It's been done many times before, nothing new here but I thought I'd post my little write-up on putting an IMS tank on a 2006/07 KLX.

There are three choices for a 2006/07 for a bigger tank, a 2.7 gal Clarke, a 3.7 gal Acerbis and the 3.2 gal IMS.

The Clarke is most easy to install, pretty much a bolt-on from what I hear. But it gives nominally only 0.8 gal of additional capacity.
The 3.7 gal IMS is popular choice since the fitment is pretty good. But it's certainly not the prettiest tank around and to get a use of all the 3.7 gallons one must either use an elaborate system of hoses, pumps and other plumbing parts or consider the last 0.5 gallons or so a "reserve" that becomes useful only by tipping the bike over to drain gas from the tank wings that normally are located lower than the drain to petcock.
So I decided to go with the IMS. It gives a usable 3.2 gal capacity with simple gravity feed, has a real reserve and can be installed to retain a close to factory look.

The downside is that the IMS is REALLY tight fit and requires some cutting & bending of the shrouds if you want to make it look good.

It took me the spare time of a full weekend of slow and careful work (plus a trip to Ace hardware) to install the tank. Here's a work-in-progress picture of the tank. You can see that the left side wiring harness has been re-routed, so is the coolant hose to expansion tank and ignition coil plus a relay from the front wiring harness has been relocated.
Supposedly it is possible to shoehorn the tank in place without relocating the ign coil, I couldn't see a way to make that happen without simply using a brute force.




Here's a view of the "tank cavity" how it needs to look like to take the IMS tank. Each leg of wiring harness has been re-routed to run along the frame tubes, the two wiring harness tabs have been removed, ignition coil is moved 35mm up and all the wiring stuff originally close to the upper coolant hose has been cleared away. The tank is so tight fit that even the coolant hose clamps should be rotated so that the tightening screw and excess tail point away from the tank.




Since I'm running a TM36 carb I also had to modify it a little bit. The close cable must be removed (I never used one before) and the bracket for one must be cut off. What is not maybe absolutely mandatory is to also cut off the upper half of the bell crank. It is possible to locate the tank just-so not to touch the bell crank, but to give it more margin and make sure the throttle moves without obstruction even if tank moves around a little the crank must be cut down.




This is another closeup of the area in front of the tank. Both the coil and coolant hose have separate "pockets" molded into the tank. To make the coil to sit in its pocket I relocated the coil 35mm up. The red thing is a heat-shrink cover for dummy radiator fan connector. The original fan must be removed and until I find the energy to work on a new slim-line fan I'll just run sans a fan. In all the time I've owned the KLX the fan has come on only once, I'm not worried to run without one.




There's also what looks like a relay that's originally located above the ignition coil, I relocated it to the left side of the head tube. The area in front of the tank is really tight. If you want to make the tank slip in and out more-or-less like the stock, you need to clear up all the room there in front as you can.




The good news is that the end result looks quite good and works like a factory piece. I scored a cheap but little scuffed up set of 2006 shrouds that used for this project. Each shroud was cut to make it fit the tank outline and then re-formed with heat gun to make it follow the shape of the tank.




Here's a better close-up how things fit together. For even cleaner look I'll take some black decal tape fill-in that little triangular area at the upper front corner. To make things fit even this good you need to cut into the shrouds a fair bit and heat them up to form them to follow this tank.




A view from the left side. The "ebay shrouds" are missing the sticker on this side, since the project worked out this good I'll probably fork out to money and get a new 2006 sticker for this side.




And lastly, here's the rider's view of the new tank. Looks good even from here but man it took some work to get to this point.
BTW, the handlebars are from a BMW GS.




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Mikko

 

Great write-up. Efforts like yours are very helpful in the decision-making process!

 

Well done. Nice clean instal. That will be good news for a lot of guys with the older bikes.
Dan

 

Great intro for the 09 owners that will be doing the same with their new IMS tanks. Me included.

Good Job

How hard is it to change plugs? Looks like the cap is touching the tank

 

The camera angle fools the eye, the cap still comes off without a problem.
I didn't try to fit a plug socket there yet but one that's not too long should fit fine.

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Mikko