ts250 - new piston rings, doubled up head gasket to reduce pinging
A few months back I took my kids to a dirt track. They had their UTV and I had my TS250. The TS was motor wasn't sounding too good, kind of gravely. I decided to replace the rings. As long as I had the top end off, I decided to add a second copper head gasket. My hope is that this will lower the compression enough that I eliminate any pinging. The bike pings hard on regular gas. If I switch to premium gas, the pinging largely goes away, but you can still faintly hear it when going full throttle at 63 MPH. Since the timing isn't adjustable, and I don't want to mess with race gas, my other option is to lower compression, which is exactly what a doubled-up hed gasket will do.
After replacing the rings and adding a second head gasket, the bike is running well. My top speed went from 63 MPH to 66 MPH. Its too early to say if pinging has been eliminated but so far so good.
While doing all this work, my OEM battery box finally snapped off one of its mounts. Ever since I converted the bike from 6 to 12 volts, I moved the battery up higher to a custom cage. The original battery box was relagated to holding the new voltage regulator/rectifier. With the box now broken, I just removed the RR and mounted it directly to the frame.
