fuzz
Livin' the rat roddin' lifestyle
This is a story about my adventures with my new toy, 1982 Yamaha xj750. I thought I'd be fun to build a bobber and play on the local streets. Found this Yamaha on craigslist, cheap and with a title but not running but remember I said cheap. So I dragges it home and commenced to get it fired up to see if it was worth working on. Had to clean up the carbs, they get gummed up when a bike sits around, thanks to low quality gas we pay big prices for. And had to cleanup some electrical connects, mostly gounds. Finally got it to run and didn't hear any loud disturbing clanking but the exhaust was leaking around the headers due to 5 of the 8 studs that hold the headders on were broke off even with the head. So I figured I pull the engine out of the frame in order to get the head off to see if I could extract some broken studs. Didn't work out so next idea is to buy a good head to swap on. Found a head on ebay and got lucky in that is wasn't a piece a junk but in fact might be useable. A leak check proved I should do a valve job first and after pullin it all apart, valves, guides and all those cute little pieces in one of these tiny motors actually looked pretty good. But first thing I had to do was make a spring compressor since my automotive type was too big to get in the small hole that the springs were down in. Made one from a C-clamp. After I got all the valves out I found my valve grinding tool is too big for the little valves so I attached a small piece of hose to the end of the valve, put some fine grinding compound on the valve and used the hose to spin the valve till the surfaces looked good. Putting it back together was more fun since everything is small except my fingers. I used small needle nose pliers to hold the keepers that I greased up so they would stick to valves while I released the C-clamp. Boys this is a lot of fun!![cl