Reader’s Photos

-- Readers playing in the sand -- E-mail your photos to Dirt Wheels Magazine > [email protected] Get your $25 gift card here > https://hi-torque.com/product/dirt-wheels-holiday/ . . .

-- Find out in the Dirt Wheels Letters Section -- Many people tell us their favorite part of the magazine is the Letters Section. It has been like that dating back 30 years ago. It's where you went to see what other ATV riders were doing. You can say it was the magazine version of Facebook. Below is a typical Letters Section that ran in a previous issue of Dirt Wheels. It was 10 pages back then based on the sheer volume of letters E-mailed to us by Dirt Wheels readers. We would like to have 10 pages of Letters in the latest…

-- Drifting from the dirt onto the pavement --     Jeremy Othelet is a Dirt Wheels reader who lives in Margut, France. In his country ATVs can be made street legal with the proper equipment. As you can see here Jeremy has turn signals, mirrors and a license plate on his quad.     His Yamaha Raptor 700 is a good quad to make street legal, because it has enough power to cruise along at speeds above 70 mph. To improve the power Jeremy added a performance exhaust and intake system, fuel controller and hotter cam shaft.…

-- Best 2-stroke for the money -- Ben Shaffer in Ohio has a fondness for 2-strokes and he decided he should take an old 2-stroke quad and build it back up to be even better than when it was new. He found this 1996 Yamaha Blaster 200 in a friend of a friend's barn. Blasters were known for being the best bang for the buck. They didn't cost much, the air-cooled 2-stroke motors were simple and easy to work on and they were pretty peppy for 200ccs. Ben's Blaster looked to be in sad shape when he first picked it up, so he…

-- The latest version of the famous two-stroke three-wheeler -- Ever since Honda dropped their ATC250R after 1986, people have wondered how one would look today if it suddenly returned to the line up. Well, that has not happened yet, but what we have here is probably the closest thing to a 2019 ATC250R that Honda would build. It has an aluminum frame, inverted front forks and a 2-stroke engine with a power-valve, raising and lowering the exhaust port to make a broader power band. So, how did this modern ATC250R come…

-- Hey wait, that's a 4-cylinder engine! -- Upon further review that's not a single cylinder engine. It's got 4 exhaust pipes and 4 intake tracks, so there's no way it can be a YFZ450 engine. Maybe we should read what James Masephol said about his quad in his Email to us. Well, it did indeed start out as a 2005 Yamaha YFZ450. However he took the engine out and installed the engine from a Yamaha R1 street bike. Those 1000cc 4-cylinder engines make about 180 horsepower stock, and James figures his gets more like 200 with the…

-- DIRT WHEELS READER REPORT -- For today the Dirt Wheels crew gives a thumbs up to Sirik Hendrijckx in Kinrooi, Belgium. In case you don't know, Belgium is a country in Europe and they ride ATVs there too. In fact, we sell many magazines there every month as well as a lot of other countries around the world. Anyway, Sirik sent us this photo in an e-mail and here's what he had to say: Hello Dirt Wheels, This is my very first quad. It's a 2006 Yamaha Raptor 700R and as you can see it still looks like it just came…

-- Reader hops up his Yamaha 450 quad -- Modern 450 quads like Yamaha's YFZ450  have such high-tech engines it's hard to extract much more power than what they come with stock. David Armitage in Illinois found away around that rule. However, you may say he cheated when he took out the single-cylinder 450cc engine. Instead he installed a Suzuki GSXR 4-cylinder street bike engine in his YFZ. When those things are revving up past 10 grand they produce around 160 ponies. That's about three times the horsepower of a stock YFZ.…

-- A modern version from 220 Trikes LLC -- If you're looking for the latest new 3-Wheeler with KTM flavor then this is the machine for you. The man responsible for this machine is Michael Noska who owns 220 Trikes LLC, which is a company that specializes in building 3-wheelers. Michael started this conversion with a 2006 KTM 450exc and turned it into a modern day 3 wheeler using all KTM components except for the customized Lonestar swing arm.  The seat, rear fenders, subframe, and grab bar are all OEM KTM 450xc ATV…

-- Custom rebuild on the first 2-stroke performance quad -- Honda's TRX250R gets most of the attention, but it actually owes its existence to Suzuki. The Quadracer 250 came out in 1985 while Honda, Yamaha and Kawasaki were focussed only on 3-wheelers. At that point Honda set its engineers on building a high-performance 2-stroke 4-wheeler to compete with the Suzuki. Granted, Honda did a good job with their very first effort, but that wouldn't have happened without using the Quadracer 250 as a reference. Here is Jay…

-- Taking a look at how some Dirt Wheels readers do it -- Farmers get to ride their quads or UTVs right from the barn. The rest of us have to haul our prized off-road vehicles to a riding area. The quick way is to put your quad in the back of your pick up truck. Maybe even put two or three back there. In some cases it's even possible to put your UTV in the back of the truck too. For most though, they use a trailer. Depending on the size of the trailer you can haul a variety of quads and UTVs. We're going to take a random…

-- 20 years worth of readers' rides -- When it comes to quad riders, which group is the most passionate, enthusiastic and hard core of all? Well, we'd have to say the owners of two-stroke quads. Honda TRX250R riders are certainly fanatics and the same can be said for Suzuki Quadzilla owners as well. However, those two machines were only in production for around four years. On the other hand, you could buy new Yamaha Banshees from 1987 to 2006 here in the USA, and beyond that in Canada and other countries. Based on 20 years…