Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128082
Project bike By Restoring acouple of old motocrossers My 1979 Yamaha VZ250 - restored beyond its original beauty by Vintage Iron. P A UL C A RRUT HERS Old Yeller ~ !!Iii :Iii ~ iii III .. D ~ Q • "' As a high sch ool senio r in 1979, I took delivery of a brand-new Yama ha YZ250, rep lacin g the YZ125 that I'd ridden the tw o previ ou s years. Movin g to the 250 w a s a h u ge s te p fo r me, a nd I never totally felt comforta ble with the bike. It was big and fast. I was small and slow . Enough said . Anyway, to make a long story short (because there's p lenty more len gth to come), I rode the bike in an d around the San Diego area for a year or so before losing interest somewha t during my college years. Sho rtly afte r college, I ended up at Cycle News a nd have been su rrounded by the newest motorcycles eve r si nce . Old b ikes were so me thi ng th a t advertising salesman Terry Pratt rod e. I had little or no inter est in th e subject ma tter other than ad miring Pratt' s trophies and hearing the tales of his latest br eakdown/ crash / win . While I went on to bigger and better thin gs, the old YZ250 sa t dejectedly in storage at my parents' ho me. Dad kept moving it from place to place, complaining the enti re time . Since I had my own ho me, with a garage, he'd ask when exactly I was going to come and get the bik e . The last thing I wa n ted was a some what decrepit 20-year-old mo torcy" What do we have here ? cle further clutt er ing up.my already cluttered-up ga rage, so Lcon tinued to igno re bo th him, and the old YZ. Then Vint age Iron' s Rick Dou gh ty came into th e pic tu re. Dought y so meho w go t wi nd o f th e fact tha t I had access to th is old YZ, and si nce he's always try ing to get more people involved in vin tage and evolution-class motocro ss, he called with the offer to hel p me 'get the bi ke back to a usable state. Since I had absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain, I finally went d own to dad's place, opened up the shed and removed Old Yeller. Yuk! If I didn't like her m uch before, I definitely was n' t falling in love with her now . Doug hty picked the bike up and told . me that I'd soon be racing it. Yeah, yea h, blah, blah, blah, whatever, I thou ght. He sto rmed off in his va n and a few weeks later retu rned ... It was love at seco nd s ig ht. What Doughty ha d done with the bike was r amazing. Now I was suddenly tu rn ing into Pratt, wit h visions of racing ot her old guys on other old bikes dancing in my head. Now I had a Doughty-induced goal: To race the bike in his Vintage Iron Wor ld Championships. But let's regress a little bit first. Let's look at how Old Yeller was reborn - from disliked shed-filler to ado red race bike. The first step of any res tora tion project, accord ing to Doughty, should be assessing exactly what you've got. "We give it a good once-over," Dou ghty said. Part of that includes getting the bike to run, a pr ocess that tells p lenty abou t what you're dealing wit h. Af ter starting O ld Yeller, Dough ty discovered that it was a bit loose arou nd the piston . Other than that it was just a matt er of thin gs like the carbu reto r being a bit gu m med up. Th e clutch wo rked, and it ran thro ug h all its gea rs. Whew! "Even thou gh the carburetion wasn't right, we were able to run it through the gears," Dou ghty ex p lained. "Once we assessed wha t the co n di tio n o f the engine was, we wen t into d isassembly mode." Pass the hammer, Bob The disassembly of old motorcyc les boils down to much, much mo re than just taking stuff apart - it involves par t-by-part ins pec tion. At Vintage Iron, everything is taken apart, checked and rech ecked, wit h certain wea r items being measured Continued on page14 : Atale Of two bikes, one restored professionally, the i other by the owner, both of which ended up being ; ridden at the same race...