The frame cuts were daunting, the engine cradle needs to be cut out and enlarged and I fitted lap joints in the new cradle to make it easier to get the new engine out. So, I tried not to rush it and find more elegant solutions to stuffing the 500 in there. But I felt like the execution could have been better. A guy in Canada and I had a lengthy dialogue about the possibility and I did my best to convince him to try it first, which he did. None really, I knew it would work and work well. What were the biggest obstacles to overcome? It has a strong removable sub frame and is just wide enough for the 500 engine as the 250 engine is a bit of a porker.Įngine fits with not a lot of room to spare The 250 frame is steel and therefore easy to get welded anywhere. Here in the UK the CRF is the only currently selling dual sport bike and I really wanted to build an as new a bike as possible. It’s a massive engine for a 250 and the frame has an equally huge hole in which to stuff much better engines. Also, the 250L mill is huge for what it is. The 250L is current, steel (easy to work with) and has a healthy aftermarket of choice parts available. Also, keeping it all Honda meant I could still get support from any Honda garage. Combining the 2 seemed the obvious choice.
I also went to see John from Rally Raid Products to ride his RR CB500X, which I thought had a great engine but terrible ergonomics for off road riding and was too heavy. It has a steel frame, a good sub-frame and it had a pedigree of surviving around the world trips. I had ridden the CRF250L and it’s such a fun simple dual sport bike. The CRF250L fit me pretty well and as a parts bin bike there’s lots of Honda parts that play nice together without tons of adaptation. Why did you choose to go with a Honda frame and engine, did you consider other makes/combinations? Levi’s design for intake, without rubber joiner Lower sump to keep above bottom frame rails That first bike was very rough but it ticked all the boxes so I started my own build with a more factory-finish version in mind, like something Honda themselves would build.Ġ0 twin only just protrudes past frame rails During my search, I came across a CRF500L build on ADVrider forum. It was a long list and I very quickly realised that no bike ticked all the boxes.
I made a check list of the type of bike I wanted. More road focused bikes were just too heavy off road, ruining the fun part and limiting the type of off road I could ride. I tried light off road bikes but they were terrible on the long road sections, high on maintenance and struggled to carry luggage. I couldn’t find a bike that delivered both off road and on. I wanted the romance and the punch of the old Dakar rally bikes, along with the ease of use of a modern power plant and chassis, and I wanted it to fit me.
Atc 250r skid plate full#
We have a shed full of questions about these builds and we thought we’d investigate further so we asked the following. He also gets 305km from the 12.5l Acebis tank. Levi’s bike came in fully fuelled with a wet weight of 158kg and Andy’s at 153kg. The result is just what many that are on a quest for their own personal Unicorn are actually looking for. These two Unicorns are the product of a possibly incestuous marriage of two separate Hondas, a CRF250L rolling chassis and a CB500X engine and electrics. These bikes are the same but different, in that they combine the same major parts but have some slight personalised differences in the actual build. We thought we’d look at two of them, one in California built by Levi Harris and the other in Surrey in the UK put together by Andy Scutt. Several such Unicorns have been built to date in various back sheds around the world combining Honda parts.
Levi used this plate for a stable base when mountingīeing of an adventurous nature, a handful of people on the Adventure Rider web forum () have adopted the attitude of “if the factory won’t build it for me, then bugger it, I’ll do it myself”.
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