dr.wylde

Small progress, cleaned up the frame , painted it , and started putting stuff back on it. she'll never be pretty,unless I go whole hog resto ......maybe one day. until then farm bike does farm bike things

so I was on marketplace......... I've always been a bit of a believer that you don't go looking for the odd and unusual/ rare / desirable parts. They find you I found a TF185 engine that was seized. when i say seized I don't mean the piston in the bore ....... that crank is seized in there! I have the barrel, I have the head. further marketplace browsing also netted me a TF185 expansion chamber, magneto cover and left side fairing cover. photos to come I didn't find those parts , they found me , definitely a sign from the farm bike gods

and this is where it currently is at . this is #2 bug. this frame compared to the 1980 , complete and not butchered so decided that this will be THE bike that I slap together. this will not be a concourse resto . I don't have time for that but I'll tidy up the frame, replace frame bearings and bolt in a working motor , then we go find some mud and cow pats.😁

So over the Xmas / new year break I was perusing marketplace............ seen something I like , had a think about it, messaged seller, made offer, went and did the exchange and I came home with mudbug #2 a full bike with not much pillaged from it . plan was to cannibalize this one into the 1980. Seller said it ran but the gearbox is rooted. no worries I've got a mint one in the garage. going over the bike ,while complete , it's also been well used. and it's covered and I mean absolutely covered in this weird dirty ,sticky ,greasy mud . she has lots of rust , frame is solid but definitely crusty around the edges.

after a day or two I had torn it down to this overall the frame is ok , seat mounts/hinges have been ground off, rear mounts for carrier are also gone too. since this day I've been slowly buying bits and pieces, plan was to convert it to full 125 spec ( forks , front wheel and engine) .bung on a generic seat from temu and locate a TF tank . found a tank found a mint 125 engine. bought those and stashed them in the shed

as some of you know I have a few TF Mudbug Farm bikes Bug #1 the one that started it all. 1980 TF100. missing parts, it's dirty it's rusty. the seat bracketry has very porous welds and cheap thin pipe material was used . I didn't need a grinder for the added buggery of previous owners literally walloped the added brackets off with a soft mallet. so much is missing or just wrong with this little bike .

Oh yeah one more thing. sooooo the lower control arm bushes look like Nolathane, the upper arms. Original factory rubber and although old nowhere near as flogged as the Nolathanes. say a lot doesn't it.

where was I? oh yeah that whole front end is flogged out , so the car ended up looking like this so now , I'm looking at rebuilding the entire front end , all the steering , brakes and suspension. what was supposed to be just a few bushes has now snowballed into more than I anticipated.

Ever heard of the snowball? yeah , well that's kinda what's about to happen here. however before I get into that , I better get this thread up to date. Over the remainder of July and August since my last update.I reassembled the engine , new gaskets , new bolts so on and so forth. now that I think about it the reassembly was a mini snowball in itself. next on my to buy/ do list was the front suspension bushes and then tyres . over August I fell really Ill with that flu thing that was getting around, so while sick in bed I sprung for a full bush kit for the Stato, after that I saved some more pennies and bought a pair of tyres for the front of the car . my plan was to replace the suspension bushings in the front end as the current nolathane ones were crumbling away into nothing. then put my new wheel tyre combo on the front. simple right? hahahahaha yeah the old girl wasn't done with me . I had some time off work thought I'd start tearing into the suspension. Lots of swearing jiggling and fighting ball joints and getting nowhere drove me to disassemble everything in my way, every nut,bolt, bearing - flogged!

so I put the cam back in Have Advanced it by 4 degrees to bring the powerband a little lower in the rev range to compensate for the 2.6 diff . so the plan is to build the car to match the cam .

so , for the last 10 years. I've had a cam , in an engine. that's being choked out by restricted exhaust manifolds , a 2.6:1 diff . and probably generally shit tuning. and I did 5000ks in it haha. the funniest thing though, and mods you may tell me off for this. one of the arguments I had with my ex-wife was kinda funny now I think about it. She drove the car for a short period while I sorted her car out ( bad idea) anyways after a week, she's spouting off at me during one of our weekly arguments ( this was in the final year of marriage when we just weren't getting along) " I know that old car better than anyone" do you really? hahahahahaha small ironies. anyways back to the car . I have two options either get a tamer camshaft or........... build the rest of the engine car to suit the cam. thoughts please in the the discussion thread. pic for fred

Update Time. been slowly working away on this, pulling the engine apart to get to the timing chain. Timing chain/ marks check out . was set up as per dot/dot , straight up. well the 9 link gap between marks. hmmmm , ok not what I thought then. so then I went a step further, rockers, pushrods and lifter came off and out. disassembled more of the car. thought to myself, you know what time to solve this mystery once and for all with the cam , pull it , check for markings and check on the Internet. and this is what I found. Crower 56502. first, that's actually pretty cool. second, ohhhhh that makes a lot of sense. it's a fairly aggressive cam for my application. I'll dig up specs. one moment please

that was the plan , wind it over on the rock and see if the valves are even. I ran 12 degrees originally with no vac advance , but when I had the vac advance rebuilt I dialed back the distributor to 8 degrees . total advance is 34 and when it has run well , this is where I've had it .

I was off work for a few days following some minor surgery. thought I'd work on the car. Inside the bumper was all rusty and scaly , wire wheeled that off with the grinder and blew some black paint at the insides and all the brackets. sadly that's all I have , but bumper is now back on the front of the car. However......... so those of you who have followed from the beginning will remember that the engine that resides between the chassis rails in the car was a rebuilt unit that was built and then possibly/potentially stored before I got it. because my OG donk shat a piston ( still have that by the way) Anyways I got the AFR gauge to determine my idle mixture as I wasn't having any luck with the vacuum gauge method. now I've done my due diligence, the entire ignition system is pretty much new and it works Carb is also reco'd and functional. even with the idle mixture running at 14.2-14.7 the vacuum signal is only reading a steady 13. definitely too low . I suspect it's incorrect valve timing which would make sense as the internals are new ish and have barely done 5000k since I dropped the engine in. All it's bad idling ( I just thought it had a lumpy cam) it's stumbling and that stranding incident. it all kind of makes sense now. compression test came back at 115-120psi all round, also too low. anyways, next job is to pull the engine all apart and check the valve timing on a cam I have no clue what its specs are . I did find a video on YouTube from Uncle Tony's garage about using the Keith Black method to determine whether it's timed correctly. anyways for now I'll leave it there as I'm going to take a break from it until next month while I gather some parts and Tools.