I bought an edsel!!

My brother has one.

Not a bad bike, from my experience.

I only rode it once, though.

Interesting, I've never seen one of those. " title="Laughing">

The relative uniqueness factor is always a cool reason to own something like that.

MXA, etc. can shit on them all they want to, that is a nice piece of machinery.

I demoed one and it was slow and heavy, but the suspension felt nice....at least compared to my '99 CR250.

whip,

funny how many in here would understand or even know what the hell is an "Edsel".

explaination, just another attempt from ford to be cool as a chevy and not get it done...... LOL

My buddy has a couple of the quad ones, he's broken everything from cases, to cranks, to clutches- you name it. Today he has the best of all the various production parts (some of which are actually excellent quality), along with lots of goodies that bring it to a 475cc motor, with 500cc+ in the future plans. It's actually very quick, and extremely torquey- front end is difficult to keep down.

I asked him why he's spent so much time and money on the Dale instead of a different ride. He replied that he liked having something a bit different than what everyone else had, really respected the folks at Cannondale for their efforts, and simply could not bring himself to ride a non-USA machine while this one was still available. He's certainly stuck to his beliefs.

I rode a Cannondale Cannibal a few times, they were beasts.

I don't care if it works or not, that is a fine looking piece.

We have a local racer that still races on one.

I saw one of those years ago at Triangle Cycles in Durham - very trick. Yeah, too bad they didn't make a go of it -

Just so you youngsters know why he called it an Edsel

[img:38t03zbm]http://www.americancarsuk.com/Previous_Cars/Edsel/Ford_Edsel.jpg[/img:3…]

dam that thing is still ugly as hell. LOL gimme a studebaker golden hawk, or s 57 buick special three window any time over that thing.

Be careful of the cooling system.
Not sure if I have the parts right, but I believe it was the valve cover is magnesium.
Now while this may seem cool, the rest of the engine (and cooling system) is aluminum, this creates a corrosion issue and the magnesium becomes the "sacrificial anode" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrificial_anode) in the system, similar to a zinc tab on a boat.

They corrected this on later models, but early ones it was a problem.
You can read about it on Cannondale forums

what the heck does the valve cover have to do with the cooling system?

I guess it has cooling passages.
I've never seen one disassembled personally, but got a ton of calls about it including from the R&D people at ATK and they always seem to say "head" or "valve cover"

Why did they have to make everything so weird? It's fun to look at but it's like a whole bike designed to answer questions nobody was asking. Probably was designed by the same engineers that designed KTM's gas caps.

i work at a dealership that sold those. they had alot off cool ideas. i only had the chance to ride thier atvs not the mx bikes. their full on race atv was a blast. maybe atk will get the things fine tuned. be nice to se an american made competative bike burning up local tracks. (besides cobra)

I missed a really clean one here in PA a few months back on Ebay. I bid $1700 and it went for $1850. It would have been cool to have just for the something different factor.

The forks alone are probably worth what you paid for it. It is a really interesting bike, but they just tried to do too much, too soon.

There are also issues with some of the earlier bikes internals.

Some of the nuts and bolts that were spec'd for Lock-Tite got missed, and stuff can come loose.

Check your serial # on a Canondale site.