Will This 37 Year Old Motorcycle Run & Get Me Home?

Today we're in Maryland because I found one of my favorite bikes. I should say one of my favorite style bikes but you know me I am a Yamaha guy too. I guess when you do this enough people just start trusting you because he said if you get here and I'm not here the garage door's open the bike's inside the garage. So far so good. There it is. Oh yeah. This is a 1987 Yamaha FJ 1200. Now the FJ was made from 1984 and it was the FJ 1100 in like 84, 85, 86. It went to the FJ 1200 and they ran that up until like 1996. But this one here is a 1987 Yamaha FJ 1200 and we're gonna see if we can make it run. Now the story I'm getting on this bike is it's been sitting for at least 20 years and this gentleman bought it to go along with his other one because he likes these bikes and just never got around to it. So we're here to get it running and see what we can figure out. That's interesting. When I turn the bars of throttle it gets tight. It's like it's not routed right. Oh the front brake actually it's like the front brake actually works. Dry rotted tires. That's to be expected. Pretty clean though. So one of the problems with these early FJs is it actually has a 16 inch front and rear tire. Getting good 16 inch rubber today is hard compared to 17 inch rubber. There's just so many more options when it comes to 17 inch rubber. So what a lot of guys will do is actually switch these older ones over to 17s. You change the forks and then you can put a set of 17s on. Fork seals don't even look to be that leaky. If leaky at all. That's nice. Good clean paint. Nice grips. Beautiful dash. There's the choke. Programmed suspension. This has the anti-dive forks. So you can see here we got anti-dive. Could be a little leaky in there. We have a little corrosion here. Nothing bad. Kerker exhaust. I mean come on. Tank looks good and we got some wires hanging out. I guess that's from tank. Fuel pump sending unit. Something. Stuff in there. I don't know what it is. The igniter box. There's some more things that aren't hooked to anything. All in all hydraulic clutch. Feels like that's working. Chain doesn't look bad. Rear tire. It's Michelin's. They're just old. Over 20 years old would be my guess. This is all clean. We got signals. That's not all broken up. This bike is nice and clean. Let's look in the tank. Oh it's already not looking great. So that's not wonderful but we we've seen worse. Tank's already off. That's handy. If the work's already done. Let's set that off to the side. So what do we have here? Push and pull cable for the throttle. Choke. Yep. Choke cable there. Okay so we got cables. Vacuum line off the intake. I'm gonna say that's gonna go to the Peckhawk. So that's what that is. I don't know what that's for. Carburetors. This is not a carburetor. I'm assuming there's carburetors somewhere here for this thing. That'll slow us down then if we don't have carburetors. What we got here in the spark plugs? They're loose. Let's just finger tight. Okay look how nice this is. I mean it's scary. It almost looks like those were never even open. So if that's possible this bike is what I say it is an 87. So what's 43 minus 7? 36? This bike's 36 years old. Well it doesn't look bad. Hard to see inside the cylinder. From what I can see it doesn't look bad. But he said he thought this bike was put away well. Meaning like maybe the cylinders were fogged or the cylinders were oiled. I'm guessing there's a reason the carburetors aren't on it. Maybe he had them off and cleaned them or maybe they're in pieces. I don't know. We'll figure that out. Let's put a battery in. We'll see if we can get it to turn over. That'll give us an idea of what kind of compression we have. What kind of state the engine's in. And then we'll look for the pieces we're missing. Put on the seat and ride this thing home. Just that easy. It's never that easy. It's always that easy. No it's not. I'm just kidding. Okay so where are these things all headed? Probably gonna leave this stuff off. I'm just gonna put on the power and the ground that we need. There it is. That's it. That's all I brought was a new battery. I couldn't find spark plugs or I did bring some oil. But yeah other than that here we are. He took great care of it. Something. I mean this bike is so far so far this bike is probably the nicest one we've done so far. Say so far again Craig. I dare you. Well whenever something's too easy I start getting a little nervous. Nope we got a neutral light. Got a high beam light. Turn signal. Really? What? Horn. Okay I'm gonna pull these spark plugs and we're gonna give this a crank. Crank it over. Make sure everything's good there. Man this is a really clean bike. We've got 15,687 miles on it. Digital clocks. Look how clean that gauge cluster is. I mean for crying out loud. See what happens here. On. Start. Okay. Engine cranks over. Seemed like it was cranking a little slow though. Guess what we have this all off. Let's see if we got the uh spark. Spark. I'm gonna get these tightened up. I tried to find new plugs for it the other day and they didn't have them at the store and I was too late to order them. These are just gonna be what they are. No work. Dan they're fine. Fine is good Okay. Tools. Give me tools or give me death. I think I saw that flag over here somewhere. Right next to don't tread on my 10 millimeter. That could be a new song for uh Carb Tunes. Don't tread on my 10 millimeters. It's a sudden genre shift. There's got to be a song country. There's a songwriter somewhere out there in the audience. I'm thinking about it. Yeah let's work on that. Okay we have spark. We have compression. We have a new battery and we're like 12 minutes into this process. I do need to find carburetors because without carburetors I don't think we're gonna get it to run. Okay um yeah this stuff here that actually looks like speaker wire. I don't know what this stuff is. I'm just gonna act like that stuff it's not important. Let's see if we can find parts. Okay there's our seat. There's our fairing. That's a frame piece. Look at this bike. This here is a 90 like a 90 early 90s 92 or something. FJ 1200. Same bike as that one a little newer. So this one here I think he already did. Can you tell me he did 17s or did this come with 17s? Looks like he swapped out the brakes. He's got adjusters on the forks. I like that color that gray and and is that blue or is that purple? That's really cool. Look how this one here has a more rounded windshield than that one out there. That one might have a high windshield on it. Yeah look we have uh different brake calipers and change the levers too. There's some doodads on this bike. He's got this one here set up really nice. What else does he have under here? What's he what's he peeking here? Oh the beamer. Tell you what lady and gents you just can't go wrong with a beamer. They are neat bikes. Oh hey I didn't even see this one. What you got out here? Oh he's got a I want to try one of these. That's a neat bike. So he's got a great collection of bikes. Yeah I would say I mean his his style of bike is pretty much right there with mine. Sport touring. Good sport touring bikes. It's been no secret I love the Kawasaki Concourse. It is hands down my favorite riding bike out there. These are close. It's same style sport touring. So I'm anxious. I haven't ridden one of these in eons. So I'm anxious to get this thing going. What were we doing? Carburetors. We need to find carburetors. Yeah like I'm seeing parts everywhere. He did tell me too he has a whole set of yeah look up there. Up there's the fairing. What? Here we have a tank. Looks like there's a flush drive. I don't know. Some frame pieces. Exhaust. Down there's brake rotors. Fuel pump. Oh getting closer. Fuel filter. Is this stuff for this? Hey is it the carbs? Are they awful? No they are not awful. These actually look like they're cool. No way. Look how nice these are. The slides work. What? Oh my my. Okay so fuel line. What do we got here? We have vents. We have overflows. Okay fuel line fuel line. Look at that. Choke cable. So that's going to come in this way and pull. Open. Close. Throttle cable here. There's your adjustment. That all works. Well I'll be dipped. That's about as hard as it gets right there. I've just gotten easier. I can't believe the carbs are all together. They actually look clean. Now that's a first. Yeah. Getting clean carbs. Getting clean. On an old bike. Yeah. So before I was talking about throttle or uh sinking carburetors. Here let me show you what I was talking about here actually. So what sinking the carburetors does is it lines up your butterflies so that they are all open the same amount. So you have an adjustment screw here here and here. One of them's your master. So you'll adjust the other three to that one. And if you look see how if I squeeze this here that changes this one. You would hook up hook up your carb sink tool. And I started using that digi sink here lately. I really like it. But you hook that up here. It measures what I think the vacuum that it's pulling through. And then you adjust these so that all that's even. And now you have good crisp throttle response and things will run more either. Your engine will run more evenly. So if you're asking about sinking carburetors generally look for like rubber caps vacuum caps or something here on top of your intake runners. And then you want to look for screws that look like this between your carburetors. Make sure you're not looking at the idle screw. But you know that's how you go through sinking carburetors. I'm not even going to pull these carburetors apart because although I'm not a gambling man I'm going to gamble on this one. But they're clean. So we've got to put choke cable on. And we have to put throttle cables on. Dan I can't believe we might get a bike running that is not going to require a carburetor clean. Sound disappointed Greg. I know you were really looking forward to opening those carbs. Right yeah I was really looking forward to fighting with carburetors all afternoon. You were training. Yeah I certainly was. Here's a fun fact. If you've ever seen that movie Rocky where he's running along the river in Philadelphia before he goes up the art steps he runs past a boat there a boathouse road called the quest. And the quest was actually sank in our local quarry. And Dan and I got to go diving there and we dove the quest. Did you know you dove a famous boat? No I don't remember you guys telling me that. Did you know that at the time? Uh-huh I've known that for a long time. Let's go diving again. Let's go diving again. I'm cold. We just gotta get gotta go dry suit diving again. Yeah I should have been a surgeon or a dentist. Either one sounds like they'd make more money than what I do. But do they allow for as many mistakes as you do? Ah good point. Are you saying I make a lot of mistakes Dan? Or are you saying I would have malpractice? Would you care to explain yourself? You don't make any mistakes Craig. I thought I made a mistake once. Turned out I didn't. Carbs might be new that doesn't mean you're gonna have an easy time getting them in. Nice. Oh yes. That was easy. Yeah carburetors. I've got a throttle. I haven't tightened those up yet but that's okay. Battery. Carbs. Choke. Choke's working. So we need fuel line. I saw fuel line in there. I'm excited. That is hard as a rock. But there's a there's a Y in there. So let's let's just for now let's see if we put this on there. I brought my IV bottle. So I'm not even really worried about the tank right now. I'm gonna get this on and we'll put the IV bottle to it with a little bit of gas. This thing might just fire right up. Pretty brittle. They are 36 years old. I get it. I'm pretty brittle too. I'm like rolling stuff through my head because I'm like is it really gonna be this easy? It can't be. It never is. Let's see what happens. Well I guess if I put a hole in the hose then I can just cut it off. Vice grip. Everybody says we remind them of vice grip. Derek if you're watching this let's do lunch sometime. We got a we got a splash in here. I know this is crazy because this all seems so easy but I think this bike might start. Only one way to find out. Should we try it? We've been here for like less than an hour. Something's gonna something's gonna catch fire. Let's do it. How long? He said this was like he thought like 20 years. There it goes. Wow. It did it. It basically fired right up. No way. All right let's let's. I wish they were all this easy. I can't believe it's that easy. We do have a lot of smoke coming from places. Why is there so much more smoke coming out of this one? I don't know. I mean it sounded like he said they they oiled the cylinders and stuff before they put it away. So I don't know. I mean the spark plugs were loose so maybe there's some residue oil in there. We've probably got valve seals and stuff seeping through some oil and whatever. You know when stuff doesn't run for so long like this all the rubber and and gaskets and seals and all that stuff that just starts to shrink because it gets so dry and whatever. And sometimes just firing it back up again and getting oil moving and getting fluids moving and things sometimes those seals will actually puff up a little bit and start sealing again and things will start working. I don't know what to say. Like this was I can't believe it fired right up. But we didn't check any of the gears. The brakes seem like they work but I don't know and we have a rusty tank. So we still have a bunch of work to do before we can get this thing home. That's just cooking off that pipe. I didn't see an air box so I'm guessing we got pod filters somewhere or the air box. I didn't see one but we'll look. We gotta figure that out. We gotta figure out the tank tires. I don't know yet. See if this thing will move start stop. Well we know it starts it runs. Yeah but we need to make sure it'll run start stop shift that whole thing. This box of stuff. Okay so if we need to do some fuel line. Here we got some plastic. There we go. Oh there's a petcock. I bet you these bolts here are what hold that frame together there at the carburetor. You're gonna probably need those air filter oil filter. Let's go put these on see what happens. I don't know how they had these on this way. I don't know how these are supposed to fit. Hold on let's get let's get this all back into place and that might help things. Got a thing for this. There we go. Dan just gotta try things. That's what I always say. That's the next thing Dan. We find an airplane. Listen we find an airplane that needs to be running and then we'll get an airplane running. Yeah yeah we get it running then we gotta stop there. Why? I don't know Craigs or something you're not telling me. Ain't afraid of no FFA. That was a joke because it's FAA. We can run it. We can taxi it. We just can't take off. Unless it's like a FAR. A FAR 103. You don't need no stinking license for one of them Dan. All you need are questionable decision making skills and an attitude for adventure. Okay we need to figure out fuel. That's going to become more and more of an issue. You keep looking at that tank like it's going to fix itself. I know I got that. I don't want to. Let's tighten up the throw out cables before we forget. Maybe that tank will fix itself by then. Seems about right. What do you think? Is there any fuel left in here? Man. Hot dog. Those are all tight. That's all tight. That's all tight. Man I am pumped. I am pumped. I am pumped. How do we clean that gas tank? Fuel filters? Do we just run fuel filters? Just like it'll like they'll drain out. It'll clog the fuel filter. We replace the fuel filter. Do it again. Yeah. And we just keep doing that all the way home. I think so. The other option is I saw another tank in here. I wonder if that's any cleaner. That's just another tank. I don't see a key. I don't know. Let's investigate this. That is not great. There's a lot of rust in there. Maybe one of these keys would fit the other tank. Try it. See what the other tank looks like. Nope. Probably get mad if we take that tank. I mean if we fill it with something we can slosh it around and and drain it and do that a couple times. I'm just not sure where to drain it. That bucket. I have that bucket. Still didn't clean itself. Okay so the biggest thing we still have yet is a really rusty gas tank. Found a garden hose here. Ran a garden hose out. Oh very nice. Yeah. I'm just making myself at home you know. So I'm gonna hose that out. I don't know what else to do. I mean we got to get on the road. We got to get on the road. Let's stop messing. All right. What's the worst that can happen? We can't use it the way it is so. Is there kinks? Yeah probably. You want me to de-kink it? I'm gonna look for the kinks. Oh here's one. I tried again. All right let's see what. Oh yeah there's chunks floating in there. Let me see. Oh yeah. We're gonna give it a shake. Dump it out and see what happens. See what it looks like. Let's dump it into this bucket. You don't want to dump on one of the seat buckets? Yeah we'll dump it into here just in case he doesn't want that in his yard. You're really making yourself at home. I am. Yeah this looks like a gas bucket. It's coming out harder than I thought it would though. Oh yeah. That'll, that'll get us all the way till it stops. See if we can get that petcock off there. All fun and games until you've filled the tank with water. Son of a biscuit. I need my bucket seat Dan is what I'm missing. Oh oh shoot. That's okay. So you can see how much of the uh rust getting out of there. That's a lot of rust we've got out. We're not even done yet. So if I. Oh that's full. Yeah that's full of you know rust and stuff. That's an easy way to get the water out I guess. All right it's better. Perfect no, better yes. Do you want to try to get as much water out there as absolutely possible? So this is a vacuum operated petcock and then it has a electronic reserve circuit. So when you power this okay so there's a little diaphragm in here and as this gets in input pulses off the intake track it moves that little diaphragm and that's actually kind of a little uh fuel shut off so that opens this up. Try something here. So fill that with water. Nope nothing. I think I saw another petcock. Let's go look see here. Everything else has been going so well why won't this. Yeah nice. It's not full of rust. So see I think that's the diaphragm for in here and the spring and I believe this is the o-ring. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. I just hear rust. I don't know if I really want to fill it with water again. Got a fuel filter on there. We only got three hours to go. I mean how many fuel filters could that be? Let's try it Dan. What the hay. We're gonna want that fuel filter. So there's a thing with these bikes and the style petcock. Once the o-ring inside of here gets old and starts wearing out these have a tendency to fall out pouring fuel everywhere causing mass chaos and destruction. By that I mean fire. Time to pour gas in it. Yeah. So it looks like we have a mixture of gas water and rust. First gear. Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth. So we got like water rust and stuff in the tank. That's probably not ideal but you know here we are. I got a fuel filter on so you don't want to be clogging up them carburetors. I don't see any. Oh yeah we do have a leak there. The fuel filter. We can either put more gas in it and see if we can get it to overpower what little bit of water was left in there. Or we just ride it on water and rust. Yeah. Nailed it. All right so we got it running and we got the tank kind of clean but I don't know if we have it clean enough to make it all the way home. So I'm gonna hop on it. We're gonna get as far as we can go. So I guess we're gonna see how far it'll get us. I love center stands. And this is might be as far as it gets. It's going so well. So funny. So we put water in that tank. See what happens Dan. We. It run a little rough. We just gotta get that moisture work through the system. That's all. Uh-oh. Come on girl. I know you got it in you. It's not liking that. Come on. Gonna run out of battery. I wonder if we clogged it up already. There we go. It slows me. No. Craig you made it out the driveway. Not bad for a bike that's been sitting for 20 years. Dang it. All right let's get out before the postal service gets mad at you. Now if you thought I was gonna quit there you don't know me good enough. Because we still got some work to do. Greg you riding his bike? I'm taking his bike.