Re: '71 Suzuki TS250 tracker
Apologies for the lack of updates. All bike stuff was stalled for the past month, but I'm making progress now. I decided to keep the reddish/faux gator skin seat. It's just way too...awesome. With that, I made a tracker-inspired cowl, as opposed to a whole seat. The glass work's done, I just need to fill some low spots and paint it.
I also rebuilt the forks: cleaned the innards and gave them fresh 10wt oil. While they were apart, I found that the left one is indeed not bent, like I had thought. I'll assume the tweaking is in the triple clamps. It should be easy enough to tweak them back roughly straight. (Hey, don't judge, this thing doesn't need to be a precision machine!) That being said, I now have two wrong forks from a blatantly idiotic ebay seller who first sent me the wrong year fork, then tried to remedy it with sending the right year, but wrong side fork. :
Oh well, don't need them anyway!
You'll recall that the previous owner told me it wasn't running because of a "blown seal". I haven't found any evidence of this yet. I did pull the head and the combustion chamber, piston, and cylinder look great. There does seem to be a slight leak from the base gasket, so I have a new one on the way. Otherwise the engine seems sound. No other leaks, clicks through the gears nicely... I'm pretty sure it wasn't running due to the massively gummed-up carb!
I'll be picking up a slide hammer from Tyler today to pull the dent in the tank. Once that's done, I'll prep for paint. My brother would like to do a Rainier beer theme. White tins, red and gold accents. Sounds doable.