My new off road toy!

[fsaroyster]

Bought this at the weekend for me and the kids to have some fun with. Don't really know what it is, stumbled across it looking for a new lawn mower, got to the petrol engined mowers and then thought what can I get on ebay and these things caught my eye, turned out a kid not too far away had one up for sale on Gumtree...

Anyone know anything about them? It has an 8hp GX240 Honda engine. Starts and runs fine, needs two front tyres, order those last night and a few engine service bits, air filter, fuel filter, oil. Has a hydraulic brake set up with a disc and pads, pads are down to the nub, but know idea where or what to order.

They call them off road buggys, or off road karts, but other than that I know nothing of it.

Managed to bend one of the 'track rods' on the steering on my 2nd go by crashing into a fence post.

Kid I bought it off says it does about 40mph, kids will have a great time, once I've fixed it.

Currently cleaning it up whilst waiting for the tyres and other bits to turn up...

Rog

[Wolfracer]

Have you got somewhere to use it? I've always thought it'd be fun to get one but don't know any local fields I could use... when I was a kid in derbyshire we had the whole of a disused opencast mining site to drive and ride ariund. sadly health and safety and large metal fences were invented and that was that!

[fsaroyster]

We've got 8 acres of land for the horses, so can do some laps on there, plus, not sure where I stand here, but there's some land the local lads run their motor bikes up and down...

[BigBobE]

bring the pads with you to local motor factor, generally they have a book of pads with a 1:1 scale pic of pad to help you match them... generally an apec brand book bout the size of a large golden pages...

[yoshie]

Fit a harness for the kids and make sure it fits properly. Badly fitted can slice the neck in a crash.
My boy had the dingo version off road cart when he was young and he loved it. Keep them safe and have fun.

[KERRSURF]

More modern karts have tubes running from the top of roll bar to front and have roll-down nets to keep little arms inside if the thing flips. Lots of fun but as yoshie says, keep em safe.

[fsaroyster]

Typical, there's me all thinking about how feasible it is to tune it and make it go faster, barely to a minute to think about the kids safety, all about the fun, then I'd have ended up taken them to hospital or worse, so really appreciate the wake up call as it were, one of the problems of being a big kid, and stupid

Cheers for the advice guys, it came with a full face motor cycle helmet, it overkill I thought but the kids think they're the Stig with it on so that's a start, considered a seat belt, harness, but now I'll make it a priority, just need to work out how I'd fit one, there's a bunch of rings fitted to the frame and roll bar, so they might be designed for that. Could see if my neighbour can weld the 'missing' bars to come down from the roll bar section to the front to give it a bit more protection.

Good shout on the brake pads, I noticed last night whilst cleaning the caliper has "Grimeca" on the side, so that's also something to go on, seems they're an Italian make.

Thanks again

Rog

[oneidadan]

if you get a harness make sure it's quick release (I believe they called them aircraft belts). You can also put a couple of loops on the steering wheel, that they can put their hands through that will stop them putting their hands out of the buggy if it rolls but you can still get out quickly.
Also a very good idea to mount a kill switch next to or on the steering wheel so the engine can be shut off quickly in the event of a roll. Petrol can leak from the tank and ignite on hot surfaces such as the exhaust. Very scary when it happens and you need to be out fast.
Unfortunately the smaller buggies are more unstable, but there's much fun to be had stamping on the brakes and sliding around tight bends using the rear braking.
I will try and find out where we used to get our brake pads from.
P.S. if you use it anywhere very dusty, check the air filter every 10 minutes as it was the main cause of our engines failing prematurely.

[NiftyNev]

P.S. if you use it anywhere very dusty, check the air filter every 10 minutes as it was the main cause of our engines failing prematurely.

Put a snorkel on it.

Nev.

[BUSHWHACKER]

I would fit a remote engine shut down switch.

[oneidadan]

Put a snorkel on it.

Nev.

Funnily enough we were looking at fitting snorkels to them to take the air filters up out of the dust cloud, but it made the engines stall under load. We never had enough time to try larger diameter pipes though.