Yep, I can relate to that - I seized the RD in the main street of Nairobi, 600km down the road after ingesting a little water whilst river crossing on the way to Lamu.

The bottom of the pistons broke off where the windows are for the crankcase injection intake ports.

I ended up buying new pistons from Yamaha in Nairobi and rebuilt the motor in my $2 a night el cheapo Nairobi hotel room.....

but get this....

On that same river crossing I'd lost my tool kit (yep in the river :(), and I took the complete motor apart, and rebuilt it, using just a spark plug socket spanner, an allen key, shifting spanner and pliers.

Two strokes are amazingly simple to work on. :thumbup1:

Garry from Oz.

Kawasaki AE80
 

Hi there,

15 yrs. ago we travelled through Westafrica on a Kawasaki AE80. Some 5k km without any problems, usual maintenance understood. I had a Yamaha Tenere, my wife drove a two stroke. Nothing wrong with that...
Read the german "Tourenfahrer" 1/2 1993...

Harti

If you look around the world at all the l

Two-Stroke Touring!
 

Norwegian Ed B. Larsen Rides two-stroke all year round. 2 days ago he got a "new" russian IZH Planeta 350. A year ago he started riding a Minsk 125, covered 38.000 kms since then. That bike replaced his Jawa 350 after a crash. The Jawa covered 140.000 kms. He has done several trips in East-Europe and Russia. The Jawa did Oslo - Irbit - Oslo, 9000 kms in 4 weeks. No bikeproblems at all.

Take a look:

LANGTUR TIL BANDITTSTAT PÃ… MINSK 125 - mc24.no

Ed and Martin touring Moldovia om Minsk and Jawa:

http://www.nmcu.org/tur/turforslag/lett_mc_moldova.pdf

Two-Stroke Touring is no problem

As a veteran MZ aflictee I can say there are good points and bad points. Keep the timing and carburation right and you'll be fine. Let them go wrong and you'll be walking until you get a new piston! Don't worry about decokes so long as you can get decent synthetic stroke oil, but carry a head gasket in places where they use old engine oil etc. if you are planning on more than a few months riding.

Fuel range would be my only real issue, but I know the mechanicals.

In 15 years and probably 100,000 Km of riding MZ's as fast as they'll go I've siezed one. That was new to me and was on a trial run to find the bugs! I still rode it 70 miles home after putting a can of coke down the plug hole to free it and used it for work for a month before the new bits turned up.

If it looks right for you, go for it and enjoy.

Andy

vespa trip up the himalayas
 

2 weeks trip, i had a 150cc 4 stroke Hero Honda i'm glad to say but of the 4 bikes with us one was a 125 Vespa. Trashed it up and down the Himalayas for 2 weeks without problem. The best bit was watching Indian filling station guy adding diesel engine oil to mix with the petrol, i guess he'd ran out of Putoline MHX ;-) Didn't cause any problems what so ever. Worth remembering that oil is oil (pretty much) if you run out of options.

Hi,
in 2004, i made a good ride to my hometown Ankara,Turkey to England (for Jawa&Cz Owners Club 50th anniversary meeting) with my two stroke 350cc Jawa (dualsport, converted by me). with any problem.
total km was little more than 7000Km. it was fantastic ride.
i used good synthetic 2t oil, good far east tires :) some spare parts that i'd never need them.
cheers
moderen

I guess it would depend on:

1) Where you are going
2) What bike you are using.

I don't know a lot about the RM250 but.... a couple of years back my brother and I rode around Oz on PX200 Vespas (2-strokes). Decent 2 stoke oil was hard to come by in a lot of places. You could find machine type 2 stoke i.e for chainsaws, etc but few name brands which i'm not a fan of. We were also suported by Castrol and could only get it in boxes of 8litre bottles. This provided us with some entertainment playing 'where can I stash this'. Were we not supplied it though, I would have still bought quite a bit and taken it with me.

On the plus side... the engines were dead simple to work on/service/fix

The PX isn't too highly strung so as long as the autolube tank was filled and a dash added to the fuel tank we could sit with the throttle pinned for hours on end with no hint of seizure... and they smell nice too :)

Yes, I know what you mean greysmoke. The first 3 words I learnt in German were "zwei takt ol". :)

In Africa, I gave up trying to find it and just used the cheapest motor oil I could find, as this is what the locals did. It didn't seem to do any harm and the bike ran just as well as ever.

Garry from Oz.