1968 Maico X4-A 360 Motocross Road Test - 5-Page Vintage Motorcycle Article

Description

1968 Maico X4-A 360 Motocross Road Test - 5-Page Vintage Motorcycle Article
Original, vintage magazine article.
Page Size: Approx. 8" x 11" (21 cm x 28 cm) each page
Condition: Good
SANTA CLAUS CAME early to
the staffers of CYCLE GUI DE this
year in the form of the new 1969 Maico
X4A 360 Moto-Cross motorcycle. Be-
tween our permanent staff and our two
guest testers, it seems we have ridden
most of the 360 bikes offered to the
public. In our opinion, the Maico
wraps all the good traits we have found
on various machines into one neat,
fairly inexpensive, highly desirable
package. It handles, Oh Lord, how it
handles. On the top end it will run with,
or beat its competitors, and for torque,
well, it starts in the cellar and goes all
the way to the attic. To say we were
impressed would be doing the bike a
great disservice.
Actually, the X4A started life two
years ago as the X4. At that time, it
was hard to start, handling wasn’t out
of the ordinary, but it did have one
redeeming feature, reliability. Since
the bike was first introduced the dis-
tributor, Frank Cooper (a well known
name in the cycle industry), has kept
hard at work developing the bike to the
point it’s now at.
In conjunction with his close friend,
Brian Fabre, a bike nut and an engi-
neer to boot, Frank has put in literally
thousands of hours working over the
frame, engine, and perhaps the most
important, the suspension. The X4A is
the culmination of two years' work.
The one area where the least amount
of change has taken place is in the
engine. But with Maico’s background
in engines, not too much of a change
was needed. What has been done is to
go to a forged Mahle piston that utili-
zes a Dykes compression ring. A
Dykes ring is ‘L' shaped and the ad-
vantage to this set-up shows up on the
ignition stroke of the engine. Very
little side wall pressure is normal with
a Dykes ring until the engine fires. At
that time, the exhaust gases try to
escape past the piston, i.e.: blowby. As
the gas charge explodes, it forces the
lip of the ring against the side of the
cylinder, thus blocking the charge
from the lower end.
The other big change in the mill can
be found at the connecting rod. The
crankpin has been enlarged to 25mm,
or for all practical purposes, one inch.
This has allowed the factory engineers
to enlarge the bearing area which will
lead to better engine life, which was
really not a problem in the first place.
Also, a needle bearing has found its
way to the small end of the rod, new for
’69.
One important point that not too
many people know about is that the
main bearings of the Maico are lubri-
cated by the transmission oil. The big
advantage to this is that the bearing
surfaces always run in an oil bath, not a
mixture of the oil and gas.
The wet, multi-plate clutch has a
tendency to drag if the bike is left in
gear with the clutch disengaged for any...
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