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Awesome ride today, abouts 40 kms of gravel and No Exits with Matt on his CR250, both bikes performed great with the cool fall air. I think my bike still runs a little lean, but there isn’t much more I can do to richen the mixture other than drilling out to enlarge the main jet a bit. Not ready for such a permanent countermeasure though. I keep eyeing up a carb swap kit I found, a Mikuni TM40 flatslide pumper carb and all the conversion bits will run about $600. Should haul ass, but I got plenty other things to throw that kinda cash at first.
Tried my best to ride in on Tuesday morning, but I turned back home after about 500m, just too foggy. The weather is sooo glorious, but mornings just too crappy. I’m gonna try again tomorrow morning, but not feeling too confident.
Yesterday in The Shop, my buddy Preston’s atv is getting a mini tune-up. It’s a small Yami YFZ80 for his kids, it’s been going well all year but now just wont pop to life. I put the battery on charge last night, and pulled the spark plug to replace it. My local store didnt have a plug in stock today, so I’ll pick one up tomorrow, and hopefully the atv will fire tomorrow night.
That’s why I liked to flip the Japanese bikes before covid pricing took effect. You could buy them for next to nothing, put $100 into ’em and sell ’em for 2 or 3 times what you paid for them.
Seems the prices have started to come back down to reality lately. I haven’t been looking, but Marketplace throws one at me every now and then.
Today in The Shop, a $5.85 Spark plug brought Prestons mini atv back to life. Practically fired on the third chug. My oldest rode it the 200 m to Prestons house where his almost 3-y/o daughter was all smiles. The only payment I wanted was a high-five from the lil one, but no luck. A fist bump from Dad was all I could muster. Maybe next time.
I keep looking on kijiji for Japanese stuff as it’s my favourite to wrench on as well, but nothing has really caught my eye.
Today the donor was picked up by my local scrapper, handed Sam an envelope with$200 and was on his way.
So far my 3RZ swap has cost me roughly $1,000. Paid $900 for the donor, bought engine swap mounts for $300, and now sold the carcass -$200. I’ve got roughly a $1,500 rock auto shopping cart, but the sale of the fuel injected SBC and TH350 to offset that cost.
Tomorrow in The Shop I’m hosting my buddy Dave for some beers and BS, will prolly push Matt’s DR back in here to resume work on it. I need to check valve clearance, put in a decompression cable, and do a spark gap test.
Today in The Shop, Matt’s DR600 fired on carb clean, and ran on the gas in its tank! I was able to go through all 5 gears heading down the street, then return home. I even stalled once and restarted on the first kick.
Last night I modified and adjusted the manual decompression valve cable. I also checked and adjusted the intake/exhaust valves. The intake were perfect, the exhaust pretty tight, more than 1 full turn out. The spark checked pretty strong too. Then we lost power for the night, so I quit working haha. Finished assembling the bike today, and kicked the shit out of it with carb clean in the cylinder.
Matts bike pulls pretty hard for having no accelerator pump. What remains of the mechanism is eff’d, so I rtv’d the linkage ports shut.
Just in time to pack it away for winter unfortunately. Guess its up to Matt if he wants to fill the tank and go for a tour.
Yesterday in The Shop, Matt popped over to check out his running bike. I gave him the starting procedure I came up with, and she fired on a couple kicks.
The headlight didnt come on, but the battery is pooched, maybe not enough voltage to even come on. The wiring and bulb all look good though.
Matt Spent the next hour pealing decals and scrubbing adhesive residue.Matt and I went for a ride yesterday, and these bikes are quite evenly matched. The lack of accelerator pump on his bike made no real impact, its still torquey with lots of pep. Neither the headlight, nor the tails running light came on, for which both circuits are powered through the left handlebar switch. Seeing as that switch is badly damaged, I told Matt to find any replacement on ebay and I’ll wire it in, and temporary I can hotwire that switch ON so long as ignition is on.
His bike is still tough to start cold, so I pulled a plug and gave’r a shot of carb clean….fired first kick.Went for a season ending ride on Nov 10, weather was freakin’ perfect. Rode 90kms of mainly gravel from 3-5pm in 15 degree blue skied weather. Both bikes hauled ass and ran flawless.
We traded bikes for a few kms, and I like mine better. My new clutch is butter smooth, rear brake less grabby, bars tilted better for my lanky arms and grips are a smaller diameter. Just a few little differences that I’ve made in last 2 years has made a big impact overall. It was strAnge that we each thought the other guys bike was faster than our own. I may just pull my carb apart again this winter and try to fatten up the fuel mixture some more.That’s all my riding for the year though, I got the closure I was seeking on Thursday. Got roughly 3,000kms put on this year, less than I hoped, but good enough considering I was waiting on parts for most of July and September
Today in The Shop, I got a lot completed.
I got a surprise day off today when my wife awoke with a ragin’ migrane, and needed me to get the kids off to school and daycare. As of 9am, I was free to wrench.
On Truckee, I put a dent in my overdue maintenace list. I did an oil change, greased the driveline zerks, changed the spark plugs, cleaned the MAF sensor and replaced a failed gasket in the exhaust, and serviced the brakes all around.
I still am overdue for oil changes in both diffs, trans & tcase, and a brake fluid flush. I would really benefit from shocks all around, and prolly a full set of upper and lower control arms. I’m at just over 180,000kms, and a lotta my “overdue list” are OEM parts that are 10 years old. I have changed all the driveline oils previously, but that was about 85,000kms ago. Front struts are bone stock originals, rear shocks have at least 100,000kms on them.Just a half hour ago I made a huge improvement to my snowblower, where I swapped out a “joystick” style chute controller, for the traditional worm gear hand crank. My buddy was scrapping a dead snowblower, so I harvested the conversion pieces I had been trying to purchase from MTD for almost 10 years. I still need to use some epoxy on the auger engagement lever because it stick ON. However, that’ll be another day.
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Recently in The Shop, reassembled Matts bike after it got some cosmetic uogrades. He put new grips on, got my buddy to recover the seat in an OEM pattern, and I applied a cool “pixel” livery he grabbed online. His bike looks damn cool, easily doubled the curb value of it with just the seat and decals.
I’ve attached a before and after for comparison.
He hasn’t even seen the results yet, perhaps he’ll pop over tonight after his wife gets home from her weekend away.
Two small wins in The Shop last night. I finally got the 3RZ off the engine hoist and onto the rotisserie stand. Finally the hoist is open to yank the small block out of Redee.
Secondly I repaired my snowblower. Right at the beginning of a non-stop snowing weekend, I lost control of travel speed and direction. It was an easy fix to pop the control linkage back into the friction wheel sliding bearing, and re-bend the control linkage back to its original shape. With the linkage separated I was left woth Forward travel at FULL speed, not ideal for how much snow we got.
An hour overall, but so much better off on both frontages.
Next up is an oil change on the Caravan, and some winterizing on the bike. I also gotta make a “start and run” video for the small block. Hopefully that’ll make it easier to sell
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