Can I Get This 80s Honda Dirt Bike Running Again?

In one of the last videos, we were called out for not being a real motorcycle channel because we didn't feature enough Hondas. But today, that's going to change because I found an extremely nice example of a 1980 Honda XL80. Now this thing is a cream puff. It is a true diamond in the rough. It is a beautiful example. And I can't wait to finally get it up on the table and work on something so nice. So let's get to work. The XL80 series of bikes ran from 1980 to 1985. And this is an XL80S. That means it came with a headlight, a taillight, turn signals, gauges. This thing was actually ready for the road. Now it put out an impressive 6.3 horsepower and 4 foot pounds of torque. That's not a whole lot. But this thing is a really cool bike. This would have been the predecessor to the Honda XR series, which is by far one of the most popular dual sport series bikes in all time. I'm really excited to dig into this thing. So that's what we're going to do. I got a box full of parts to go through. We're obviously missing the carburetor. Everything else looks to be intact. It does have compression. The engine is free. Let's look at the gas tank. Metal tank. The XL80s. I wonder if all the XL models came with a metal gas tank. Okay. It's not horrible, but it's not great. Okay. So we have good tires. Like I said, everything here looks to be complete. The brakes all seem to be fine for now. The engine turns over. Yeah. And there's definitely some compression there. So we're going to move right on to spark and fuel. What are the chances we have spark, Dan? It's going to be a coin flip. Let's see what we got here. Key. That's good. Going to need that. I'm going to put that to run. Oh, it's a bummer. The light switch is broken here. The high beam switch. But everything else is pretty well intact, which is amazing for a bike like this. You see, a lot of times these just became the kids' bikes and they were falling over and crashing and doing stuff and the lights were broken off. The turn signals were broken off. The gauges got removed. I can't believe this one here is actually as intact as it is. Spark. Let's see if we have spark. See that? I saw it from here. Yeah. I didn't have to zoom in. Okay. No way. See, you got to do stuff like this every once in a while because it gets you excited and it makes working on bikes fun. At least I'm having fun. Are you having fun? So much fun. I did get a box of parts along with it. Let's go through that stuff. I believe we're going to have to assemble a carburetor. See what other bits of doodads and what's it's nots we have. I'm going to say this is it. I'm going to say that's the box of parts. These side panels are not easy to find. Oh, there's all sorts of stuff in here. Brake shoes. Horn stuff it says. There's the horn. Brake switch. Spokes. We don't need those to run. Oil seal kit. I didn't see any leaky oil seals. Looks like we have an engine gasket kit. Seals and gaskets there. Spark plug. Tool kit maybe. Some wires. I didn't see a carburetor yet. Oh, okay. Here we go. Looks like exhaust gaskets maybe there. Flywheel key. There's float needles there. Got a bag of screws and jets. Here we go. Here's a carburetor. There's a float bowl. And there's the carb body. Looks like that might want to be cleaned a little bit. Let's see. What do we have in here? Fuel filter. Petcock. Slide spring. Float. All right. Well, hopefully we have all the pieces we need there. You know what, Dan? Tell me what? We should clean these two pieces in the vapor home. What do you think? Sure. Go for it. I like your attitude for adventure, Dan. Yeah, watching it sprayed in the face by that cracked screen. I think this vapor home is going to make really quick work out of this carb body and float bowl. Let's see what it does. I'm loving this thing. It cleaned these up pretty good. Carburetors have lots of small little passages, especially carburetors that are tiny like this one. So whenever I'm done vapor honing something, I always put it in a bucket of water like this and blow air all around and get in all the passages and all the holes. It's amazing how much of that abrasive material will actually still come out of here. I just realized I didn't see a float bowl gasket while going through that stuff. Hopefully it's in there somewhere and I just missed it. Okay, so we need to figure out what all we have here. Dirty floats. I think what we'll do is we'll just kind of clean as we go. We're going to still put these in a container with some water just to make sure that they don't have a pinhole and they actually float. So let's do that while we're cleaning everything else. Okay, so we know this goes there. We know this goes there. We know that goes there. So here we have the mixture screw. That's a pilot jet. That is, or wait, maybe that's idle. And that one's mixture screw. And that should probably have the spring and a washer that we don't have. Main jet holder. That's the main jet. That's the float pin. This is the float needle. I did see here we have new needles so we'll be replacing those. This is the drain bolt for the carb drain. This should probably have a gasket on it. I'm going to see if we can come up with some gaskets. Because right now we're missing float bowl gasket. We're missing intake, the o-ring here for the intake. And we're missing a sealing washer for on this float bowl drain. Terrible cleaning. Pow. Right there. Needle jet. Clogged up tight. Or not the needle, this is the pilot jet. It is blocked. Let's see if there's some cleaner. None of that went through if you were wondering. This thing's really giving me fits. Calling the big dogs. Unleash the hounds, Craig. That's right. I'm going to just let that soak in there for a while. See what happens. We have enough stuff here to figure out. That's floating so that's good. So then next goes the main jet holder and main jet. And that gets tightened down. Okay, this is the idle screw. So that goes here. This is the mixture screw. But that needs to have a washer and an o-ring, I believe, on the end of it. Okay, well, let's see here if we can put this choke assembly together. I know that goes through there. Let's clean that up a smidge. Alright, Dan, let's just come down here. This is like a whole new setting. Right. It's like we're not even in our shop anymore. Oh, there's all this different stuff down here, too. Wow. That's cleaner. That's better. So this is going to go. Okay, so this goes down that way. I have a feeling this comes in here to lift that up and down. Yeah, see, that piece is all peened over. See how it's peened over? Those peens are what's holding this little strap into place. So that means I need to try and get this in there. This comes through here. So see, that's moving that arm up and down in here. That, in turn, is going to move this arm. Put that down there. Okay, we're getting somewhere. So this is engine side of the carburetor. This is air box side of the carburetor. That means the air is coming in this way from the air box, picking up the fuel and coming out of the carburetor into the engine through here. Now, the way this choke is going to work. So when this is down in a position like this, do you see how it's closing off the passage to the carburetor, through the body of the carburetor? So that's open, and that's closed. There's also a little trap door. There's a trap door right there. What that's doing is, when this is down, that trap door opens up, and that is allowing a small amount of air through here, but it is blocking off a majority of it. So choke on, choke off. Now we need to figure out what holds all this together. It kind of looks like maybe this would go there. I agree with that. That's a working choke. It's interesting, though, that it... Should it go up? I think I'm backwards here. Uh-oh. Got to make it do the opposite. Well, I don't like that the choke is off when the lever's up, because, you know, vibrations. And that's going to make it fall down. Nothing like a good puzzle. Now down. So when I had the choke lever over on this side, what would happen is, when the choke lever was up in the air like this, the choke was off. So when you're riding and vibrations and all that, this would, you know, start working its way down, working its way down, working its way down, turning on your choke while you're riding. You don't want that, so that told me I had the choke lever flipped to the wrong side. So I just moved it 180. And now you can see when a choke lever is up, the choke is on. When the choke lever is down, the choke is off. That is correct. Nice. Okay, so we have a new float needle like that. And then our float. Now that's going to sit down in there. Okay? All right. That's all looking great. Let's see if our pilot jet is on clog now. It's been soaking for a little bit. That sounded different. It sure did. Well, let's see what comes out of here. I thought I saw it coming out. Did you see light? Maybe I'm wrong. No. Not at all. There it goes. Oh, it's going through. There it goes. Look, you can see. Stuff that you're pushing out. See that little stuff right there? That's what it was. There. See? Oh, there it goes. All right. Now I'm seeing light. Do-do-do-do. Pilot jet clean. And then our spring is going to go onto here. Our throttle cable comes through our spring, comes into the bottom of our slide, and hooks in the slide. Just like that. Okay. We have the carburetor pretty much assembled, and I just realized going through this stuff that I do not have gaskets. I don't have a float bowl gasket, and I don't have the O-ring for on here that mounts up, meets up to the intake track, and I don't have the O-ring for the air screw. So it looks like we need to order a couple carburetor parts. We're missing the gaskets, but before we do that, I'm going to look over this bike really quick and make sure there's nothing else that's obvious that we're going to need to order. And while I'm doing all that, I wanted to take off the seat, and I wanted to take off the tank. The tank does have a little bit of rust in it, so I'm going to soak that for a night or so, get that all cleaned out, and that way it's ready to go when the carb parts come in. We can put the clean tank back on, and this thing is going to be ready to fire up. Well, that was easy. That's it? That was it. Dang, Craig. I could have done that. I was really gearing up for like a whole ordeal. Right? Dude, look how clean this bike is. It's even got the air box. Dude, this thing is nice. I'm going to pull this air filter cover so I can see what we have for an air filter. So our air filter is there and respectable, which is good news. Everything else is looking good. Do we have brakes? Yeah, we have brakes, rears, fronts. I just did the most amazing stuff for like the last 10 minutes. Shut up. And Dan just looked at the camera and went, oh my gosh. Well, I think it might have unplugged. Hold on. Shut up. But sorry, guys. You missed all that awesomeness. Just hurry up and clean this stupid tank, Craig. I'm trying. You've got to record it, though. I'm recording it. Oh, yeah. Now you are. I am. We're going to check on that in the morning. We've still got other work to do. No, actually, we don't until parts come. I was just lying. But tomorrow. Now we've got our float bowl gasket. Finished putting this carburetor back together. And we've got our new for there. I think we're going to need a little heat on this air boot. This thing is just so delicate. And those are good and tight. Put those in there. Then the spring. OK. That's all working good. We're going to do a spark plug quick. New spark plug. We're getting really close to firing this bike up for the first time in, honestly, who knows how many years. There we go. Put a little spring back over the intake. Start that at about one and a half out. OK. Exhaust bolts need tightened. That's all looking good. Should be all right there with the clutch. OK. So tank. We've had the tank soaking for a few days now because there was some rust in it. I'm going to go get the tank. We're going to drain it out, rinse it out really good, and see what it looks like on the inside. I did a good job putting these rubber caps on. How many times used is that evaporous? In a tank, I think it's twice. Is this the second or third time? Second. But the tank looks like new on the inside. Did it really work that well? Yeah. Wait till you see it. All right, Craig. I want this tank so clean I can drink out of it. Look at that. How nice is that? That's pretty nice. Pretty nice. And now we take some denatured alcohol. We swish that around a little bit. And that's going to take our water out. OK. Now we put on the petcock. Petcock and fuel filters. I believe that's the straw for the petcock. Am I right? Yep. So that sits in there. A little oil in the O-ring. That'll help it seat and seal. If this was a motocross or bike, what I'd do is I would probably put the knob for the petcock on the inside because that's how they're set up. But this here being a little trail bike, I think it's just fine leaving the petcock on and off here on the outside. Now we need a little bit of fuel line. We're going to need these fuel filters. Let's put this tank on. Seat can go back on. I guess all that's left to do now is some fuel line. This fuel line might be a little big for this little tiny petcock. Yeah. OK. Let me find some smaller fuel line. This might work. OK. So I like the way that fits a lot better. OK. That's nice and tight. I think these fuel filters are too big. Maybe I can make that work. We'll see. I'm going to have to order some smaller fuel filters. This is all going to probably be temporary just so we can get fuel through the system and make sure it's going to run. I'm going to have to get a smaller fuel filter just because the petcock line coming out of the petcock is really small. So I had to use the five millimeter fuel line. But I have a bigger. I have a six millimeter fuel filter. But this should be OK for testing purposes. I know we do a lot of sketchy stuff and whatever. But this bike here is really nice. And I'm doing it for a buddy. And it's going to be just right when he gets it back. I don't know, Dan. Now we add gas and see what happens. Oh, boy. OK. I saw some fuel get into the filter. I feel like we are ready to pull this thing off the stand. We got fuel, carburetors together. Nothing's leaking. We have good oil. We have spark. We have a clean gas tank. We have compression. New petcock. Carburetor's clean. Gas in. Fuel filter. Everything is pointing towards this thing should fire up. Let's see what happens. How many kicks, Dan? I think you did a good job, Craig. I'm going to say three. Three? Yeah. Wow. OK. I'm super confident this time. I'm more confident than you are. What do you say? Three kicks? Let's see. I'm going to go five. All right. OK. So we're going to give it a couple of primers. OK. Ready? Ready. No way. Is that one? One? One kick? Not anymore. Shoot. Did you forget to do something? I don't think so. Flood the engine? Everything's on. Is it idling? No. Well, I might have to adjust that idle a little bit. It's not far off. Hey! That was like exactly what I thought it was going to be. Oh, yeah. That's what it was. You win, Craig. Listen to that, man. It sounds like a sewing machine. What a fantastic little bike. You going to take it out for a spin? I think we should. I love this thing. I didn't even ride it yet. Let's fling open that door. Let's do it. Woo! Getting chilly. Oh, beautiful! Brakes work and everything. Look at that. What an engine. What an amazing little bike. Tell you what, man. If you were 10, 12, 13 years old and this was sitting underneath your Christmas tree in 1980, you would be one happy kid. Neutral! How cool. What an awesome little bike, man. This thing is as cool as it gets. I'm stoked. Thanks for watching. Check out this video right here or this one right here. I know you're going to love them. Later!