Honda TRX450R - Abused

GT Thunder Stock Shock Rebuild
You just threw down more than six Gs of your hard-earned money to walk away with a brand-new Honda TRX450R. Excited about its potential performance abilities, you quickly realize that the handling is not what you expected. The suspension is harsh; you're constantly near an over-the-bar experience as the rear end tends to kick; and it is almost impossible to keep all four wheels on the ground while tackling fast corners. Sure, the TRX450R may be one of the finest-performing machines on the market, but its suspension is in dire need of an upgrade. The standard solution would be to throw down another two or three Gs and replace the stock suspension with aftermarket shocks and maybe even long-travel A-arms, but most of us don't have that kind of budget. So don't max out your credit cards just yet. There is an answer in the quest for first-rate performance on a budget: GT Thunder.

Laz Sommers and the rest of his staff at GT Thunder, located in Millersburg, Ohio, have done their homework over the past few years and discovered ways to drastically improve stock suspension at an affordable price. "Our goal is to transform your stock suspension to outperform aftermarket setups," Sommers explains. We shipped all three of our TRX450R shocks to GT Thunder, and a little more than a week later they were ready to be mounted up.

In a nutshell, this is what the pros at GT did: They added a new linkage to the rear shock to improve the leverage ratio, changed the wheel-travel progression ratio and altered the location of travel. The rear shock received new valving and a spring to match the changes and the rider's weight. For the front, GT Thunder magically grafted on an additional 1.5 inches of travel so the suspension has more room to work. Finally, the front shocks got the revalving work and a dual-spring setup to match the rider's particular specs and weight. This package is about $740-significantly less than the thousands charged for a good aftermarket setup.

The installation proved effortless; after all, we only had to remount the stock shocks. Once all of the bolts were tightened, we dropped the Honda to the ground and immediately welcomed several new inches of sag. This new, lower stance enabled the TRX to shed its tendency to roll in fast corners. To our great relief, the rear linkage helped diminish the kicking and bucking, allowing us to charge hard through rough terrain without the threat of an over-the-bar trip. Best of all, our bodies really appreciated the disappearance of the energy-robbing jolts that the stock suspension couldn't smooth. Overall, the GT Thunder shock rebuilds were just the ticket, and now we can confidently take our TRX450 to any starting line or simply out for a good trail ride.-Thad JoseY

Swisher 44-Inch Tow-Behind TrailcutterMowing the yard or clearing the brush off your land is about the last thing you want to be doing. Done the old-fashioned way, with a hoe, weed whacker or rake, it can be downright backbreaking. And the current crop of ride-along mowers have a hard time with anything larger than grass blades, let alone rugged terrain. Since we had a few large mowing jobs on the horizon, we looked into various options and found the Swisher 44-inch Trailcutter.

Nearly a commercial-level, or agricultural-specification, piece of equipment, the Trailcutter is roughly 550 pounds of machine. We assembled it in under an hour following the easy instructions, which are mostly for attaching the hitch. Ours had the 14.5-horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor (versus the 12.5-horsepower version), which included electric starting. As you can imagine, the motor has plenty of power and it started right up. There is a remote engagement (we attached the handle to the tow bar close to the hitch) driven through a belt and pulley system to the dual swinging blades.

Swisher claims the cutter will rip through sticks of up to 1.5 inches in diameter, and we can confirm this is true. In fact, we were cutting dry brush and small branches into the 2-inch range, just moving slowly so there wasn't too much cutting going on at once or it would slip the belt. If that happened, it was easy to stop, reach back and disengage the lever, then back out and whack slower. The motor hardly bogs down and seems to have good momentum with the blades. Being abusive (isn't that what this is about?), we tried to chop too thick of brush, to hit stumps and to cut way too much bulk at once, and the only causality was the belt slipping more and more until it finally grew too hot and started smoking. We suggest having a spare belt around anyway. We also thought more stuff would fly out and hit the rider of the quad, but all he got was dusty in the dry conditions.

The best feature of the Trailcutter is its ability to be set up to cut offset to either side of the quad. Just change the angles of the swivel joints on the hitch arm, which is easily accomplished with quick-release pins. That way you don't have to ride through the thick brush and the cutter slices through a half-length more trail to the side you choose. The wheels are large enough to get through most rough ground, with strong metal deflectors built in front to guide the Trailcutter around obstacles like stumps or rocks. The cut is adjustable from two to seven inches in height via a threaded handle.

We cleared five acres of scrub brush and sage on very uneven ground in about five hours with the Trailcutter. We also used it to cut a bush runway in a thick grass meadow (again littered with sage). The Trailcutter took three to five minutes to accomplish what it would take a human and a hoe one hour to do, making the $2060 price tag seem a lot more worth it. The price may be a tough pill to swallow initially, but the machine is clearly built tough and worth every penny in backbreaking labor it will save you. It leaves a nice mulched wake of destruction in its path and arguably makes mowing fun.-Jimmy Lewis