Yesterday I was humbled and honored to see my 200 Tiger prototype race bike I started working on in around Oct 1985-March of 1986. There were so many little things I seen I did that I had forgot about, but then there were thing that had been changed too that wasn't done by me, such as a longer swing arm and some one had put the different rake plate and the adjustable front end kicking it out too far, but for the most part it was all there. But then as I started looking at all the rest of the collecting I see my first Factory 250 that had the new frame with the rake where it should have been and someone had put my rev. cyl. in it so the pipe came out the rear of the cyl. and the side mout carb, which wasn't done right but those were all my race parts. I had taken both these bikes to San Jose in 1986 for my first National. The sad part was I tried to clear a small set of jump and landed on the second on in practice on the 200 and got knock out when the bike landed on me splitting my sternum and was unable to race. We found out later that the blue prints showed something like 10 inches of travel in the rear and I lowerd the bikes down 4-5 inches, but we really only had about 8 inches, so when I hit the second jump it bottomed out hard.
For more info on the Tigers and more about my time there you can read the history here.https://sites.google.com/site/tigerrotax/home
Anymore info on the 350x?
Chris
Why a Dickson frame? Was there a partnership with Honda?
Chris
I dig that chain tensioner. Did they hold up with hard riding? I feel like at full slack with a plus 2 swingers mines way too loose. Thank goodness tapper has those case savers. (350x)
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Another John Neary find, first race on our new 200r works bikes. Every 200cc racer on Honda at the time were called to the "Mears Gang Rubble" after Rick Mears had just won the Indy 500 in 84'. Honda told us to just show up with your race gear out of the blue. Here Stevie and I went at it in the heat, I ended up win the over all and because it was on TV Honda and Hondaline both doubled our win money, great day of racing! LOL
Yes more of Neary's photos, or I should say his Dad. Not only did he take a ton of pics he did a lot of video's that are really great. I didn't ride for Kawasaki long before I went back to Powroll on the 200x so I could make a living, so I didn't have any pics of me racing them. But here is me and Stevie going at it in FL.
Did anything from the prototype make it into production? I'm just curious how the process works.
Chris
Maybe the handle bars, lol. We were given the frame, swing arm and motor. This was either late 83' or early 84'. I was given free reign as far as setting it up, paint and nickle plating the frame and engine work. The motor Honda picked was the XR350RFVC which was all they had, we also at the same time were given a XR250RFVC AND XR200RFVC at first to build. All 2 projects were baced on the 200x frame and the engines made to fit. All 3 were poor motors to make HP and had bad heat problems because of the RFVC style head.
The 350x went to Japan mid 84', but after fighting withe the lack of power and heat problems we made a report of going back to the old style XR250 as in the pic of this custom frame 250. This is more of the motor the 350x came out with, so that's where they used the 350x that got sent to Japan as what we were looking for, but very little of it has anything that the 350x that went into production. It's the same thing as what happen with the MT200cc 2 stroke, nothing was used off that motor on our 200r works bikes because the MT200 was a turd.
This was the 2nd 250cc 4 stroke we built, it was fast but just like when you start reving a 350x to hard the stock OEM valves drop because the valves are magnetic and don't work good with OEM valve guilds at high rpms.