The little 250s has a touch over 3000km's on it now Being the pedantic guy I am I've done 3 oil/filter changes already.
The following are some of my discoveries on the bike -
Engine stalling while clutched in and downshifting. I have heard of many others experiencing this issue however there does not seem to be a fix. My theory is that when engine mapping is in a fuel-cut state when on the over-run (rear wheel driving the engine) - when the clutch is disengaged thus no drive is being transferred from the rear wheel to the engine - the engine can cut out on compression stroke due to lack of inertia - this phenomenon is further exaggerated on a single cylinder low inertia engine like in our 250R's. Now a possible fix would be to map the ecu so that the injector delivers a small amount of fuel when the engine is in the aforementioned state (clutch switch open, throttle closed, rpm mid-low). However it is not a big enough of an issue for me to bother going down that route as it only ever happens when I'm being lazy and not rev-match downshifting and even then it is a rare occurrence.
Lack of front end stability while travelling over 120km/h. Hitting bumps mid corner really seems to unsettle the front end creating a squirming/shimmy. When riding over 150km/h the same occurs while just travelling straight - where the front end feels light and unstable. I am still under investigation on this to find a possible fix. I suspect it is due to a culmination of things: weight of bike, lack of steering damper, less than perfect damping performance of the forks, tyres. I'll report back on my findings as I play around with the settings. As now I have Racetech cartridge emulators, uprated springs and preload adjusters in the forks.
Another issue the bike seems to have is a metallic rattle when accelerating (light-medium throttle). I suspect it to be the cush drive rubbers so I'll be opening them up and seeing whats up.
(Update: lubricating the chain has removed the noise. Seems like lubing the chain is a very frequent requirement - like once per fill up rather than once every 2-3 fill ups which about was how often I did it. The cush drive rubbers were perfectly fine. I reinstalled them with a touch of silicone grease to decrease the wear/beading of the rubber.)
One more thing to note, when raising the pegs with aftermarket rearsets or brackets - the kickstand foot protrusion becomes the lowest part of the bike when leaned over, so that needs to be cut/bent/re-positioned/re-welded so that is doesn't hang so low. I nearly low-sided once when it scraped!
