Fooligan Ride | Raced a Grom | Experienced Clutch/Starting Issues
 

Hello fellow China Riders. I’ve been browsing the forums for a few months now and decided it was finally time to make my first post.


Last Thursday, Fooligan / Omaha Grom Squad held their first meetup & ride. If you don’t know who they are, check out Fooligan’s channel on YouTube.
For the ride, I decided to bring my RPS Hawk 250. I figured powerwise, it’d fit right in. I ended up racing one of the Groms (Fooligan’s Murph) and it was a close race, which is what I expected. I think the Hawk would’ve pulled ahead a little bit further if I would’ve kept the revs lower in the RPM. If you want to see the short race, I added it to my YouTube video (link posted below).

Anyways, the Hawk ran great for the whole ride until the end when we entered the trails. Once we were in the trails, the clutch began giving me fits. Pulling in the clutch lever became extremely light and the clutch didn’t want to fully disengage. If I pulled the clutch lever fully in and had the bike in gear it would die on me.
The bike also began having starting issues even when I turned the lights off and put it in neutral. The combination between the clutch & starting issues became a real pain when I had to limp the Hawk back to my truck which was 30 minutes away (in the city).


I'm thinking my issues were from the engine becoming too hot since we were riding for a few hours with lots of starting & stopping. I rode the Hawk for a half hour the next day and things seemed to be running fine. However, if you guys think there’s something I should look at or adjust, please let me know.


If you’d like to check out some of the footage from the Fooligan Meetup, I uploaded the clips I gathered to YouTube. The Hawk vs Grom race is at the 11:00 mark and my Hawk troubles follow shortly after.

https://youtu.be/gx2oYzsj6x4

change your oil. I put synthetic in mine and the clutch problems were gone.

I had my hawk at my concocurs rally last week and one of the guys had a grom. I really wanted to run them, but we never got the chance.

What oil you running/when was the last oil change? I would agree with what Sport Rider said. I am running 20w50 in mine. Also do you have a skid plate or anything restricting airflow around the engine?

How many miles?

I have just over 600 miles on my Hawk (according to the odometer). My first oil change was around the 450 mile mark.

I'm running Rotella 15W-40 Conventional Oil. If synthetic fixed your clutch issues maybe I'll take a look at going that route. What oil are you guys running? Rotella T6?

The bike is basically stock (except for 17t front sprocket & Iridium Spark Plug) and there's nothing blocking the airflow around the engine.

The odometer is in KM's so if it shows 600 then your not even at 400 miles. Most here say that the engine needs about 500 miles to loosen up.

The synthetic oil is cheap enough it's worth a shot, or just give it some more miles.

I thought I saw a hawk in the meetup video. I'll bet that was a fun ride with those guys.

Not pretty when that guy goes down at 1.19 minutes. Riding in large groups makes me nervous...

As far as your bike issues, I would adjust the valves and clutch. If the valves are tight, hard starting could result and most or all of the hawks have been reported with tight valves as delivered. After adjusting my valves, my hawk starts instantly. With a dragging clutch, the bike will tend to stall at low speed with the clutch pulled in, stop and go on tight trails. Repeated start attempts will lill the battery quickly as well. With my hawk I have found that adjusting the clutch to leave the proper free play results in not enough disengagement, and leaves the clutch dragging and makes it difficult to impossible to find neutral> a common issue with the hawk. "Overtightening" the clutch slightly seems to help and does not result in clutch slipping, which I can imagine would lead to pre mature wear.

if you were running hard for a long time on stock jets i would guess it was smokin hot and the oil would have been super thin

It definitely was a fun ride! Riding in large groups makes me nervous as well. I'm glad I rode it solo and not 2up.

I've been meaning to purchase and install new jets. I'm still trying to decide whether to modify the stock carb or purchase the VM26.

I think I will recheck the valves here soon and make sure they're still within the recommended lash. Clutch drag was another fear of mine. I'll take a look at that as well.

By chance, do you guys know what clutch kit will work with the Hawk?

Synthetic oil stands up to overheating better then conventional oil. The constant stopping-starting I saw in the off road part of your video is not easy on clutches. And the downside of the 17 tooth front sprocket is more clutch slipping = heat. If you are going to do more riding like that, try a 16 tooth front sprocket. Also, carburetion needs to be right on the money to pull well at low rpm. That's why many people switched out to a Mikuni carburetor. Much easier to tune. Stock jetting is way lean, and that adds to the heat issue as well. :tdown:

Most around here are happy with the stock carb on the HAWK after a bit of modding (main jet and maybe shim the needle and some adjustment screw play... the stock pilot seems to work fine), save a lot of your $ and open up the stock carb and try tuning that first :D

Well I finally ordered some jets. I'll go ahead and try to modify the stock carb since you guys are having success with it.

I think I'm going to throw the stock 15t front sprocket back on. I do a lot of town/city riding as well as some offroading here and there. Originally I was going to try to gear it to run on the highways since the major cities are a half-hour away from me via highway. But after riding the Hawk a bit more, I don't think I'll be able to gear it to do so. Instead, now I'm thinking about making it more into thrash bike (stunting & some offroading). Maybe I'll get squirrely and throw a 12 bar on the Hawk! ;)