Dirty Bird 1975 Suzuki TS185

[Bigshankhank]

Ever since we moved into this neighborhood way outside of Austin, there is a ton of unincorporated land literally where the asphalt ends and I can hear the braaap of bikes and UTVs out there every weekend. This symphony has made me yearn for another dirt bike but on a budget ya know. Enter farm community craigslist aka regular craigslist but expand your search area to cover rural farm lands. I found this old TS185 in a shed filled with bike and auto parts. It was listed at $500 "ran when parked" but when I talked to the guy he had just lost a leg to cancer and just wanted to get rid of it. I managed to pick up this bike as well as the later frame in the background for $200. The front end on the later frame will be a nice upgrade swap as they are thicker and have some adjustability. No title, as if you couldn't guess.


I did find the original tank but it had a fucking swastika painted on it which I mean this is my second nazi-adjacent bike and I am starting to wonder if its something I am doing. No pictures of that tank obviously until it gets a good strip and spray can treatment. Not trying to pass judgement but yeah based on some other stuff I saw while trying to get the fuck off of this guys property I can believe I was in the presence of someone who is a white hood enthusiast.
The wiring is a complete mess but I only want it for a dirt bike so I'll strip the switchgear and lighting wiring, put in an On-Off switch for the ignition and call it good. It is missing its coil but they are remarkably cheap on eBay.
Good news;
-The engine turns over freely
-Putting a spark plug in the head it has compression
-It shifts from neutral to 1st & 2nd
-So the clutch works
-The oil pump is present and when you pull the pump actuator cable it moves smoothly and with resistance so something in the pump is moving the way it should

Maybe this will be fun, maybe it will be a nightmare.

[problemaddict]

Sweet project!
I sold MATPOC Dmitry a Suzuki AT1, which appears to be the 50cc version of your bike. Or at least in the same family. If memory serves, he rebuilt it with little trouble. Replaced all the seals and rebuilt the carb and...?
I can point him to this thread and see if he pops in with any insight...

[Bigshankhank]

Its been a while since I had a two stroke but I recall most of the knowledge gained. This has an electronic ignition so at least I'm not fiddling with points & condensers.

[MATPOC]

Nice score, considering any used bike is now a minimum of $1000 even with a broken engine
I also envy your commitment to those projects, mine long has gone and I bought a Tenere 700 which starts every time and doesn't need anything other than tires and oil (and gas)

AT1 was a 125cc street model and it had a "dirt only" counterpart. The first time I took it to the woods I realized how limited it was due to antiquated suspension and that was probably last time it has seen dirt. TX probably different, but here it's rocks and top of rocks and you need good travel and ground clearance, so after few years if little to no use I ended up selling it. For a while I had KTM 250 which is not problemaddict's new toy, but since I got T7 I stopped riding all other bikes and ended up selling a few...

You will probably have more fun with it than I would, you got patience and don't have the "need for speed" which drives many of my bike decisions, I almost ended up buying a KTM instead of T7 only because it has 30 more HP and they had them in stock, but luckily a visit to service department changed my mind and I eded up waiting several months for a Yamaha. Glad I did...

[Bigshankhank]

T7, nice. I tried sitting on one but it was too tall for me. Then again that was prior to my knee replacement so maybe I would be more comfortable straddling one now.

[Bigshankhank]

I picked up a coil, CDI box and voltage regulator on fleabay which arrived today and of course I couldn't resist bolting on the coil before I even tested anything. I found the two wires from the kill switch and twisted them together and since it doesn't have a key switch I took a gamble that those wires, wherever they are in the harness were already spliced so it was time to check for spark. Since it doesn't have a kickstart lever I was turning it by hand with a socket on the magneto bolt but it made little sparky-sparks!
Unfortunately the plug that I found that fit the threads in the head is too long so I need to source the correct one, but that's a simple enough task for the morning along with spraying some ether into the carb to see what comes out the other end.

[Bigshankhank]

Today was productive but got expensive quick. It started with buying the correct spark plug at my local NAPA so I could stick that in the head and spin it up with a big drill and socket on the magneto bolt. That plus a heavy dose of ether in the carb didn't do anything, so I repeated this process but with a compression tester. Only got to 90psi so off came the top end. I do love working on 2-strokes because 4 bolts later and I have the entire top end on my bench. Piston is pretty badly scored because, and this one kills me, the "filter" was a blue shop towel clamped around the mouth of the carb. Luckily the cylinder walls are good and clean and its the original bore however the rings are way out of spec so I ordered a new piston and rings. Crank looked good with minimal side to side play on the rod so I'll leave that as is.
I noticed while removing the exhaust that the clamp ring was missing and one of the bolts was broken off. Clamp it up in a vise, file the end of the bolt to a good flat surface, center punch it, drill a pilot hole and SNAP goes the nice hard drill bit deep in the bolt. I tried carving a slot in what was left of the bolt to get a flat screwdriver in there but no luck. Off to a shop it'll have to go to get electro-blasted out and probably vapor blast it to make it look pretty.
OK what else could I accomplish? I scraped all the old gasket off the cylinder and crankcase and brass brushed all that nice and clean. Flipped the head around and hit it with the brass brush as well and realized instead of a head gasket it had been RTV'd cause the PO was a bumpkin. Whatever, I had already ordered a new gasket kit with the piston so it'll all be nice and tight again. Also scavenged a brake lever and throttle assembly from my box of Aermacchi parts since it happened to have the same diameter handlebars and I'll never rebuild that bike anyway. Then I started examined the carb and realized that the bore wasn't correct and the intake was, well, look at the picture it was home made so this carb was from who knows where but wasn't correct. Thankfully our neighbors in China reproduce this carbs for relatively little money so I gambled on one so there's another $40 out the door. Lastly I bought a bundle of engine mount parts since the engine is only bolted into the frame at one point and its missing the front mount plates entirely.
Give me a week or so for all these parts to come in and I'll have a little runner.


"Custom" Intake

"Filter"

SPARKS!

RTV head gasket

Busted Exhaust stud

Piston

Inside the tank, not terrible

[problemaddict]

Loving the updates! They should change the term barn-find to bodge-find

[Bigshankhank]

Just because I would need to do it eventually anyway, I pulled off the old greasy chain and am soaking it in some degreaser, and with that off I now have access to the oil injection pump. Someone tried to remove the screws with clearly the wrong tool because the head of the two screws holding the cover on were completely stripped out. On a lark, because this might as well be fun right? I decided to try the GatorGrip tool that I bought decades ago and is universally hated. The fucking thing actually worked! No one is more surprised than I was. I am going to chock it up to the Universe proactively stepping in to keep the PO out of the oil pump chamber in an effort to preserve the spirit of the Machine because it was immaculate inside. Small wonder.


Couple of shots of the top end gasket surfaces nice and clean and ready for reassembly

[DerGolgo]

Is that a piece of metal just chillin' in the combustion chamber looking like there's a plugged hole other than the spark-plugged hole? Or what is going on here?
Non-specific trace of fabrication methods? Or was it intended for dual-ignition? Or direct fuel injection? I know it's not that, but there's only so much another hole might be doing in a cylinder head...

[Bigshankhank]

Some two strokes of the era allowed you to screw in a backup spark plug so when one fouled (inevitably) you could just swap over the plug wire and keep on riding. Problem was if you left it in there long enough it would just get caked with carbon and unburnt fuel sludge that was swirling around the combustion chamber. So that is just a plain old bolt in there, and there it shall stay.

[DerGolgo]

... and there it shall stay.

Naturally.

silly threadjack

Show

But allow me to ponder what, if any, of an effect tow plugs firing together might have... that close to each other, nothing immense I'd assume.
And yet. Me, being a weird, were this my bike, I'd already be poking around between the points, trying to work out if one could wire up a secondary coil. Would that melt the points, two coils hung on?
Or could a single, big coil handle two plugs at once (and itself be handled by the single-coil points setup)?

And now my brain has proceeded to picturing a pair of big old MOSFETs wired up behind the points, each feeding one coil...

Really, a whole lot of effort for no benefit.
Which makes it a noble pursuit, truly!

[Bigshankhank]

Oh DerG sometimes the German penchant for over-complexity bubbles to the surface with you. Fwiw this has an electronic ignition, not points.

As for a new update, the cylinder got dropped off at a machine shop for bolt removal. Good cylinders are too expensive and most of them are either already over ores or need an overbite and since this is the original cylinder means I want to use this one and not just replace it, also I already bought a piston and rings to fit it.

[Bigshankhank]

All that being said, dual-plugs on ironhead sportsters is a common mod, but I think in addition to the 2nd coil you need to upgrade the pickup coil on the flywheel to make more electrons flow per rotation.

[MATPOC]

All that being said, dual-plugs on ironhead sportsters is a common mod, but I think in addition to the 2nd coil you need to upgrade the pickup coil on the flywheel to make more electrons flow per rotation.

I think 2nd plug was pure racing application, you in the woods running an event and need a quick fix you can just swap the wire, not intended for daily use where you can take your time and swap the plug, takes all of 2 minutes, this is why they are capped off when you buy the bike.
if you have electronic ignition you don't actually need anything other then a different coil to run twin plug set up, my Hawk GT has twin plugs but single coil with two wires, one is negative, other is positive, so they complete a single circuit through both plugs

TLDR
More modern twin plug applications like my R1100S for example, use different timing curves for the plugs, primary plugs run normal timing curve and secondary does something different. How do I know? when the center plug failed to spark my bike still ran fine and for 10,000 miles (or more before I bought it) I had no idea, except that it wasn't fast, but I bought bike used with a failed plug (actually broken wiring to the coil) and assumed all the BMW's were that slow and was actually going to sell it, until on the way to D00M '18 I finally got to test the top speed and found out that bike tops out at 115mph and Der Spezificationz claim 145mph top speed, so I knew something was a miss and I spent several month (all winter) poking and testing till I found broken wire inside the connector. if someone wanted to prank me it would have been the best one ever, I had NO IDEA what I was looking for and it took me months to find it... but I also had fun doing it because I love puzzles.
I think it's the owner before last, who was a DIY guy who fucked it up and then dealer spent months and thousand$$$ looking for this problem and gave up, bike got flipped couple times and when it developed yet another electrical issue I picked it up to a song (less than a cost of Ohlins suspension that it on it) so I can't complain

[Bigshankhank]

Pushing this one pretty hard for no reason other than I don’t want another non-running vehicle, and parts are starting to roll in. I dropped off the cylinder head after a failed attempt to remove the broken exhaust stud. I don’t know why I bother anymore, when someone else can do it for me better and cleaner


Then today I got my new piston and rings. I gotta say Wiseco packed the piston in a cloth bag which was just classy as fuck


Also scored a brand new “Mikuni” carb, had to take it apart since this same carb is used on Ts100, TS125 and the TS185 with different jetting. Everything is setup correctly for my bike, and since the cylinder is ready to go I slipped in the new piston so it’s loaded for Bear when the gasket kit arrives. As you can see, the old carb was definitely not the right one, but according to the PO it ran fine <shrug> Another milestone here; in all my years riding and wrenching I’ve never had a brand new carb. Never until today, and when I think back on all the shitty, dirty grungy nasty old carbs I’ve worked on I wonder why I haven’t considered buying a new replacement before now?


Last but not least I got an original kickstart lever. Why not?


Still coming in the mail, new throttle and clutch cables, top end gasket kit and a set of engine mounts including the exhaust collar. She’s getting close!

[Bigshankhank]

Still coming in the mail, new throttle and clutch cables, top end gasket kit and a set of engine mounts including the exhaust collar. She’s getting close!

Everything has now been delivered EXCEPT the gasket set which, I can’t put the fucking engine back together without that! Patience patience patience…

Oh, I need a flip-up gas cap for this bike, so if anyone out there in internet land has one kicking around let me know. Since I don’t have a key switch I don’t need the matching fork lock and all that shit, just the cap. Every one I can find on eBay either comes with an entire tank or all the other keyed parts and I don’t want any superfluous parts to deal with.

[Bigshankhank]

Ugh tracking on the gasket set shows another week till delivery, that makes me sad.

[Bigshankhank]

Gotta love the attachment of the old clutch cable

[Bigshankhank]

Why, oh why am I bothering to even try the front end swap right now? I was supposed to just get this bike running and rideable and now I'm making improvements...


Which was courting disaster because while pulling the triple tree out one of the upper neck bearings fell out and bounced off the end of the connecting rod and landed in the skid plate. A bounce in the wrong direction and into the crank would've meant a full lower end tear down.

Also humorous to find the PO had replaced the front wheel bearings with bearings with the wrong inner and outer diameters meaning the axle was flopping around within them and he had wrapped electrical tape around the outside of the bearings to get them to fit in the hub. This bike continues to deliver the hits.


Also of note the front end off the SP250 had a tapered lower neck bearing and balls on the upper, both of which were rusty as hell and will need replacement. Sadly I got called away before I could test fit the SP triple in the TS frame so there is still some knowledge to gain, and I haven't done anything that can't be undone on the TS frame.

[MATPOC]

This sounds like my snowmobile rebuild last year... Except I bought it running and seemingly in good shape, just needed some cleaning... and complete suspension rebuild which turned into welding and milling rear skid, complete rebuild or replacement of every single suspension component and eventually welding the chassis because I found cracks.
End result is that I spent way too much money (probably more than what I could have bought the same sled in mint condition) also spent 100+ hours wrenching, sanding, priming, painting... and after all it still needed a new clutch that cost $700+ (Paid $1100 for the sled, could have bought a nice one for $3k)
On the upside I know how every single component forks and can probably keep this thing running for few more years. It's got a 120hp Suzuki 2 stroke and I already got gears turning in my head trying to figure out how to make it work in a motorcycle (has no gearbox, uses CVT like a golf cart or scooter)

IDK how to hotlink Google photos... this is what I get when i click share
https://photos.app.goo.gl/XLNERqeD8VDaauNy6

[MATPOC]

I was just talking about it and faceplace delivers!!

FB_IMG_1699582941963.jpg

[Bigshankhank]

Jesus dude is it just a perspective truck or is that expansion chamber compensating for something?
Also, stingers? That’s gotta be brutal on the ears.

[MATPOC]

I'd say this dude is building a drag bike but the fact that forks are in backwards, even if it's dry-fit makes me wonder if this is ha shady tree project that never gonna get past this stage or I don't know something about this and running forks backwards is some special drag-racing trick

[Bigshankhank]

I'd say this dude is building a drag bike but the fact that forks are in backwards, even if it's dry-fit makes me wonder if this is ha shady tree project that never gonna get past this stage or I don't know something about this and running forks backwards is some special drag-racing trick

I didn’t even notice that, considering there is only a caliper mounted on one side of the front makes me wonder why they left the other one off? I can’t imagine how that setup would be advantageous for drag racing, usually there would be a disc in the spokes to catch the timing lights but otherwise I think drag bikes run their forks conventionally (albeit shortened).

[Bigshankhank]

As parts continue to roll in, the work continues only slightly abated! At long last the top end gasket set arrived so I was finally able to finish reassembling the engine.


Followed by a good condition two-stroke oil tank, which allowed me to replace the old cut and hardened oil line and get it all tied in. I'll probably toss some weed walker two stroke oil in it and run a little premix for now until I can bleed the oil lines and get to the store to buy some proper 2-stroke bike oil. Sadly there are no MC shops near me that aren't wholly V-twin cruiser focused so I'll have to make a trip in to town.


Last but not least with the top end back together I was able to remount the exhaust, and while I was on that side I kicked it over a few times and it has some tight compression. I also stuck the plug in the cap and all this fettling hasn't disconnected the crucial wires and it still has spark. Believe me when I say I was temped to pour some gas into the carb and see if I could make an explosion but my grandson was in the garage with me and I am not going to deafen him with the ring-ding and smoke out party. Soon though, oh so soon...


Still waiting for;
-New front wheel hub w/ axle that has a complete set of bearings and spacers that are missing from wheel that was on the bike. I will swap everything over and then have a spare hub in case I need it to lace up a 17" SuMo rim? I dunno, just crazy thoughts
-I searched and searched for a bearing splitter to pull the tapered race off the upgrade triple tree stem and swap the ball bearing race from the OEM stem and finally just ordered one online. No local auto shops have them to rent/borrom and surprisingly Harbor Freight (my source for one-time tools) was really expensive. Amazon came through for me and it arrived tonight so once that swap is done, I can put the front end back together and with a running engine, this bike will be rideable

[Bigshankhank]

Aggravation today. Had some free garage time so I decided to fill the carb and pour some oil in the tank and give the kicker a few swats. Two or three was all I got before it started free kicking so something inside is stripped and not engaging properly. I went ahead and ordered a replacement kickstart gear and since I needed to pull the clutch side cover off I got a new gasket as well. Once I'm in there I'll decide whether or not to replace the friction plates in the clutch. After that I decided to try a drill in reverse on the magneto bolt but all the did was spin the chuck off of my drill (technically my grandfather's drill so that's a little upsetting) but its a sign that compression is good I guess. For all that I did spit some smoke out of the exhaust so some measure of combustion took place. Back to waiting on parts I suppose.
In an effort to cheer myself up, I decided to pull the bering races off of the two steering stems. Sadly the diameter of the two stems are about 2mm different so in order to make this front end upgrade work I'm going to have to take both to a machine shop to have the stems pressed out and the original one pressed back into the better lower triple. In the process of all this I managed to lose 2 of the upper ball bearings so it looks like I'm going to be ordering replacement bearings after all.

[Bigshankhank]

Going back to the OEM front end after trying and facing setbacks on the swap with the SP250 (see other thread). Got a new front hub with necessary bearings and spacers that my original wheel didn’t have and I bought a new tube for the front tire so I should be able to put it back on its own two feet this weekend. You may also notice that the handlebars are bent but as luck would have it I have the bars from my Aermacchi that are the same diameter and are straight so Imma swap those in and sort out the cables. Getting there slowly but surely.

[Bigshankhank]

There is something in the engine. Managed to get it to kick over briefly a couple times then while spinning the engine by hand something is now grinding inside. It’s been spinning smoothly prior to now. Looks like a complete tear down and hopefully it’s just one of the ball bearings from the steering neck and can be easily removed without having caused any damage.

[Bigshankhank]

Im continuing to speculate that since this bike had its oil injection pump disabled at some point in a very checkered past, it may be experiencing a crank bearing failure. Also not fatal.
Trying to keep my spirits up, I went ahead and cleaned off my work bench and prepped my tools for the tear down.