Rokon Trailbreaker?

[DaveJames]

I think you will like it, I think they do better then dirt baikes in the woods, never could convinec the Ole man to get the side car for it, I have talked to one PH who works in Az that has one and hauls out his hog takes.

Just for grins if I wanted a side car version that was trail worthy I would look the Russian Ural

Just my extra two cents

[boss]

Jacko was booted off from here but he loves his, just rode like 30 miles on it on some serious trails, hope to go ride with him with my Arctic cat 700's.

[HBG]

I saw a man and a woman riding one down main street in Deadwood last week, it had a sidecar and a leather saddle scabbard strapped to the front fork with a levergun in it. Pretty cool.

[Davo]

Made a long post on the Rokon & Ural both...
Hopefully it is merely delayed in transmission and not lost into some cyber black hole.
It'll take awhile to re-write if it is "gone".
Davo

[Davo]

"Once more unto the breach...."
Rokon 1st:
There's quite a few things wrong and alot right with the MOTOTRACTOR.
I have run one for several years now, hauled wood and gone alot of places I used to travel hossback and a few where I'de be afraid of bogging a caballo down.
They are expensive.
Aircleaner is fragile trash that would not last on a lawnmower.
Seat is poorly-made/low-bidder thing dictated by bean-counters, no doubt. (The milk goat had a higher opinion of it and ate some of the poorly stitched and staple onto a warped/delaminated interior plywood base, cover & too flabbly foam rubber stuffing.)
New leading link front end is not that great...As long as you have the balloon tires you'de be better off with the simpler, stonger, more reliable GIRDER, un-sprung front end than the peculiarly named "auto-grab" one.
Kohler engine has the poorest factory helpfulness I have ever heard of.

Fixes/up-grades:
Welding brackets on so as to mount my spare Ural solo seat this afternoon in place of the "thing" perpatrated by Rokon's bean-counters.
Made my own air-cleaner with a K&N and a UNI foam filter over it routed up under the lower front of the fuel tank(less dust and better water fording ability.)
I routed it there on a piece of radiator hose run from a right angle adaptor I made to bolt onto the little Mikuni carburetor where the bogus, eggshell-delicate, plastic airbox previously was.
It is stout and I have kicked it repeatedly with some stout brogans and it has not gone "bust".
I had to make an over-size main jet set since Kohler basically told me to poop in my hat when I wanted jet sets or a source from the manuf. of the carb. (tiny Mikuni) They would sell you all the "high altitude" jets you could afford at $35 to $40 apiece :-( Thanks ALOT, Kohler.)
The game carrier is a good accessory and hauls boxes left at the County Rd. by UPS or US Mail for us back to the place when I don't have the sidecar mounted.
The sidecar attatches with only ONE wing-nutted bolt, and amazingly WORKS.

The log-hauler from Rokon is a poorly-engineered, over-priced flop.(It now has a metal box on it to haul 800 to 1,000 lbs. of crushed rock to fill in potholes.)
I have ordered a log arch hauler from Northern for $200 that looks near the equal to the Ben Meadows forestry cat. one for near $600....All I'll have to do is weld a 1 7/8" hitch on the tongue of the log arch.

The Rokon will hill-climb like a slow mtn. goat up places I could not have gone when I was a kid with a large displacement Brit. single cyl. bike....At a slow walk instead of an all-out full throttle CHARGE.
You can cross logs that it would take a really talented trials rider to cross on a one wh. dr. motorcycle.
It will also cross boggy places that would probably stop an ATV and surely bog a horse down so bad you might have to shoot the poor sucker before he drowned.

The fan-cooled motor (get the Honda, NOT the Kohler! Better aircleaner on the Honda and they cannot be any worse to deal with for parts than Kohler) will not over-heat at low-speeds when rock-crawling.
The belt-drive torque convertor and 3 speed transfer case can provide decent road speed in 3rd.(25 mph+) to serious load hauling, log skidding power in 1st.

The Rokon is UNIQUE.
The Rokon is expensive.
(I'll let'chal know how the Ural solo seat works out on the Rokon, hopefully after I get home late afternoon today. :-)
The Rokon is expensive.

Davo

[Czechsix]

Davo - that's pretty much the reasoning that I used when I went with my older '73. It's got the old Brit sprung leather saddle, which is actually pretty comfy. Two stroke works well for me, is very light and plenty of power. I run a Uni filter on it. Like you say, looks like the beancounters have been at it. I'll stick with the older design. Still haven't managed to break it, and one of these days I might even spring for new rubber (yeah, still has the original tires from '73 on it, rofl...on the plus side, I can use them as anvils if I need to shape anything)

[Davo]

Czechsix,
Really intersting feed-back on the OLDER model Rokon.
Practically having to arm-wrestle the welder fabricator to make a seat mount for the old style solo seat on my newer Rokon.
Today got wrecked by family catastrophe in wleder/mech's family, so new seat bracket is on "hold" for a day or two..(What the heck...I've put up with the factory abomination in ti's original and it's re-built form for long enough, I can wait another day or two ;-)
People mistake these things for a motorcycle...
They are as akin as a big riding burro is to a over-bred, pasture-raised horse.
Pretty hard to "improve" on the originals.
My modifications are kind of retrogressing :-)
New Rokons are EXPENSIVE...(Or did I already mention that? ;-)

Davo

[Davo]

Russia acquired "thru a neutral country" 2 or 3 BMWs just before the war really got rolling.
It's really a shame they were not able to get the big Zundapp KS750 as that was a super rig for it's day.
External frame like a modern sportsbike, cyl. heads canted upwards from true 180 degree "Boxer" engine to a very slight V-twin to give better clearance to cyl. heads and exhaust header pipes, engageable sidecar wheel, but the real improvement over the BMWs, Russ. Dneipers and Urals was a hi-low transfer case allowing speed to match Wermacht marching speed of 3 mph. w/o lugging the low-end or rod bearign out of it. (or metric equivelant.)

The old flat-head bikes of WW2 had a low top-speed that was bettered by URal 650cc OHVs despite 100 cc drop in displacement, BUT I'll bet the OHVs don't have the low-speed torque and lugging power.

I have a 2010 Ural Gear Up, and I LOVE it!!!
I've had more than my share of problems, but the warrantee is an honorable one.
The main flaws are:
Only ONE tire really suited to dual-use, the K-37 4.00x19.
You don't have clearance to swing even cable chains on snow/ice/mud, but you can screw in Kold-Kutter ice-racing studs.
It is a 4-speed, but if the 4 that are already there were the same ratio with a FIFTH gear as a compound low, you could crawl over things you have to take a bit too fast, or abuse the clutch to get over/thru.
It has a high C.G....This is the price you pay for the 2wh. dr. and enough clearance to make bad road/mild off-road practible.

Good things about the Ural Gear Up:
It may not be the kind of off-road machine the Rokon is, but you can go most places an ATV can, plus you are street-legal and can cruise at 50 or 55 mph once you hit a good stretch of road.
Dave Hooker/"Mr.COB" on ADVRIDER makes some really fien modifications and parts liek skid-plates and WAY beefed-up L.crashbar/footpeg as well as a R.hand footboard.
He also modifes stock clutchplates so they are way less apt to warp and vents the bellhhousing to dissipate heat.

I made a post about sidecar outfits on some forum & was taken to task by some oaf who started his opinion thusly, "I'me not a motorcyclist, but a motorcylce/sidecar could not outrun a loaded mailtruck."
Well I didn't say anything about outrunning another vehicle, but I believe I did make the point that a passenger in the "hack" has a nearly 360 degree field of fire, interupted (hopefully! only by the "driver" and windshield if you have one. (I like mine, particularly in the winter and during hailstorms :-)
As to possible speeds...
Keeping in mind that if you are old and you crash hard it may be your death or put you in a wheelchair, mebbe even one like that Hawking guy has.
You can "drift" corners on sand/gravel/dirt roads much more securely than you can go at speed on an insecure surface on a two-wheeled machine (IMO)
I am deeply aware of this because if I bring a solo machine down on my re-built knee(s), I'll likely be using a walker or in a wheelchair.
When my TW200 would have the front wheel slide out on curves on the logging roads around here, I was able to stomp down and keep the bike from falling(barely)
(TW200 is a fairly light bike ham-strung by a narrow-ratio gearbox.)
Dave H. was a mech/advisor to a team wanting to run an Ural Gear Up in the Baja...They hired Joe-Go-Fast, some 4 whl. hotdog who burnt-out because of a lack of condition (he'de been warned that it was not the same as driving a 4whl vehicle, but knew too much to listen...), after the 1st day. (It takes some muscle as well as skill to really push a big hack FAST.)
So, they asked gray-haired Dave H., APC driver during Viet war and about my age to drive...
Dave was passing stock-engined Baja Bugs and dune buggies and really gaining ground when put out by a freak mech. accident.
So much for the "mailtruck" metaphor and eejits who know nothing of motorcycles much less sidecar outfits.

IF you get after market shift levers you can take a run at a hill and get more power to the groudn in one wh. dr. and then shift into 2 wh. mode when you hit loose stuff where one "pusher" tire will spin.

MPG on the road is 30 to 35 mpg. and there are NO damned computers or throttle body injectors where carburetors should be.

I am trying to adapt a Kubota tractor cyclonic two-stage air cleaner to my big Ural. (I am kind of fetished about clean air for my steel ponies ;-)

Great machine...You can pack three people and small ammount of gear weapons/two people and a fair ammount of weapons and supplies, spares, tools etc., or one person and LOTS of gear :-)
There's a DVD/Utube movie of a Gear Up and passenger being flung around fst & HARD in the dirt and on dirt roads complete w/PKM LMG, and another segment where they deploy a belt-fed grenade launcher quick, fire chunk-chunk-chunk, throw it back in the rig and take off. Also AT rockets. (If you were on the receiving end, "Don't you hate it when THAT happens?" ;-)
Militarily, sidecar outfits were better as scouts and in the advance than in retreat...
So the Germans found out after Stalingrad and Kursk, and concentrated more on manuf. Kublewagons with their depleted resources since these worked better for running in front of the Russians who were after payback for the 600 villages and occupants burned by the nazi freaks, in addition to their other tircks and atrocities.

If you are interested you can find LOTS on Youtube, ADVRIDER.com and others....(also my previous post "My Russian Troika")

Urals are expensive, but extremely COOL, and there is nothing else like them outside of WW2 museums.

I'll be happy to corresspond with anyone who is interested in Urals or Rokons. ( dave3220@mac.com ) (Please do not fwd. any viagra ads or messages from mid-eastern/n.african fraud artists who want to "give me" a million dollars if I'll just send them enough $s to grease the wheels :-) (So they can buy more semtex for their islamic bum-buddies to make IEDs with after they pluck a few more suckers :-(

Davo/journeyman curmudgeon, subsistance hunter & sidecarist

[Davo]

Got the spare Ural solo seat mounted in what I hope will be the right position....
MUCH better looking....Like the"classic" Rokon rather than the low-bidder-built abomination foisted on buyers of NEW Rokons.

I have just cut-out and inserted 5/8" foam pad cut out of sleeping bag pad in place of the Russian faom rubber in the seat cover that compresses to the thickness and padding same as 2-ply paper towel.

An Ural seat w/suspension & mount is $200 plus (Obama funbucks don't go very far :-(

The machine is pretty good once you and brushguards to protect the brake levers and juice brake reservoirs, re-place the tacky, easily broken parts(seat, aircleaner, tail light....), weld the eyes on the lower bracket legs of the front rack SHUT so if you crash you won't spring them off the thru-bolts.

You also have to use compressed air to blow the dust and crud out of the centrifical clutch/torque convertor on a regular basis.

It is raining now, and while I am not made out of sugar, I AM still getting over dbl. pneu. , so test ride will have to mebbe wait until tomorrow, if it is not still coming down like a cow widdling on a flat rock.....

I went to alot of trouble and expence to finally get saddles fromy horses that fit them and ME, and was a great deal ahppier once I had done so.
A better saddle on the Rokon will make a big difference, at lest to ME. (Hope I got it right! :-)

Davo

[Craig R]

I have ridden one several times (slowly) and loved it. It's no Honda CR 500 but that's appealing too. The factory is about 10 miles from my house in New Hampshire and there are several people that own ROKONS in my area.