Best dual sport bike for the street?

[Megadan]

Originally Posted by Bill Hilly

I like the CG motor, and think they probably have the edge ( at least for my style) on secondary roads. I have around 4,000 miles on the Hawk, and a little over 2,000 on the KPX now, and I can tell you that the gas mileage is hugely different between the two, enough so that the price difference between the KPX, and a more basic CG Dual Sport can eventually be absorbed by the fuel
savings . I catch myself constantly being low in gas in my Hawk, and not nearly as often on the KPX, even though I have been using them about the same lately.

It's that lower and middle rpm torque that makes the CG such a sweet city and secondary road bike. They may be a bit anemic up top, but at around town and country highway speeds up to 55mph, the CG250 is a sweet little engine. It's when you start trying to really push it in the upper rpm ranges in the higher gears where you can really feel the OHC engines come into their own more, but for low speed stuff, the CG is the king of the "tractor factor." Now with the cam and big bore setup, it's even better. My bike accelerates harder with the "17/45" setup it has on it vs a stock bike with a 15/50. I never find myself going beyond half throttle until I need to get to those highway speeds.

As for the fuel economy. It's not surprising. The EFI bikes are tuned very lean from the factory, which is the biggest contributing factor. Since they run a head temp sensor, the EFI can be run lean and then only add fuel if head temps start getting too high to help cool it back down. Carbs are sorta just stuck with one fuel setting, and keeping them on the lean side can be a tad tricky. If you get the fueling really dialed in on the pilot and needle you can get the economy of the carb bikes a lot higher than people would think. My Cammed, big bored, ported head bike has a VM26 clone on it, and after a couple of tanks my fuel economy riding around town is in the 70-72mpg range. On my first Hawk, which was just bolt ons and the same carb and sprocket/tire size setup, I could manage 75mpg average just riding normally.