I remember ofreen having one for a while.
I had a 2002. It was a great bike. Great range because of the 6 gallon tank and 55+ mpg. Great commuter bike due to torquey and smooth motor, nimble handling and tall seat height giving good visibility. In spite of the "Kan't Leave Road" mockery by the XL and DR riders, it is a good adventure bike.
I made my own tools and did the doohickey replacement on it. The original was still intact, but it was a flimsy thing. I believe most of the problem with the original design was that people would overtighten the bolt when doing the adjustment, like some guys will do with the cam chain tensioner bolt on a CB750. There is a company called Happy Trails here locally that used to have a shop (I think they are just internet these days). They would have "doohickey days" where customers could come in with their bikes to swap them out. I went to a couple of them and saw 1 or 2 broken ones. The original welded doohickeys were thin and soft, so if the bolt was overtightened they were gouged and cracked. Happy Trails sold a lot of $100 replacement kits that included a torsion spring that replaced the factory coil spring. The torsion spring was a little controversial. There were two schools of thought about where to drill the hole for the torsion spring leg. The location specified by the included instructions put too much tension on the chain in my opinion. I installed one because all the cool kids said you needed it. But you could hear a loud howl when running down the road, so I put the factory spring back in and all went back to normal. I probably could have just drilled another hole in the alternate position that put less tension on it, but I don't think there is anything wrong with the factory spring.
Kawasaki finally updated the doohickey, in 2008 I believe, that I think solved the problem. Happy Trails still recommended swapping the new ones out, but I think they just missed the money they made from feeding doohickey paranoia.
Handling in the twisties is great. Some people don't think so. The long travel suspension means you have to be smooth with throttle and brake inputs, which you need to do to ride any bike well, but hamhanded riding will have a KLR pitching around. The stock exhaust is ridiculously heavy, but all the aftermarket ones I've seen are too noisy. The stock rear shock is poor. But over all a great bike that is even a decent highway tourer.
