Hi all, I found out about this site thru a recommendation over on thumpertalk, where i hang out at the KLX 400 forum. I recently purchased a KX500 with the intention of converting it to a dual sport, as I have always wanted one of these bikes from like 10 years back. Anyway, i found an ad on Craigslist advertising a 1992 KX500 for sale. I went and looked at it and truthfully didnt know a whole lot about KX500's to know that i was getting myself into a mess. Supposedly, the guy selling it brought it here to Arizona from Maryland a few months ago, where he assisted another guy in rebuilding/repairing it. According to him it has a new piston/rings and is still on standard bore, though i've no way of verifying any of this and he didnt produce any paperwork. He said he kinda lost interest in it before he completed it, so it still needed a few things. I noticed a blown apart silencer and a cracked gas cap and weathered plastics and bad wheel bearings. But it started right up and sounded healthy as hell. Always a sucker for a badass sounding two stroke.......and to make a long sad story short, i ended up buying the thing off of him thinking it would only take a few hundred bucks to get it sorted out the way i wanted it. Again, i've not owned a dedicated "dirtbike" before, only a succession of Dual sports or enduros or whatever you call them.
When i had a friend run the VIN numbers stamped on the frame, they come up looking like it is a 1987. Now, from looking at pics, i can tell the 1987's had black colored engines and conventional forks, but this bike has a raw aluminum colored engine and upside down forks. So I am confused here. Did I buy a cobbled together beast of unknown origins? It appears so. Mainly what i want it for is Dual Sport purposes, so it is super important for me to be able tp put a lighting stator on the engine, but they only list the years 92 and up for those stators. Can this stuff be retrofitted to the older engines? What are the differences between the years of the liquid cooled KX500 engine? Did they all have the KIPS system? (I am assuming this is powervalves)? If i provided someone knowledgable with my engine numbers, could they tell what model engine i have and what year it was produced?
I've read about the earlier models having weird wheel bearings, and have so many questions regarding simple things like what plastics will fit what years, to wheel and brake questions, etc? Sorry to drop a bomb here, i am just a fellow Kawasaki enthusiast appealing for some help here. Thank you.
