Making a Full Size Bike Fit - Part I

In my post below, I talked about my quest to find a good bike with a low seat height. I ended up with a GasGas Pampera 280. I loved it for riding trails, but I wanted something with more pop (for riding sand dunes) and better suspension (for the track). I really liked my CR85R, so we decided to try a CR125. My husband found a really good deal on a nice 2002 CR125 and surprised me with it. Since I can't even come close to touching on a stock 125, we installed a kouba link on it and lowered the triple clamps as far as we could down the fork tubes. The pro of this configuration were that I could now actually touch with both tip toes or, if I slid over on the seat, I could just about touch with the ball of one foot. The cons were that the bike felt a little tilted upwards because we couldn't adjust the forks enough the really balance the lowering of the rear end and that the link changed the handling characteristics of the bike. The changing of the handling characteristics is not necessarily a bad thing, if the change suits your riding style. My husband installed a kouba link on an Aprilia RXV450 to lower it and really preferred the new suspension characteristics.

The CR125 is an absolute blast to ride at the dunes. It revs quickly and it is a fun challenge to keep it on the pipe. However, I never felt comfortable on track or trail with the 125, so it has been confined to a dunes bike, where peaky power is fine and you don't really need to be able to turn on a dime, and I ended up keeping the GasGas. So, now I had a great trail bike and a great dunes bike, but still nothing great for the track. At the time, we did very little track riding, so running a less than ideal bike on those rare occasions wasn't a big deal.

Eventually, though, my husband got interested in riding hare scrambles and as a result, we started riding the track more often. He then got a CRF450R and his brother got a KX500 and the little CR125 just didn't have enough power to keep up with them on the sand dunes. I needed a 250F. And I needed to be able to modify it so I could touch the ground without affecting its handling. Part II of this post will describe how we did this.