11/2/2014   PROJECT UPDATE

 Before I retired I picked up an 85 Yamaha 750 Virago from one of the guys I worked with. He had bought it out from under me around fifteen years ago from another coworker. Over the years I had given him a bunch of good natured teasing about it because I never saw him ride it nor did he ever talk about it. I just figured he wrecked it and let it go at that. He would say it was still around and that he "needed" to get it going.
 One day out of the wild blue he showed and said that if I wanted the bike to come get it. He'd just give it to me to get it out of his way. A buddy offered his trailer and we went to see if it was worth hauling off. Once we got there I was shocked to see that it was in REALLY GREAT shape. From what I could get out of him it had sat most of the time he had it with the carburetors off, He had taken them off to rebuild them and couldn't get them to go back on. Over the years he had hinted how hard they were to get on but never really came out and said anything.
   

     We loaded the old bike and headed to the house where we dumped it off at the Cline Motor works R & D   shop and promptly got busy doing other things.
    A few days ago I was at the shop poking around and looked it over. I had managed to get the carbs back on and was wondering about if it would even fire. I rigged up a gas feed from a milk bottle to feed it and put a battery on it, hit the starter and it fired! Fired up and ran after 13-15 years sitting in an open air shed with the carburetors off. I was impressed. It didn't sound rough it sounded pretty good, smooth except for the hollow pipes the original owner had cobbled up. I was impressed.

There wasn't to much left to do other than the clean up. Seems that sitting for so long a lot of grass and leaves had piled up on the exhaust pipes. They burned off and it looked like for a little bit that I was burning the shop down. Smoke was everywhere. (lol.... had the neighbors looking and wondering. )
  The only other problem that I found was a couple of small holes in the gas tank. A dab of JB Weld and we're almost in business. Got lots of clean up to do and an inspection of the wiring harness to make sure. Should all be "Peaches & Cream" in a couple of weeks.

catch ya on the road