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Any opinions/experience?
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CSC RX3 Cyclone
- Thread starter KenH
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not yet.
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"Yet"? Did you order one?
Last I read in Chinariders.net, the freighter carrying the first batch of RX3 has only just berthed in the California port. So no one has one just yet. Don't know how the dock strike will effect unloading efficiency.
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the dock strike is over, they are working on clearing the back log of ships and containers and are ahead of schedule but are looking at another month till they are caught up.
if the containers with the bikes are in fact on the Xin Fei Zhou, they are being unloaded right now.
there is some confusion as to what ship they were or are on.
there is a member here who I think has ordered one but their bike will be on the second batch.
if the containers with the bikes are in fact on the Xin Fei Zhou, they are being unloaded right now.
there is some confusion as to what ship they were or are on.
there is a member here who I think has ordered one but their bike will be on the second batch.
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There was confusion. The first containers shipped were parts and accessories, not bikes. The Xin Fei Zhou berthed yesterday and has the actual bikes for sure. No confusion about that.
I was hoping one TWTer or another happened to be in or near Azusa and stopped by the CSC building for a test ride.
Still white and blue bikes available from the first batch, but low or out of red and white last I heard. I'm not picky, my son paints show vehicles for a living so I can have any color I want. Thinking about high vis green to match my riding gear.
I was hoping one TWTer or another happened to be in or near Azusa and stopped by the CSC building for a test ride.
Still white and blue bikes available from the first batch, but low or out of red and white last I heard. I'm not picky, my son paints show vehicles for a living so I can have any color I want. Thinking about high vis green to match my riding gear.
inroads
0
They are waiting to unload about 200 any day now.
I have a deposit on one of those.
About as excited as I can get with a Chinese Adventure bike.
All indicators and spec sheets are impressive.Quite a few 1st rides alresdy just not on these shores.Motorcyclist magazine has tested one just in the last week so there should be a write up next months issue.
I have a deposit on one of those.
About as excited as I can get with a Chinese Adventure bike.
All indicators and spec sheets are impressive.Quite a few 1st rides alresdy just not on these shores.Motorcyclist magazine has tested one just in the last week so there should be a write up next months issue.
garfey
0
I knew if I waited long enough someone would post something that would hint at what a CSC RX3 (RX3 - that was a 70s Mazda?) Cyclone (wasn't that a Ford truck?) was.
Always interested in a cheap bike that can do something one of the present stable can't, IB listening for a Ride Report.
Always interested in a cheap bike that can do something one of the present stable can't, IB listening for a Ride Report.
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I'll do a ride report as soon as mine gets ridden. I ordered a red one, the Tourfella cases because my son needs a set for his bike, and a center stand. My intent is to use the bike for racking up miles on the paved back roads through west Kentucky and Tennessee, just day and overnight rides. I have another bike I'll trailer to epic adventure/dual sport rides when necessary.
You never know how long customs will hold goods. Could be a couple days. Could be a couple months.
You never know how long customs will hold goods. Could be a couple days. Could be a couple months.
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Downs
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I'm very interested in these bikes and live about 100 miles away from CSC right now. Sometime in the future I'm going to have to get up there and test ride one of these things.
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CSC has bikes in the warehouse, but still another couple days of bikes to be unloaded from containers. Office folks are prepping the paperwork. Shipments and pickups rumored to begin next week.
apleschu
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RX3 Shakedown and brake in run (Azusa -> Houston)
We are home safe and sound and (almost) everything was good. Before we get into the nitty gritty, I have to state something here for the record: If you hear me complaining about the seat of the RX3, then please understand this is coming from folks who sit all day in the saddle when we are out and about, there are quite some days where we spend 8 to 12 hours in the saddle. So, our requirements are more than likely quite different from most everyone else. More than likely if your general MO is two hours in the saddle and then have a decent break, you are going to look at me deer eyed, and ask "Why? I think this seat is OK" and that is already the gist of it. This seat is not made for the long distance traveller, but then again, I have had only one stock seat in the past that was acceptable and that was on a Goldwing. Every other seat, including all BMW seats fell into the same category. That said, the seat is atrocious! LOL.
Now that we have this out of the way on Thursday morning we took an early flight out of Houston and arrived 9:20 in Ontario California. After a short cab ride we pulled up at CSC, and there they were! Both out bikes washed and ready to go for us.
The white and faster one
And the red, and prettier one
Very quickly I mounted the immediately needed add ons like X-grip to hold the phones and other things. As it turned out I ordered the wrong X-grips. The ones that are intended to be used for huge phones and for tablets. But they seemed to be just enough for our phones at the time so we got everything on and only an hour later we were on our way. Much faster than initially feared. The bikes ran NICE, I loved being back in CA, being able to split lanes when traffic comes to a crawl or stop and life was good. that was until 30 miles into our trip when Karen all of a sudden with an angry face passed me, motioned me to turn around and into the gas station and then told me that her phone fell out of the X-grip and this was the result
Apparently iPhones do not like it when they are run over by a truck
SO,,, we had a bit of a delay leaving the LA basin, since we needed a new phone. At this point it needs to be said that you do not ever want to get in between Karen and her tunes when riding. That will leave you one head shorter because it will be bitten right off your body. Smart man that I am and knowing this fact about my wife we turned around and headed towards the next Apple store to get the phone replaced. And again Apple care paid for itself three times over. One new 128GB iPhone 6 for $79 coming right up. Now I did not test another thing at home and that coupled with the fact that CSC is still missing a few bits and pieces coming in from China meant that we could not use the GPS we had with us, but were "only" able to use the iPhones as GPS devices. so in order to make the ride at least a little bit different than just droning on freeways, which with new bikes you don't want to do anyways I told the GPS software (TomTom) to route us home and avoid freeways. Initially I was a little bit disappointed because the first thing it did was to direct us onto some of the LA freeways. I shrugged it off to the fact that for some things in LA freeways seem to be unavoidable. (What does someone do riding a bicycle?) But very soon the phone told us to get off the freeway and it routed us to Big Bear via 303. Having ridden this now I have to say: If you are going to pick up your bike and Big Bear is not too far off your path: Do it. Up to Big Bear, then the North Shore road and down to 18. By the time you arrive on 18 your bike is broken in. Terrific road, one curve after the other, cars cannot go too fast, you are able in a 250 to chase cars up the mountain, you can keep a high gear and high pressure in the cylinders (thats how I brake in all my bikes) And the curves! Did I mention the curves? Something I can only dream of here in flatland.
So, anyway, we stopped after about 180 miles, since it was getting dark and we had to find out the lights were not properly adjusted yet. In addition the fuel warning lights were blinking at us. (Something we learned to ignore very quickly) and we started out at 4AM Central (2AM Pacific) and it was going on to be 8PM, so really time for us top get off the bikes. With the last waning light of the day we changed the oil (and made the mistake to follow the procedure by not removing the bash plate, and made a mess all over. Further we found out you can't just add oil and call it good. There is a new oil filter in there and lots of nooks and crannies where the oil just came out that needed to be filled again. So, in analogy to some other bikes we modified the oil changing procedure to:
1) Button her up, put the oil filter in, put the oil drain plug back in.
2) Fill'er to between the top mark on the sight glass and top of the glass.
3) start the engine, let run for one minute
4) turn engine off, wait for two minutes.
5) fill to the top line in the sight glass
6) return to step 3 until no change is apparent any more.
This ensures that you have enough oil in the engine, but not too much. I never liked the "Just fill'er with such and such amount" because one never knows how much rest oil there still is in the engine. But I digress ...
Next morning very soon we cross in Arizona and riding all day long with not much happening, other than we slowly learn about the intricacies of the bikes. i.e. fuel gage. The fuel gage has a few bars and those basically tell you how much you have used of 2.6 gallons. Wait, 2.6 gal? Should there be at least 1.5 gals more? There are, so basically we started to treat the flashing empty light as: "Its now time to look for a gas station. No reason to panic, in normal riding mode you have about 100 miles left and even in WOT you have about 60 to 70 miles left. So just do not enter sections on the road where they say: "Next service 110 miles" other than that you are good. Get gas whenever you feel like" And quite frankly on a X-country trip like this I need to pee anyway, so no reason not to fill up the bike while you are at it (Although I have been told the bike does not run on pee, so you may want to use gas instead)
Anyway, at the end of the day we arrive in a little town on the border of Arizona an NM. Found a terrific little hotel with lots of charm and the rooms are not your typical chain hotel but have charm.
And *NO* TVs in the rooms! Yeay!
During breakfast we talk to the owners and they recommend to stay on 70 and then take Route 9, which goes along the Mexican Border as an alternative to I10 and as something that is "different". We say, fine, I force the GPS to change the route to take us to Route 9 without looking where that will bring us. On off we go. Soon we cross over I10 just to go further south.
This is still on route 70 in Arizona or maybe already in NM
One direction:
And the other direction:
And the fact of just how many cars you see and that I was perfectly fine in the middle tells you just how much traffic there was on this road.
So, after we crossed I10, the road very soon changed:
And from there it went to gravel and then sand
15 wonderful miles of dirt.
But soon we were back on the tarmac and on our way south to Route 9. If you want to look up Route 9, then look on the southern edge of NM, where NM borders Mexico, then pull up the zoom, until you see a road along that border. 120 miles of nothing. Then another gas stop in the middle of nowhere
And from there we were pretty soon (3 hours) in El Paso, and since at this point the bikes were at 900 miles we decided we would superslab it home. A decision that turned out to be better in the long run. Somewhere along I10 I changed the oil again on some (very windy) parking lot of a gas station in the desert.
This was also the spot were I realized the heat shield tab on the exhaust header was clear broken off
From there we continued on to Fort Stockton, TX, which by itself is very clear in the middle of nowhere. And where the white bike had a flat in the morning. Trying to get this fixed on a Sunday is as most of you know a loosing proposition, but we were really lucky. The tow truck operator had all the tools and so off came the rear tire and the tube was "fixed"
which got us back on the road, even if it was a bit later than planned. But since we had now clear over 1200 miles we had not second thoughts of running the bikes WOT (about 90mph indicated, 80mph ground speed) and we continued to Kerrville TX. Shortly before we got into Kerrville something much have happened again to the tube, because as well pull off into the gas station in Kerrville I can feel the rear moving, just as a flat tire feels. This time we are lucky enough that the flat is slow enough and a MC dealer is within reach, so we gas up, fill the bike with air and hurry to the MC dealer, knowing that we we will have to leave the bike there until Tuesday the very least, oh well, we will give the RX3 a workout, carrying both of us. As we get back on the freeway something interesting happens: I realize that the bike is nothing slower two up than one up. Up the hill one can feel the bike dropping in speed easier, but other than that it performs absolutely perfectly. This means that the last 300 miles we spent two up running most of the time into Houston WOT keeping up with traffic without any real problems. Did I mention that the seats are atrocious?
So, we are back home, We will be picking up the white bike next weekend, Steve from CSC is going to send me the parts that went bad on the trip home and we spoke at length about the spring problems, which incidentally are not Chinese problems. This is just for the folks that call at every moment they can that Chinese quality is sub-par. From everything I have seen on this bikeThere is little to nothing that points to sub par original manufacturing. And as far as the exhaust header tab goes: If that becomes a pattern, then maybe, The rest of the problems are somewhere else.
Not sure if this is appropriate, but if not mods/admins please feel free to delete the link: In any case, there is a dedicated forum to the RX3 owned operated by yours truly. If you need more information, more pics or anything else that we come across the RX3 feel free to join in the fun: http://rx3forums.com
We are home safe and sound and (almost) everything was good. Before we get into the nitty gritty, I have to state something here for the record: If you hear me complaining about the seat of the RX3, then please understand this is coming from folks who sit all day in the saddle when we are out and about, there are quite some days where we spend 8 to 12 hours in the saddle. So, our requirements are more than likely quite different from most everyone else. More than likely if your general MO is two hours in the saddle and then have a decent break, you are going to look at me deer eyed, and ask "Why? I think this seat is OK" and that is already the gist of it. This seat is not made for the long distance traveller, but then again, I have had only one stock seat in the past that was acceptable and that was on a Goldwing. Every other seat, including all BMW seats fell into the same category. That said, the seat is atrocious! LOL.
Now that we have this out of the way on Thursday morning we took an early flight out of Houston and arrived 9:20 in Ontario California. After a short cab ride we pulled up at CSC, and there they were! Both out bikes washed and ready to go for us.
The white and faster one
And the red, and prettier one
Very quickly I mounted the immediately needed add ons like X-grip to hold the phones and other things. As it turned out I ordered the wrong X-grips. The ones that are intended to be used for huge phones and for tablets. But they seemed to be just enough for our phones at the time so we got everything on and only an hour later we were on our way. Much faster than initially feared. The bikes ran NICE, I loved being back in CA, being able to split lanes when traffic comes to a crawl or stop and life was good. that was until 30 miles into our trip when Karen all of a sudden with an angry face passed me, motioned me to turn around and into the gas station and then told me that her phone fell out of the X-grip and this was the result
Apparently iPhones do not like it when they are run over by a truck
SO,,, we had a bit of a delay leaving the LA basin, since we needed a new phone. At this point it needs to be said that you do not ever want to get in between Karen and her tunes when riding. That will leave you one head shorter because it will be bitten right off your body. Smart man that I am and knowing this fact about my wife we turned around and headed towards the next Apple store to get the phone replaced. And again Apple care paid for itself three times over. One new 128GB iPhone 6 for $79 coming right up. Now I did not test another thing at home and that coupled with the fact that CSC is still missing a few bits and pieces coming in from China meant that we could not use the GPS we had with us, but were "only" able to use the iPhones as GPS devices. so in order to make the ride at least a little bit different than just droning on freeways, which with new bikes you don't want to do anyways I told the GPS software (TomTom) to route us home and avoid freeways. Initially I was a little bit disappointed because the first thing it did was to direct us onto some of the LA freeways. I shrugged it off to the fact that for some things in LA freeways seem to be unavoidable. (What does someone do riding a bicycle?) But very soon the phone told us to get off the freeway and it routed us to Big Bear via 303. Having ridden this now I have to say: If you are going to pick up your bike and Big Bear is not too far off your path: Do it. Up to Big Bear, then the North Shore road and down to 18. By the time you arrive on 18 your bike is broken in. Terrific road, one curve after the other, cars cannot go too fast, you are able in a 250 to chase cars up the mountain, you can keep a high gear and high pressure in the cylinders (thats how I brake in all my bikes) And the curves! Did I mention the curves? Something I can only dream of here in flatland.
So, anyway, we stopped after about 180 miles, since it was getting dark and we had to find out the lights were not properly adjusted yet. In addition the fuel warning lights were blinking at us. (Something we learned to ignore very quickly) and we started out at 4AM Central (2AM Pacific) and it was going on to be 8PM, so really time for us top get off the bikes. With the last waning light of the day we changed the oil (and made the mistake to follow the procedure by not removing the bash plate, and made a mess all over. Further we found out you can't just add oil and call it good. There is a new oil filter in there and lots of nooks and crannies where the oil just came out that needed to be filled again. So, in analogy to some other bikes we modified the oil changing procedure to:
1) Button her up, put the oil filter in, put the oil drain plug back in.
2) Fill'er to between the top mark on the sight glass and top of the glass.
3) start the engine, let run for one minute
4) turn engine off, wait for two minutes.
5) fill to the top line in the sight glass
6) return to step 3 until no change is apparent any more.
This ensures that you have enough oil in the engine, but not too much. I never liked the "Just fill'er with such and such amount" because one never knows how much rest oil there still is in the engine. But I digress ...
Next morning very soon we cross in Arizona and riding all day long with not much happening, other than we slowly learn about the intricacies of the bikes. i.e. fuel gage. The fuel gage has a few bars and those basically tell you how much you have used of 2.6 gallons. Wait, 2.6 gal? Should there be at least 1.5 gals more? There are, so basically we started to treat the flashing empty light as: "Its now time to look for a gas station. No reason to panic, in normal riding mode you have about 100 miles left and even in WOT you have about 60 to 70 miles left. So just do not enter sections on the road where they say: "Next service 110 miles" other than that you are good. Get gas whenever you feel like" And quite frankly on a X-country trip like this I need to pee anyway, so no reason not to fill up the bike while you are at it (Although I have been told the bike does not run on pee, so you may want to use gas instead)
Anyway, at the end of the day we arrive in a little town on the border of Arizona an NM. Found a terrific little hotel with lots of charm and the rooms are not your typical chain hotel but have charm.
And *NO* TVs in the rooms! Yeay!
During breakfast we talk to the owners and they recommend to stay on 70 and then take Route 9, which goes along the Mexican Border as an alternative to I10 and as something that is "different". We say, fine, I force the GPS to change the route to take us to Route 9 without looking where that will bring us. On off we go. Soon we cross over I10 just to go further south.
This is still on route 70 in Arizona or maybe already in NM
One direction:
And the other direction:
And the fact of just how many cars you see and that I was perfectly fine in the middle tells you just how much traffic there was on this road.
So, after we crossed I10, the road very soon changed:
And from there it went to gravel and then sand
15 wonderful miles of dirt. But soon we were back on the tarmac and on our way south to Route 9. If you want to look up Route 9, then look on the southern edge of NM, where NM borders Mexico, then pull up the zoom, until you see a road along that border. 120 miles of nothing. Then another gas stop in the middle of nowhere
And from there we were pretty soon (3 hours) in El Paso, and since at this point the bikes were at 900 miles we decided we would superslab it home. A decision that turned out to be better in the long run. Somewhere along I10 I changed the oil again on some (very windy) parking lot of a gas station in the desert.
This was also the spot were I realized the heat shield tab on the exhaust header was clear broken off
From there we continued on to Fort Stockton, TX, which by itself is very clear in the middle of nowhere. And where the white bike had a flat in the morning. Trying to get this fixed on a Sunday is as most of you know a loosing proposition, but we were really lucky. The tow truck operator had all the tools and so off came the rear tire and the tube was "fixed"
which got us back on the road, even if it was a bit later than planned. But since we had now clear over 1200 miles we had not second thoughts of running the bikes WOT (about 90mph indicated, 80mph ground speed) and we continued to Kerrville TX. Shortly before we got into Kerrville something much have happened again to the tube, because as well pull off into the gas station in Kerrville I can feel the rear moving, just as a flat tire feels. This time we are lucky enough that the flat is slow enough and a MC dealer is within reach, so we gas up, fill the bike with air and hurry to the MC dealer, knowing that we we will have to leave the bike there until Tuesday the very least, oh well, we will give the RX3 a workout, carrying both of us. As we get back on the freeway something interesting happens: I realize that the bike is nothing slower two up than one up. Up the hill one can feel the bike dropping in speed easier, but other than that it performs absolutely perfectly. This means that the last 300 miles we spent two up running most of the time into Houston WOT keeping up with traffic without any real problems. Did I mention that the seats are atrocious?
So, we are back home, We will be picking up the white bike next weekend, Steve from CSC is going to send me the parts that went bad on the trip home and we spoke at length about the spring problems, which incidentally are not Chinese problems. This is just for the folks that call at every moment they can that Chinese quality is sub-par. From everything I have seen on this bikeThere is little to nothing that points to sub par original manufacturing. And as far as the exhaust header tab goes: If that becomes a pattern, then maybe, The rest of the problems are somewhere else.
Not sure if this is appropriate, but if not mods/admins please feel free to delete the link: In any case, there is a dedicated forum to the RX3 owned operated by yours truly. If you need more information, more pics or anything else that we come across the RX3 feel free to join in the fun: http://rx3forums.com
Last edited:
- Joined
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- Location
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- Hogan
Beyond brave to jump on brand new unproven unknown bikes and ride over halfway across America!
I had to open up the intake and exhaust and install a feedback fuel controller to my more expensive no where near as equipped Taiwanese Honda to get it to go that fast.
I had to open up the intake and exhaust and install a feedback fuel controller to my more expensive no where near as equipped Taiwanese Honda to get it to go that fast.
If anyone is interested in getting a close up look at a Cyclone then make plans to attend our weekly meet up at "The Live Oak" this Wednesday. Andy has agreed to be there with his and his wife's new scoots. For info check out "West/Central Houston Dual Sport Meet Up" in upcoming rides and events.
SilverBullet
never slow down...you never grow old
apleschu
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It's called Adventure riding. Where is the adventure if everything is perfectly planned and you know everything is going to go just according to plan?
Besides, I did extensive research, and believe it or not, one can see a lot of important details from high res pictures. Now that we have both bikes home we are still happy, and we are even more happy the way CSC is supporting the bikes they sell. More about that on the rx3forum
This bike has been for sale in China and Europe for a while. People have rode this bike on China silk road adventure thousands of miles. And it seems to proven to be as good as any 3rd world-made Japan bike
. And so far, CSC seems to be providing excellent customer service.I want to see a drag race with the WRR.
Last edited:
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Same neighborhood
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- Haley
This bike has been for sale in China and Europe for a while. People have rode this bike on China silk road adventure thousands of miles. And it seems to proven to be as good as any 3rd world-made Japan bike
I want to see a drag race with the WRR.
WR will smoke a Cyclone. No question. WRs are ~100 pounds lighter, cost 2.25 times as much, and come with practically nothing necessary for adventure riding, but do have a way to tweek the EFI and a pretty good suspension for hauling butt. Two completely different mission objectives.
apleschu
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The customer service, response speed and the way CSC handles customer service is the best I have seen in the industry, by far! Every answer is promptly answered and even more important: The answer is technically competent, not some Enterprise BS everybody is almost used to already.
apleschu
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Thats a no contest. The WR, at least the 2015 model from I was able to see has 30HP. the RX3 has 25. plus as stated around 100lbs lighter.
In a drag race the WR wins over all short distances. Now, once the distance is greater than 200 miles that will turn around very quickly with the tiny fuel tank. Then if you are going to try to schlep gear with you it gets even worse.
As has already been said, different use case. Different requirements, different outcome.
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well? update? lost interest in them yet?