Godzilla vs King Kong!  What else can you do after nearly four years of Rick Sieman building an affordable used dirtbike - no, two - than compare them at the end?  This is an awesome piece, with blunt and honest recomendations, opinions and suggestions.  From SuperHunky himself.  And we won't even charge you for it. You're welcome!  Here's a taste:

"Not everyone wants to spend $7,500 on a new fussy four-stroke motorcycle, especially one that needs a rebuild every 30 hours or so.We started with the Honda CRF230F and later on, due to an avalanche of mail, proceeded to work on a Yamaha TTR-230R. Both of these bikes are inexpensive, very reliable and parts are reasonable.The bikes have lower saddle heights than the fire-breathing motocrossers and have what might kindly be called "mellow" motors. That's another word for "slow."

We bought the Honda new (a 2005 model) for $3,000.The Yamaha, also a low-mileage 2005 bike, was purchased for $1,700.Yep, for about half the price of a new zoot-capri four-stroke, we ended up with two bikes.

The other thing we didn't want to do was spend a lot of money making the bikes better. Read the tests in most of the dirt bike magazines and they babble about $900 titanium mufflers and so forth.We didn't spend that much total in modifying each bike and ended up with much better machines than we started with..."

Need more?  Check out the whole article here: