So excited!

[Hondacrrider]

I am so excited, tomorrow is my first ride of the season, and I can hardly wait. I can almost smell the two stroke smells, and I can almost see me and my friends spraying dirt all over the four stroke riders. Two of my friends just got new two strokes, so, like 80% of my friends ride two strokes. This is the year of the two stroke, no matter what the chinese say, it is the year of the comeback of two strokes!

[JohnN]

That is great news!!

Enjoy your day!

[SubTexel]

I am so excited, tomorrow is my first ride of the season, and I can hardly wait. I can almost smell the two stroke smells, and I can almost see me and my friends spraying dirt all over the four stroke riders. Two of my friends just got new two strokes, so, like 80% of my friends ride two strokes. This is the year of the two stroke, no matter what the chinese say, it is the year of the comeback of two strokes!

Everyone I know, minus one of my brothers (he just came out of the quad rider closet and bought a 4 stroke POS... Could have got a banshee but noooo), has gone back to two strokes (well over 30 people).

I sold my Wife's 07 CRF150R and bought her a brand new 09 KX100, bought my son 2 KX65s (04 (parts backup) and 07) and the new '10 KTM 250SX and 06 CR250R for me. Still have the little CRF50s for the kids, but those bikes don't count since they're so damn awesome.

Pretty much everyone's reason for going back to 2 strokes? Costs of 4 strokes, and really no performance increase over the 250s they replaced. Plus, minus the large events @ Glen Helen there has been an increase of 2 stroke riders pretty much every weekend. Honda CRF450s still own Glen Helen (in terms of ownership) but it's starting to change in favor of the 2 stroke.

[JETZcorp]

We're still waiting for April to start the riding season over here, but our group has been 100% two-stroke for over a decade (ever since Mark got off that ridiculous blue SL70).  250cc is the smallest size of bike that's in attendance.  Last year 430cc was the biggest, but there's a chance my dad might roll out the 500 "Sand Spider" (it's actually an '86 M-Star but we call it a Maico Sand Spider because it sounds better).  That bike is, and there's no other way to put it, beast.  It's not A beast, it doesn't have some beastly characteristics, it's not even THE beast.  It's the very definition of beast.  Everyone in the riding group is convinced that the bike doesn't rev out, because it's always taking it easy no matter how fast it's accelerating.  The rider doesn't even have to put in an effort in order to keep up to any bike.

Okay, that was a bit off-topic, but whatever.  The thing be beast.

[Hondacrrider]

Hey Jetz, your near Portland right? I am on vacation right now and am in that area, i wanted desperately to bring my bike, but my parents didn't want to bring it across the border, oh well

[juliend]

Excellent!

While I don't frequent the MX tracks as I'm solely an off-road rider, I will be competing in some HS races this year on a KDX. Over the last couple years I have noticed more and more 2 strokes at all our riding spots, mostly KTM 200/300's. The sounds you hear on the mountain have changed dramatically, especially during this last season. It's really good to see!

[Paul P]

The 2-stroke sound is what's needed at all our riding area's because they are so much quieter. All my old riding spots are now closed because of the 4banger noise pollution.
   I have a private track on my property now and the rule is NO 4 strokes unless they are one of the really quiet XR's or XL foo-foo design. I hate to turn good freinds away, but I am not going to lose my own private track for a noise issue. I never get noise complaints with the 2-stroke only rule.
                 Paul

[JETZcorp]

I don't think my bike is helping the noise pollution thing.  It's a two-stroke but... uh... it's really bloody loud.

1982 Husqvarna 250CR - Cold Start

[admiral]

The 2-stroke sound is what's needed at all our riding area's because they are so much quieter. All my old riding spots are now closed because of the 4banger noise pollution.
   I have a private track on my property now and the rule is NO 4 strokes unless they are one of the really quiet XR's or XL foo-foo design. I hate to turn good freinds away, but I am not going to lose my own private track for a noise issue. I never get noise complaints with the 2-stroke only rule.
                 Paul

that's very interesting as i have the same rule. i built a small MX track for once a week practice on my family's farm on the backside of a hill so it can't be seen from the highway. no one ever asked my parents about it because no one could see it and couldn't hear anything. then back in '02 one of my riding buddies bought a CRF450. we ride there on thursday evenings after work for a couple of hours. after the first time with that loud 4 stroke bike was there someone asked my parents "what were you running up there last thursday evening?" that's all i needed to hear and modern MX 4T's were off limits from then on. we still ride there and no one complains. out of sight and hearing, out of mind.

[JETZcorp]

It's amazing that they're so loud given the size of the silencers they put on those things.  A KX250 has half the silencer of a KX250F, and yet it's the quieter machine.  What's wrong with this picture?  I'm convinced that a two-stroke that's running a straight stinger will be no louder *at distance* than a thoroughly silenced four-stroke.  Up-close the straight stinger is unparalleled, but once you're a few meters away they seem pretty equally violent to me.

Story time!  One time, way back in the mists of time, my dad was out in the desert with his Kawasaki Bighorn (unsilenced) and for whatever reason, he was pissed at the thing.  The points were giving him trouble, or there was some weird jetting problem, or whatever.  He fires up that bad boy in neutral, holds the throttle wide open for a good long while (and remember, this thing got no rev-limiter) then hits the kill switch.  Utter silence.  Then, about a second later, a ghostly wail comes in as massive sound blast echoed off a mountain.  Then there's silence again, then another wail, from another mountain further away.  Three times, the ghostly wail comes, then the sound ran out of mountains to bounce off of and just washed into the desert.

As bad as four-strokes are, this story shows that there are worse acts of noise pollution to be had.  Can you imagine if bikes still ran straight stingers (or straight headers in four-stroke terms)?  Granted, every bike would sound a lot more bad-ass, but all the hippies and suburb-dwellers would nail us to the cross.  I'm just glad I ride in the middle of total nowhere, but I still sometimes worry about people who live five miles away catching a little bit of ghostly wail when I take the 120 for a ride.

There's my Sunday rant.  I think we're getting close to realizing the goal of daily rants!

[JohnN]

JETZcorp - please be careful when you speak about sound... this one area has caused motocross and motorcycling more ground through the years than you can care to imagine.

You never cease to amaze me with your love of the "good old days" even though you were not alive then! LOL

Personally I HATED those stingers on the early two-strokes.... they were brutally loud.

I know we dis-agree on a few things, and that's just fine....

I just want to add a caveat to what you are saying... yes with some of the old machines removing the silencer would increase the horsepower. Sometimes dramatically. But by the late 1970's, early 1980's the pipe/silencer designs improved to the point where this was no longer the case.

In fact today, the bikes will not run properly without a silencer.

My take on loud bikes and the reasons people like them is because it "feels" like you are going fast, even if you're not. I know that you are not a motocross racer, that's cool... I'm glad that you love bikes... and two-strokes...

I just don't want kids reading what you are saying and think that those same techniques will work on the modern machines.

As for the reason of the difference of sound between a four-stroke and a two-stroke is so different, even when the four-stroke silencer is almost double the size is easy to explain.

First the 4T pipe is similar diameter from the engine to the silencer (with the exception of the little "bumps" that lower the sound at low rpm) the inner diameter of the 4T silencers is virtually the same as the rest of the pipe.

Compare that to the two-stroke, the two-stroke pipe is designed so that the sound goes out and then resonates back to the exhaust port, which helps "supercharge" the engine, it also quiets the machine down.

Second the sound nature of the four-stroke's low rumble carries much, much further than the two-stroke.

As for sound levels themselves, it's an amazingly complicated science. Many sound engineers do not agree about the measuring of sound using some of the most advanced technology available. It's impossible to make a judgment on this stuff by listening with your ears only..

The important part of this entire "rant" is that if we as a group of racers continue to ignore our neighbors and people that do not like the sounds of our machines, they will find a way to get them legislated out of existence.

While each person has rights and can do what they please, that right stops at the point where it affects others negatively...

A short story to make the point... where I live is a very rural area, houses are on 1 acre lots.. well every once in a while one of the neighbor kids starts up his bike and runs it up and down the road in front of my house. If the kid rode up and down the road once or twice, no problem.. but when he rides for an hour or two.. it starts to bother me.

Worse yet.. I worry that one of the other neighbors will get mad enough that they will do something to negatively impact me!!

Sorry to go on so long... I hope that you understand what I'm trying to express to you and everyone that reads this....

[JETZcorp]

I agree 100%.  I personally prefer the sound of a straight stinger because it just sounds better, not necessarily because it's louder.  If it were up to me, I'd want the thing to be fairly quiet, but still have that unrestricted sharpness that a straight stinger provides.  To me, that's a big part of the appeal to the really old bikes like my 120 or the TM400.  They just sound bad-ass.  But, people realized pretty quick that this unrestricted bad-ass sound came in some pretty significant quantities, and those quantities were too much for Aunt Peggy and Grandpa Joe who live some ways downwind of a motocross track, flat-track, riding area, two-stroke tuner, or whatever.  Super Hunky writes in his book that he thinks DB saved the sport when they did a test that showed that bikes at that time could get as much power with a really good silencer as they could with a straight stinger.  The pipes were tuned to go either way (unlike the 120's, which will literally break in half if you ride it with a silencer).  Of course, they conveniently neglected to mention that after a couple rides, these silencers would start to get kinda nasty and would start taking power little by little, adding one more thing to the list of crap that the casual rider had to put up with.  BUT, it was worth it for saving the sport.  It had to be done, and I'm glad the shift was made.

As you said, by the time we got to the late '70s and early '80s, all the bikes came with and were tuned for silencers.  They wouldn't flow right without one; the pipe simply wasn't set up to create the back-pressure or whatever with a straight stinger.  My '82 Husky goes halfway, because although it's got a silencer, there's no packing in it.  It's a lot better than the crappy, gummy packing it had before, but the power delivery is kinda weird now.  It's got explosive top-end but is really lacking down-low, and I think the odd franken-silencer is partly to blame.  It's not too loud for where we ride, which is in the middle of the desert miles away from anybody, but it really should have packing.  We just have some other problems we have to fix first before we get there.

As for modern bikes and anyone who's trusting me as a source of information for some crazy reason, I have to re-emphasize what John's said.  Do not try to run a modern 2T with a straight stinger.  Unlike the olden days (before my time, of course) where the expansion chamber was like a couple of ice cream cones with a tube in the middle and a piece of gun barrel coming out the back, the new bikes can hardly be said to HAVE a stinger.  Look at the pipe on the new Maico and compare it to the one on the 120.  Running the one without a silencer is as ridiculous as trying to clamp one onto the other.

[JohnN]

Thank you! 

[Paul P]

 Coming off my Maico 490, I tried a freinds YZF250 out and had to bring it in after 4 laps because of the ringing in my ears and headache from the exhaust noise. I have a newer HJC helmet but I should have also had earplugs. I won't ride a used 4S now for fear of being the guy on it when it blows and feeling responsible for some of the bill to fix it.
       Just to get back on topic, I'm riding this coming weekend in some tight trials type woods on a 74 Montesa 250 enduro. Can't wait!
                                                  Paul