Kenny Carlile

As long as the weather holds and it doesn't turn into a mudfest, my intent is for Thursday night (4/16/09) to be my first motocross race (ever) at Portland International Raceway's Thursday Night Motocross. Since I don't have a dedicated MX bike (yet), I had to do some tweaking to turn my woods/desert bike into a more MX-appropriate machine.

To comply with racing rules, I needed to remove my kickstand and headlight. Removing my kickstand was easy enough, but I needed to replace the headlight with a number plate. I had purchased a Cycra Stadium front number plate a few months ago for just this reason. To get everything to fit right (I use "fit right" loosely, because it doesn't really fit the way I would like it to because of the crazy CRF250X triple clamps), I chose to remove the odometer, which has left me with an open connection at the right side of the front wheel hub. I could replace this with a different hub spacer, but since I'm not sure if I want to leave the odometer off, used a red (coincidentally, it just happened to be the one that I had that fit) wire nut which threaded right on to the hub connector for the odometer cable.

I also removed my handguards, but used the Fastway barends from the handguards to plug my open-ended grips. These are not ideal solutions, but they are temporary solutions for a multi-purpose bike for someone who is trying motocross for the first time. Here are the pictures of the conversion.

Stay tuned for race results!