I find that if I ride fast on a road I consume alot of fuelbut I can ride on the trail driving 3 times as much and it will use only a fraction of what it uses on the road!?!?!?

 

About the only thing I can do is ask if when on the road in 4th or 5th, are you lugging the engine? If so, you will burn more fuel as the engine is working even harder than it does when in a lower gear and rapped up higher. If trail riding and in a lower gear and up in the rpm's, you are a bit higher in the powerband and the fuel burns more effeciently. You should be able to feel and hear the difference between running correctly and "lugging" the engine.

Hope this makes sense.

 

Like I said in one of my posts that mine went through a LOT of fuel but it was running like crap and I asume that is why?

 

A machine not running correctly will always burn more fuel. A 4 stroke only makes power on every 4th stroke. If you do the math, the bike has 75% power consumption to get 25% output. If your machine mis-fires one time, it then takes 8 strokes to get that one single power stroke. Every time it misfires, the engine has to work harder to keep the rpm's up. This would constitute true lugging and will literally "eat" fuel in order to maintain a normal operating speed.

Hope this makes sense.

Something else to keep in mind is the jetting. Being spot in is ideal. If you take a machine and jet it just a tad on the "fat" side (rich), it will burn more fuel than say a larger displacement engine that is tuned to a gnat's rear end. Proven Fact... My buddy has a pretty stock wolverine, I have a totally tricked out Wolverine that's bored and stroked to be a 435. We rode the exact same terrain, same mileage, same speed, and the same day (within 50 feet of each other) and his machine burned more fuel. Just goes to show that if a machine is rich, all of the fuel is not burned and the most possible power is not generated.

 

Here is the way I see it. On the open road I can ride wide open for looooooooooooonng periods of time. On the trails I ride, even with an underpowered 500, I can only hold it wide open for no more than about 3 seconds at the most. If I figure it out, average wise, I bet I'm under 10mph more than 90% of the time.
If you don't have a pumper carb the WOT time will kill the fuel mileage. If you have a pumper carb, that will kill mileage because of the shot of fuel evertime you pop the throttle on.
95Wolverine makes a good point about the tune of the machine.