Recommend Me A Used Motocross Bike Please

I think I looked at the Yam Off Road Experience website but again there are no more days until March.

Re: modern/vintage: I know myself and seat height is an issue. I'm quite long legged for my height (31" inside leg) but I hate that feeling you get when you stop while riding a tall bike in that inch between when the bike tips over and your foot makes contact with the ground. That's on the road so I imagine it will be even worse on trails with weird cambers or when scrambling over rocks and I need to take a dab.

I’m a confident road and track (inters bordering on fast group) rider, but if I am being honest, tall bikes intimidate me and I can see myself not enjoying a modern enduro, whereas I think I’ll love pottering round the woods in a waxed belstaff and open faced lid on an old twin shock that I can flat foot....

I've had highsides and a nasty 100mph barrel roll through a gravel trap which beat both me and the bike up quite badly, but oddly, the thing I am most anxious about when riding is when I put my foot down and it slips or goes into a hole causing me and the bike to over balance. I dropped a 748 when my foot slid out from under me on gravel and a few years ago it happened again with an 848SF. That 3mph topple also broke my left tibia, as my leg acted as a deformable crash structure that thankfully protected the Termi end cans (cans replacement = £750, bone healing = £0).

I'm also leaning more towards a vintage enduro now as per @Jez900ie suggestion in this post Recommend Me A Used Motocross Bike Please because I think it would attract less police/Village Karen attention, and I honestly think pottering round the woods in a waxed Belstaff and open faced lid on an old twin shock would be a nice gentle intro into the off roading world. Cheaper too, as I won't need to buy a load of new gear to go with the lairy look of the bike.

If I enjoy it I can always upgrade to a KTM EXC300, whereas if I don't like the off road life, I would still ride something like a DT250 on the road, plus when I do upgrade to a modern bike, it would also make a good base for one of my custom projects. Something like this, which I absolutely love.

 

I have been looking for an experience day for weeks, but they all seem to shut down between Dec and March unfortunately.

I'm also not a total novice at it, as I popped my bike cherry on a DT125 which I used to rag around the fields, byways and tow paths where I grew up. The latter location being the place where the bike met a watery end when after a whole 3 weeks experience I felt that I was suitably qualified to teach one of my mates to ride, so with him at the helm and me on the pillion we were bombing along the side of the canal and I warned him to "Keep left as there's a big pothole on the right". Unfortunately it seemed all his CPU power was being diverted to other processes, he got muddled up, the front wheel went down the hole and me, him and the bike all pirouetted though the air and into the drink..

And like I said, in the unlikely event that I hate riding off-roading now that I'm 50 rather than 17 (which I still am in my head tbh) I will keep the bike, stick some road rubber on the rims and turn it into yet another half-finished custom job to join the others in the workshop

 

Update

After 24 hours and 37 photos worth of messaging with the seller of a decent Suzuki TS250 when it came to the crunch he went all weird on me, decided he couldn’t sell it when the lights were not working despite me offering full asking price. Then he blocked me on WhatsApp and took the listing off eBay. It was all friendly though. No crossed words. Very odd.

He’s a bit like me and has a motley collection of half finished vehicles so maybe his missus told him it had to go but he’s the motorcycling world’s version of Mr Trebus (the old Polish bloke from the TV program who’d hoarded 50 years of crap to such an extent that the council had to clear it all away), and he had a bit of a meltdown.

 

And I was banging both your wives at the same time while you were negotiating with him

 

Thanks for looking for me mate, but IME "easy project" usually means "I haven't got a fkn clue how to get this running", plus it's another one which doesn't have a V5. His ad is also so garbled that it's not even clear what engine is in it. The title says its' a 185, but the last barely literate paragraph of the info says it is a 125! He's also in Cornwall, so I'd either have to buy blind or take a long and expensive trip to view it. Also, isn't this a 4 stroke? I am dead set on 2T.

As I already have 2 unfinished projects of my own on the go, I need something that I can literally ride away and start using, but most of these type of bikes seem to be either unregistered death traps or nut and bolt concours jobs, with nothing in between.

I'm presently waiting for a call back or email from Holeshot MX re: lowering a KTM EXC300 that I have my eye on. If that is not cost-effective then I will keep my eye out for another Suzuki TS250 as I prefer the looks over the DT, but I am open to suggestions re: comparable models.