAPANESIUM"...

NOT the greatest stuff, being capable of thread-stripping with just a screwdriver, but probably better than "CHINESIUM"... LOL!

That early Honda metal would corrode in similar manner to aluminum, but ten times faster, and, steel screws and bolts threaded into it caused a Galvanic reaction, freezing them stuck better than "JB Weld"...

Honda has come a long way since then. Maybe the Chinese will too!

I totally agree!

I hate to call the early Japanese metal "pot-metal" since it WAS super-lightweight, but in ALL other respects it was every bit as crappy as pot-metal... Maybe even crappier... LOL!  Even Smith & Wesson gave in to the temptation of using "Zamac" zinc-alloy (CLASSIC pot-metal) in the slides of their ill-fated Walther/S&W .22's with polymer frames.  They looked great, but fell apart.

From recent truly dismal S&W examples I've seen (including $2K custom-shop guns with "canted" barrels and other defects) I'm not surprised, but I'd expect better engineering from Walther.

The big problem (and temptation) to use Zamak is that it's CHEAP... It molds BEAUTIFULLY, rendering intricate parts that require little or no machining or finishing, and it takes all sprayed, powder-coated, baked, blued and plated finishes perfectly.  The downside is that it melts at a mundane 600 degrees, it's HEAVIER than steel and WEAKER than aluminum.

It's OK in it's place, but it's place isn't usually in high-perf motors...