Wow, where to begin? I thought I would do this in a single blog, but I quickly realized it’s going to take more than a few.

Joe Gresh thought it would be a good idea to do a comparison between the RX3 and the RX4, and since he’s the brains in this outfit (I’m the good looks), I started the photos for the comparo earlier today. There’s a lot to discuss, and I don’t want to try to cram it all into a “Gone With The Wind” single blog.

So, here we go with the first set of comparisons, and I guess as good a place to get started as any is with a shot from the rear of both bikes…

You’ll notice that my RX3 has the stock plastic luggage and the RX4 has the optional Tourfella aluminum luggage. The RX4 will come stock with the same plastic panniers as the RX3, but it will have a taller tailbox than the current RX3 design. The current RX3 tailbox won’t close with a full face helmet, but the taller stock plastic tailbox to be provided on the RX4 will. I’m hoping the 2019 RX3 will have the taller tailbox, too.

The Tourfella luggage is a great option. Both sets of luggage are lockable; the stock plastic bags use the bike’s ignition key. The Tourfella luggage has a separate key. The Tourfella bags have considerably more capacity than the stock plastic bags, and when I rode in Colombia with good buddies Juan and Carlos, my AKT RS3 (a carbureted RX3) had the Tourfella bags. You get a huge increase in capacity (which is nice), but the aluminum bags are wider and I’m guessing they are heavier. You’ll see a slight decrease in fuel economy and top speed with the larger bags on an RX3; I don’t know what they’ll do to both stats on an RX4.

I like the looks of both sets of luggage. I’m a guy who travels light, so the stock bags have been good enough for me on my adventure tours. One other minor disadvantage of the Tourfellas is they are wide. I scraped a taxi splitting lanes when debarking from a ferry ride down the Magdalena River in Colombia. Joe Gresh’s RX3 had the Tourfellas in China, and I watched him have the same problem a couple of times when splitting traffic there. & But those big aluminum Tourfellas sure are nice. They are a high quality bit of kit, too. & And like I said, you can carry a lot of stuff in those aluminum boxes.

Here are photos shot from the rear of each bike, starting with the new RX4…

And here’s my RX3. It’s one of the very first delivered to the United States, and I’ve done some serious traveling with this motorcycle. It has the stock plastic luggage.

Next up are two photos of the exhaust outlets. On the RX4, the muffler has two openings, suggesting the bike is a twin (it’s not; it’s a single like the RX3).

As I mentioned in my earlier blog on the RX4, the new bike sounds like the RX3, but you can tell it has a bigger and stronger engine. Both bikes sound almost as if they have a custom pipe. They are both actually a little bit louder than I’d like, but the sound is great. Good ExhaustNotes, I’d say.

Moving to the other end of both motorcycles, let’s take a look at the front brakes. The RX4 has twin-piston calipers and dual disks…

The RX3 has a single disk with a twin-piston caliper up front. My bike has the CSC larger diameter brake rotor. I think this is a worthwhile addition to the RX3, but I also think the stock RX3 brake is sufficient.

If you look closely at both of the above photos, you’ll see the two front wheels are different. I’ve already mentioned the RX4’s 19-inch front wheel (the RX3 has a standard 18-inch diameter front wheel, with a 19-inch wheel available as an accessory from CSC). What is also shown (but maybe is not so obvious) is that the RX4 has aluminum rims, while the RX3 has steel rims. I think that might be what makes the RX4 handle so well. Aluminum wheels mean less unsprung weight, and they also make a motorcycle handle more crisply.

The production RX4 motorcycles will have anti-skid braking, and unlike the the 2018 RX3 ABS, you’ll be able to turn the ABS off on the RX4. That’s something you dirt denizens asked for, and your voices have been heard. The RX4 will come standard with wire wheels (like you see in these photos), and cast aluminum wheels with tubeless tires will be an option. The RX4 wire wheels require tubes.

Here are couple of tangential thoughts intended for the wizards at Zongshen (they read ExhaustNotes, too, you know). I’d like you guys to consider adding the dual discs, the aluminum-rimmed wire wheels, and the switchable anti-skid braking on the 2019 RX3. That would make an already great motorcycle even better, I think.

Both the RX3 and the RX4 have Cheng Shin (CST) tires. They’re bigger on the RX4 (more on that in the next blog). These are good tires. They hook up well and they last a long time. I get about 6,000 miles out of a rear tire on my RX3, and as is the case with most motorcycles, the front tires last about twice as long as the rear tires.

Staying at the front of the motorcycle, let’s now take a look at the face of both bikes. This is my RX3…

CSC changed the windshield and headlight design on the RX4. During my trips to Chongqing, I saw that Zongshen evaluated using the same RX3 windshield and headlight on the RX4. I thought keeping the windshield would have been a good idea, but hey, what do I know? The RX3 windshield has been universally praised by everyone who has ridden an RX3, including every magazine that tested the bike. It is a good design. It just works…there’s no turbulence, and it’s well below your line of sight. But like I said, who am I? I don’t make a million motorcycles a year. Zongshen does.

The RX3 headlight…well, that’s not the RX3’s strong point. Being charitable, I’d say it’s anemic. I don’t ride at night if I can avoid it, but I recognize that the stock headlight doesn’t light up the world the way I’d like it to. The spotlights you see on my bike are from AKT Motos in Colombia. I had them on the RS3 I rode there, and I liked them so much that my good buddy Enrique Vargas gave a pair to me when I left his beautiful country. CSC sells accessory spotlights, too, but I kept the AKT Motos lamps on my bike. I use the spotlights as headlights on my RX3 when I ride at night. Many folks who buy an RX3 put a brighter bulb in the headlight, and that works well. I have one that my good buddy TK gave to me, but I haven’t put it on my bike yet.

You’ll also notice the very cool headlight guard on my bike. That was another gift from Enrique in Colombia. CSC now sells a similar headlight guard. Mine is Colombian, and I’ve kept it instead of the CSC headlight guard because it was a gift and I like it.

Onward and upward…here’s the front end of the new RX4…

The RX4 headlight and windshield design are much changed from the RX3. Like I said above, CSC could have gone with a front end look identical to the RX4, but they opted instead for the new look. It’s grown on me. I would be okay with either one, and at first I recommended staying with the RX3 look because I feel it is an iconic Zongshen motorcycle face, but I like the new look, too. The new RX4 windshield is adjustable (the RX3 one is not). The headlight is a completely different design, and later tonight, I’m going to move both bikes onto the street to see how the headlight illumination patterns compare. I’ll try to get some photos so you can see the difference.

Let’s take a look at the fuel tanks. First up is the RX4 tank, and the big news is that it holds 5.3 gallons instead of the RX3’s 4.2 gallons. Here’s the RX4 tank…

You can’t help but notice the paint on this motorcycle. CSC received three bikes for the U.S. certification effort…one in silver, one in red, and one in orange. My bike has the metalflake orange color and it’s visually arresting (it will stop you in your tracks when you see it). Here’s a close up…

There are really three or four colors going on here. One is the metalflake orange. Another is the metallic silver on the tank’s side panels. A third is the even darker metallic gray on yet another side panel (you’ll see that in another photo below). And the fourth is the black of the frame and the molded plastic body bits. It all comes together nicely.

You can compare that to the orange on my 2015 RX3…

I mentioned the RX4’s 5.3 gallon capacity. Okay, let me explain a bit more. I haven’t attempted to actually run the thing dry and put 5.3 gallons of gasolina in the tank. 5.3 gallons is the figure Zongshen provided. The RX3’s spec is 4.2 gallons, but that’s not the right number. The RX3’s tank would hold 4.2 gallons if there was nothing else in it, but the tank is also occupied by the float for the sending unit and the fuel pump, and they both take up space. Gerry and I once took a bone dry RX3 tank with the fuel pump and sending unit in it to a gas station, and after really finessing the gas station pump, we were able to coax 3.9 gallons into the RX3 tank. I don’t know if the same situation applies to the RX4 tank. Maybe that 5.3 gallon statistic is really 5.o gallons.

The other thing going on in the RX3 is that the fuel gage and the fuel warning light indicate you are out of fuel when there’s still something close to a gallon left in the tank. As it was explained to me by the guys in Chongqing, that’s to make sure the fuel pump is always surrounded by fuel (it’s how the fuel pump is cooled). I don’t know if the same situation applies to the RX4 fuel tank. I have to get more miles on the bike to let you know.

So, let me do what I have a bad habit of doing, and that’s go tangential for a bit to tell you a little bit more about the RX3 tank, and in particular, the tank on my RX3. You’ll notice that my tank has a panel with a decal that says “Speed” on it. That was the first year of the RX3, and I guess it was Zongshen’s idea of making the motorcycle convey a fast image. The Internet weenies had a lot of fun with that. When they cornered me on it, I told them that CSC originally asked that the bike’s name be “Methamphetamine,” but we would have had to make the font so small you couldn’t read it. That got a laugh and the Speed teasing ended. Mercifully, CSC changed the name to “Adventure” the following year. There’s no such name label or decal on the RX4. I think that’s a good thing.

You probably notice all of the other decals on my RX3’s fuel tank. I like to think of them as campaign ribbons. We put one on their for each of the Baja runs, the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Run, and the Destinations Deal tour. I like them. Moving right along, here’s a side view of the RX4 showing the engine and fuel tank, and then a similar photo of the RX3…

There’s a lot to take in on those two right side views. Here we go, folks.

I guess the first thing to notice are the engine guards. In the old days, we used to call them crash guards, but these days it’s more correct to say engine guards. Whatever. Anyway, on the RX3, the engine guards extend all the way to the bottom of the engine. On the RX4, they only cover the upper portion of the bike. I don’t know why that is. It might be that if you drop the RX4 on its side, the upper portion is enough. But I don’t know this, and I’m not going to drop both bikes on their sides to find out.

On the RX4, the crank position windows are on the right side of the engine. You can see them just behind the spark plug on the cylinder on the right side. On the RX3, those viewing ports are on the left side of the engine.

The RX3 has an upswept exhaust pipe; on the RX4, the exhaust pipe heads south to run underneath the engine, and then heads north again to an upswept exhaust pipe (you can’t see that in the above photo). While some might view the RX4 exhaust routing as less than desirable from an offroad perspective, I’m okay with it. The RX4 has a steel engine skid plate, and the RX4’s exhaust routing makes getting to the oil fill port a lot easier (it’s just aft of the water pump).

You’ll notice that the cylinder, cylinder head, and upper engine mount castings are all much heftier than are those on the RX3. If you look at the cylinder head casting just aft of the cylinder head, you’ll see a weird-looking ribbed triangular extension with a threaded hole in it. It’s on both sides of the engine.

With that threaded hole, it looks like Zongshen left a part off the bike (there’s nothing there). My guess is that this feature is either used to support the engine when it is moving down the assembly line, or that it is there for mounting the engine in another frame (perhaps one of the Dakar rally bikes). I’d like to see Zongshen remove that part of the casting on the RX4 engine; it serves no purpose on the RX4 other than to add weight to a bike that doesn’t need to take on ballast.

The RX4 appears to have the same arrangement for the oil filter and the oil strainers as does the RX3. One strainer is accessible via a threaded cover on both sides of the crankcase; the oil filter is located beneath a cover on the right side of the engine.

Credit: exhaustnotes

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