Well! A lot has happened since my last update.

I had a blast riding around on my 250! It was a great bike, learned a lot on it. In terms of performance, acceleration was quite good for a bike so small, and it handled very well. “Flickable” is a word that accurately describes it. I didn’t have any mechanical issues with it at all. I had two small accidents: in one, I was coming up the shoulder to make a right turn and didn’t think of the parking lot entrance as an intersection and a lady turned in front of me, in the other I wiped out on a turn and still am not sure what made it happen. In the first, I bent my forks and lower triple tree, replaced them with used pieces on eBay. In the second, there was only minor cosmetic damage to the bike, so I just carried on.

You’ll notice that I’ve been talking about my bike in the past tense. That’s because I bought another bike at the end of June and sold my 250 to a friend near the end of August. I sold the 250 for more than I bought the new-to-me one, so it worked out quite well.

Behold: my ’00 Ninja 500R!

This, at least, is how it looked when I purchased it. It’s in excellent condition. When I purchased it, it was fully stock and had just under 10k miles. I have over 14k miles on it now and it’s not quite as stock. I like it a lot more than my 250, which I loved. It handles better, has much better acceleration, and gets nearly the same gas mileage. Highway jaunts on this bike are significantly better than they were on the 250. The 250 could keep up the speed OK; 85 mph was about as fast as it would go before it felt like it was struggling. However, this bike does it so much easier, and changing your speed at highway speeds is much faster. It’s also a much sharper looking bike; even my nieces and nephew thought so!

Around when I got this bike is when I started riding with a local Reddit/Facebook group called BmoreMoto. Great group of guys to ride with (just kidding, we’re all terrible people). If you’re in the area, come check us out! Half of the rides that are planned are for Sunday mornings, which means I usually can’t make them, but I did play hooky from church and attended Thunderfuck (I said a bad word!) this past year. There were about 60 of us in total, which was a really fun ride. I even led my own ride in October, with an impressive turnout for a 40F morning!

The bike itself was in pretty good shape mechanically, and decent shape aesthetically. Over the summer, I did a few things to it, though I’ll be doing more work to it over the winter! I added some black rim tape that is also reflective. It’s pretty subtle during the day, but at night it can be very bright. I reduced the rear fender to just enough to hold the blinkers and the license plate, and swapped in short LED blinkers on the back and flush LED blinkers on the front. That really cleaned up the look of the bike. I also installed an aftermarket exhaust system, which eliminated the muffler on one side and took at least 30 lbs off the bike. The lower fairing doesn’t fit over the new exhaust, but I kind of like how the bike looks without it!

One thing I added, which took a little bit of work and planning, was a terminal block that is switched by the ignition. I hooked up an automative relay to the positive line of the rear running (brake) lights so that when the ignition turns on, and thus the rear running lights, the circuit completes and the relay completes a circuit between the battery and the terminal block. I put a 30A fuse on the line, so there’s plenty of power available (and more will be available as I replace incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs). This is a wiring diagram of how I set it up.

I also added Ninja 650R mirrors, which make it actually possible to see what’s behind me, a novel concept. You can see them in this shot, they’re much longer than stock.

I pulled my bike into the basement last week, just like I did with the 250, and will be focusing on improving the suspension since it’s really not up to snuff. I have done two things so far, though: I removed the PAIR system and replaced the stock blinker with a digital one to fix the hyper flash my LED blinkers introduced.

The PAIR system is basically a system that draws in fresh air from the airbox and injects it into the exhaust so that any unburnt gas can detonate in the exhaust system. It’s an emissions system that only adds complexity and annoyance to working on the bike. With an aftermarket exhaust, you get a lot of popping on deceleration because of this. It sounds neat, but as you can see, the system obscures the entire top of the engine:

The PAIR removal kit basically blocks off the hole in the airbox, caps off the nipple on the carb, and has two plates that cover the holes in the valve cover. I got the optional OEM block off gaskets, which allowed me to remove the reed valves completely. Install took about 20 minutes since I already had the tank and fairings off the bike. The instructions supplied were clear, though I didn’t really need them after an initial read since it was pretty self-explanatory. The included stainless steel block off plates are excellent quality. For $27 shipped, this is a great kit.

The blinker I put on is actually the same blinker I put on the 250. It’s about $8 from superbrightleds.com and works excellently. It only works in one orientation, and the wires don’t match colors at all, so I used different gender quick disconnects to ensure that if I ever take it back off, it can only go back on in the correct way.

Below you can see an extensive gallery featuring more pictures of the bike and more detail shots of the PAIR removal and blinker replacement.

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Tags: EX500, Motorcycle, Ninja 500R, Project