Is It Possible To Over-modify A Pocket Bike?

It certainly is when you consider the available goodies to tweak your pocket bike, such as a racing exhaust, racing sprockets, uprated carb, juice boxes, boost bottles and an almost endless list of gadgets to challenge even the deepest of pockets.

But often one fact is overlooked:how much does is all this stuff weigh?

Performance is determined by power-to-weight ratio, so it seems counter-intuitive to seek improved performance by adding extra weight to the equation. Commonsense, dictates that we need to lose weight, not gain it. In theory, what we ought to do is take off all the bits we intend to replace and weigh them, then compare that figure to the total weight of their substitutes.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as that. The use of new materials has made many replacement parts lighter than stock parts. But this has to be balanced against the added weight of tuned pipes, velocity stacks, etc. and whether the actual gain in performance terms outstrips it all. If pocketbike riders were accountants - and some presumably are off-duty bean counters - they will recognize this conundrum as a variation on the classic cost-benefit analysis of the financial world.