2005 YZ250 - Ship of Theseus

What was that line from happy gilmore? My fingers hurt? 

If ben stiller really wanted to punish old people, he wouldn't threaten landscaping, he'd threaten cleaning an aluminum frame YZ250. In 2004, somewhere  outside of Tokyo near Iwata in Shizuoka prefecture, an engineering team designed this frame with a myriad of crevices, indents, and different textures on the frame. And you know what I have to say? Fuck those guys, cleaning this sucks.

I started off with car wash soap, a bristle brush, and just elbow grease to try and knock the dirt off.  

Now for the fun spots: 

Next came all purpose cleaner and some steel wool:

We're getting.........somewhere, but I'm not thrilled with how it looks.  

Next step is to hit it with Aluminum Brightener + Red Scotch Brite, Red Scotch Brite + Dawn, Gray Scotch Brite + Dawn, and then finally SOS + Dawn.  Am I gonna do that tonight? Probably not, I'm probably gonna drink beer instead.

Scrolling marketplace today led to an incredible find; a 2016 YZ250 roller that was mis-labeled, mis-taken, and mis-used for christ knows how long.  Not sure if God was smiling down upon me when I named this thread, but this really is the ship of theseus now.  I'll be swapping the engine, fuel tank, radiators, exhaust, carb, subframe, and seat on to this bad boy. 

$250 later and it was in the bed of my truck

Home and ready for a deep clean

DO NOT LET PERFECTION BECOME THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS

I've yoinked the ol' motor and swapped in the 05. The full frame scrub and love will come at a date yet to be determined, I want to ride this thing.

Looking at this bottom end requires a penicillin shot.

I'd like to send whoever stripped this sub-frame bolt a bag of my dog's fecal sample.  Bringing the bike to a welder tomorrow to weld a nut on and finally get it out after it ate my Irwin Hanson extractor bit. 

In the meantime, I've re-blued the welds and re-packed the muffler to keep building progress. 

Local welder/alchemist/witchcraft expert had this bolt out in about 30 minutes of working it.  Nice to find somebody whose skill can be seen just from the damn workshop when you pull into their house.

With that said, when I got home I re-installed the new subframe, the exhaust, kickstarter, shifter, and tried to get the new chain slider in.  This is the pinnacle of italian engineering folks.  I swear, Acerbis may as well say FIAT on the side now; if you ever meet somebody that works in Acerbis engineering and especially QC, kick them in the balls for me.

Here's how she's sitting as I head to the brewery 

Don’t tell Rocky Mountain that when I request a return!

It's friday night, Alice in Chains is blaring in my garage, and I am 99.5% ready to go ride tomorrow. 

Sorting through the carb on re-assembly, when I turned the gas on, it would piss fuel everywhere.  Found the first cause was a piece of the needle that most likely degraded over 20 years, cleaned, re-assembled, bent the float, and voila, good as new.

After that, try as I might I could not get the bike to start. Tried fresh gas, tried a new spark plug, nothing. Finally after brainstorming and reading countless old threads, I unplugged the kill switch and it fired on I kid you not, the 2nd kick.  Was a beauty to hear run.

Finally, I moved on to new twinwalls, new grips, new clutch cable, and a brand new ARC lever and perch.

Here's how it's sitting tonight in my garage before I go ride tomorrow.  The front axle is for whatever reason pulling 95% through; googling it seems to bring up that the axle spacers might be backwards, but I'm struggling to see how that could be the case.  Either way, I'll solve it tomorrow morning, or I won't. Time for wine.

Anybody know what might’ve causing the axle to not pull through all the way?

Spacers are correct, doesn’t seem to be a fork lug issue, tolerances seem okay.

Today went well. The bike didn't need a single adjustment save for a few bolts getting torqued and adjusting the brake lever up.  All in all, couldn't ask for more from the maiden voyage.  This is my 3rd or 4th YZ250, and this one is by far the hardest hitting.  The PC pipe combo with T2 is unreal and this thing revs to the moon.  I will not be touching the carb again as this thing is jetted absolutely perfectly.

I have not ridden a 2 stroke in nearly 5 years.  I need to lose about 30 pounds as well, but I can't believe how much fun I had. 

Could have gone without blowing both fork seals in the bed of my tacoma but like Johnny Cash said, I'll take it one piece at a time.

I am thinking it's a combo of wrong axle + wrong spacers. I'm just going to order new ones, not a ton of stuff to get wrong here.

Yeah, makes complete sense. I'm going to order the Tusk spacers for $10 and see if that shakes it out.  I agree it looks funked up from the get go, I'd also guess that sitting in East Dallas outside for 6+ years didn't help those forks.  At least they felt great on the track!

Definitely a finger dragging, clutch feels incredible for something that's 21 years old.  i'll inspect the fibers and plates when I do the oil after the next ride, but the ARC lever made it possibly feel better than it had any right to.

I'm also just fat and have to feather the bike to get it out of the sand in E Texas tracks.

Axle problem solved, a combination of wrong spacers and wrong axle caused the issue. Bonus points to anybody who can guess the bike that this combo is actually off of 

Here's how the bike's sitting now; 180 decals is printing my numbers up now, debating whether or not I want to try and build a spare set of blue wheels in the meantime, but damn if blu on silver ain't clean.

Next problem I need to address is this rounded out brake pad holder bolt, it's insane how corroded some of the bolts were on this 2016. 

Funny, that’s exactly what I had in mind. Hitting it with copious Kroil right now.