Success!

After all the doom and gloom lately of tearing down engines and bad tuning I finally put in a good day of riding! Spent a few hours fine tuning the carb Saturday morning, then went out and ripped on the Honda 400ex for the first time. Fantastic little quad, good power and torque. Starting to learn wheelies, pretty stable platform. Also took some video of our ride, came out pretty cool, love my GoPro HD helmet cam.

Dropped in a 42 pilot jet, replacing the 38. Changed the original 178 main jet to a 170 (the largest the local dealership had). That jet was too lean, ended up getting it running good on the last clip on the needle, so I now I’m going to see what jets are between 170 and 178 and order two more sizes to fine tune the needle settings back to the center.
Looking forward to future rides…

Melancholy

I figured I’d bring some closure to my project

This weekend was a melancholic one, we’re moving out of our 2000 sqft shop into a 5’x10′ storage place, I’ve sold off most of the parts to this car, and today its shell was scrapped at a metal yard for $30. I even tried to give the shell away to someone who would use it, but nobody came for it.

A sad end to such a cool project. But on the bright side its RB25 and full rear subframe/suspension are staying in the family and going into my boyfriend’s Datsun 240Z project. It was a learning experience with some good and bad memories, but in the end I’m glad to have worked on and owned this project. Hopefully I’ll start something again when I’m in a better position in life.

Thanks for tagging along for the ride

Sam’s is a bad place for me

On our last visit to Sam’s for our bulk needs we, like every time before, went to drool over the LCD TVs they had on display. A little old man came up and asked if we needed any help, we said that we were just looking, and he replied that we should check out the discount/open box section. There was a nice Magnavox there for, what he said was $600, but after some searching he found the actual price at $314. Helluva deal for an open box LCD TV. Turns out the 42″ Magnavox LCD TV goes for $800-$900 normally. Sweet!

Went around the store collecting groceries after we found out about the TV

Noice!

New tricks

Shyla shows off her newly learned trick, spinning!

Trade much?

In trying to thin down our fleet of unused vehicles, planes, and other stuff we’ve been selling and or trading. Went in to Houston this last Friday to trade Kandi, the 1983 FB RX7 for a ‘supposedly’ Honda 1999 XR 450 dirt bike.

Getting it ready for the towbar

Once we got there we found out it was a XR 650, yeah, big bike. The previous owner had also stripped the spark plug threads so it needed the head pulled.

barely fit

When I got the bike I put it up on craigslist just for the hell of it since it turned out to be a larger bike than we were expecting. Yesterday I spent the whole day removing the head to start fixing the bikes issues. Last night I got a call from an interested guy who wanted to trade a modded quad for a dual sport bike like the 650. He came over with the quad today to look at the bike and after some negotiations we rode the quad into our garage and loaded up the 650 into his truck.

The quad I picked up is a 2001 Honda 400EX with 11.1 Weisco piston, 2nd over, stage two hot cam, ported head, new heavy duty clutch plates and springs, cam chain, new valves, rocker arms, 3 angle valve job, new brakes, seat cover, white brothers pipe, high output light bulbs. My mainly stock YFZ 450 still could kick its ass, but its a Honda and hopefully it will be reliable and fun. Looking forward to riding it and then having a riding buddy once I finish my YFZ.