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When the police in Chiang Mai started to clamp down on unregistered bikes I sold my Kawasaki Vulcan and my Suzuki GSX400 and bought a cheap chinese 200cc road bike.

I also bought a new Platinum PX 175 enduro style bike for riding short journeys around Chiang Mai and also because I take a couple of short cuts on a bike that have bumpy and unpaved roads.

I read up all that I could on this bike prior to making the decision to buy it, and it’s fair to say that lots of people have bought earlier Platinum PX175’s and had nothing but trouble, but this is a second generation Platinum PX 175 which is actually a whole different bike built in a different factory.

I remember back in 1981 my friend bought a new Honda XL125, I rode his bike a few times when it was still fairly new and this bike really does feel like an early 80’s Honda XL 125 with a slightly more powerful engine and electric start. Really it’s an old honda design made on the cheap in China with engines made in a factory that actually make OEM Honda engines, hence whatever the complaints about these bikes nobody has ever criticized the engine.

Things I like about this so far:

• Great Engine
• Full Size Bike
• Very Cheap

Things I dislike:

• Gearing is wrong, needs to be changed.
• Front Brake not very strong.
• Indicators hard to cancel.

I can fix the gearing by changing the sprockets easy enough, I can buy a Honda twin pot brake caliper on eBay cheap enough, and I can change the switchgear to Honda just as easy.

The bike was 52,000 baht, I reckon that if I need to spend another 20k on bits and bobs to bring it up to standard then it’s still a bloody good deal.

This is my second Chinese bike, so I knew that I had to go over it with a torque wrench, to my surprise there were no loose nuts and bolts on this one and it seems to be well assembled.

If Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki or Kawasaki sold a full size enduro style bike for under 125,000 baht in Thailand then I would have bought one, but they don’t. Platinum fill a gap in the market, time will tell if this was a good buy or not, but I’m willing to take a chance and I’m confident that it will be OK.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under Bikes, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.