My best friend bought a Kymco 700i for his birthday back in October of 2016. The ATV is damn good even with the Arctic Cat powerplant (I believe). The down side is my friend is a rather large guy and with the small suspension travel he bottoms out more than usual on the trail. What is a great set of shocks for this ATV to make the ride better for him? Possibly more travel as well. All suggestions are appreciated.

 

Don't know what they share with Arctic Cat, but the AC 700 is pretty strong. I know a few guys with Arctic Cat 700 Diesels have switched to Elkas to get a better ride. The shocks on my AC Diesel won't bottom out with 2-250 lb riders. I think the AC Mud Pro's have quite beefy shocks that also fit the Diesel. If the Kymco dealer sells Arctic Cat as well, get the parts guy to measure the Kymco vs Arctic Cat ones. Perhaps, if they are interchangeable , then he has several choices: Elkas , AC 700 SuperDuty Diesel, Mud Pro and 1000 cc ThunderCat ones. If he can't find out from the dealer, get the measurements, fully compressed and fully extended front and rear, I'll try to measure my Diesel. Diesel weighs 900 lbs. Here is a picture from the rear with the plastics off.

 

Most any of the aftermarket supply houses should be able to make a recommendation for you. One that comes to mind is "SidexSide Stuff" and yes they handle ATV stuff as well, I have had good luck with them.
By the way just so you know, the 700 in the Artic Cat atv is a Kymco engine, they make many of the Artic Cat drivetrains as well as Suzuki, Kawasaki, and the smaller Polaris engines. Kymco is a name to be recognized as their build quality is second to none.

 

Not so sure about Kymco and Polaris unless Polaris got rid of Aeon for the smaller youth market.Aeon even started making some youth machines for Yamaha starting in 2015 according to their time line.Aeon Motor

 

Can't say for positive, when I was searching for Kymco history there were a couple articles talking about Kymco making the small youth atv's for Polaris. Can't say whether Kymco and Aeon had any connections. I know that Kymco was originally a Chinese co that Honda hired to help build engines but required them to move to Tiwain which they were looking to do anyway but the Honda incentive speeded up the process. Once settled in Tiwain they began to grow leaps and bounds and used Honda's quality control to improve the products. They became the largest producer of scooters in the world and then expanded into atv's using much of the Honda engineering ideas which pissed off Honda so they split shortly after as Kymco started looking into the American market.

 

Well thanks you guys. I'll look into getting the measurements and go from there. It'll be a little hard to do without him noticing lol.