Our daughter said she'd bought a quad and wanted to come for the weekend to try it out. She showed up with a '16 CFMoto 800. I just bit my tongue. We headed out in the hills on Saturday. The battery was weak so I'd put a charger on it. I have an extra car battery that we put in the back along with some jumper cables just in case. We got about 5 miles when it started to choke out and died. The battery was pretty well dead. We had a drink of water and talked about it, planning to get it turned around to tow it home. Then it started and was running fine. We headed back down and it did it again a mile later. Let it sit 5 min and it would take off again. We got it home ok and she went to town for a new battery and some injector cleaner. The cleaner said to add it when the tank was close to empty, start it to get the cleaner through the injectors, then fill the tank. I siphoned most of the gas out, dumped in the cleaner and started it. Then we let it sit overnight so the cleaner could work. She got a good AGM battery that we put in.
Next morning, I tapped the key and It insta-started. It was running great. We headed back to the hills and that thing ran like a scalded cat. We put on 52 miles yesterday on some really rough, steep, rocky trails and it ran great.
I think the previous owner had been using ethanol gas and the injectors were just gummed up from sitting. The problem is that nowhere in any manual I've seen does it tell you to avoid ethanol at all costs.
CFMoto is seldom on any list of top quality machines but this one seems to be a good one, at least for now. She's not afraid to drive it hard but normally won't be using it anywhere near as rough as where we went yesterday. Hopefully it'll last her a while.
