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This episode of Ran When Parked is sponsored by Visionary Cycles, the U.S. distributor for Kedo products from Germany. Kedo sells thousands of parts specifically for the XT500, and when they heard what we were doing they were stoked to help out. They sent us a big box of everything we'll need to get the bike back on the road.

In the last episode of this Ran When Parked, we got this classic 1979 Yamaha XT500 dirt bike running and riding. But there were still some issues that needed addressing before we actually hit the trail. Can we finish the project and get this vintage motocrosser ready for the dirt?

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Transcript
00:00Welcome back to Ran, Wind, Parked, an MC garage production, and we are back today with our 1979 Yamaha XT500.
00:08And if you've been following this build, you know that we pulled it out of some dude's garage.
00:13We went through the absolute ringer trying to get it running the first time.
00:16We did get it running.
00:17Ran, Wind, Parked!
00:18And then we needed to get it riding.
00:20So in the last video, we did suspension, we did brakes, we did chain, we did a whole bunch of other stuff.
00:25And today we're going to get it ready to take on a ride, which means we need to do a little bit more fettling with the brakes.
00:31I need to hook up brake switches, need to address the elephant in the room, elephants in the room?
00:36Which are these tires.
00:37They're ancient, they're trash, they're desperately unsafe, even for riding around the parking lot, and it is high time we change them.
00:45And to fix that, we called our friends at Dunlop and check this out.
00:49Dunlop sent us a gigantic box of goodies.
00:52So in the last episode, we talked about our good friends at Keto.
00:56They helped us out with most of the hard parts for this thing.
00:59But for tires, we knew we needed some serious help.
01:03So we got a set of Dunlop D606s.
01:06These are a 60-40 off-road, on-road tire.
01:10They got pretty aggressive knobs on them.
01:12I've run them on a bunch of stuff in the past.
01:14They are going to be the perfect fit for our sort of on-road, off-road ethos with this Yamaha.
01:19They're going to get us on the trail, and they're going to get us down the road safe.
01:22All right, so we're going to set about getting the wheels off this thing so I can take the tires off.
01:27There are some of you who are heading right to the comments and say,
01:29well, why didn't you just do this when you had the tires off before when you were doing the fork seals?
01:34And that's a really good question, and that's definitely something we should have done.
01:37But the way the timing of this project worked out, that's not what happened.
01:40And we really wanted to ride the bike in the last video.
01:43So here we are doing this again.
01:45It's also fun to note, I told you before, these tires don't appear to have a date code on them,
01:49or at least not one that I can read.
01:51But what is cool is we're throwing a set of Dunlops on here,
01:54and the tires that are coming off are Dunlops.
01:56That's neat.
01:57Somebody who put tires on this bike in the past obviously had good taste.
02:00My partner in crime, Anders, has gone out to the Power Sports store to get some tubes and rim tape for these things.
02:06So I'm going to work on busting them apart while he's gone,
02:09and hopefully I will have this tire off this rim by the time he gets back with the new stuff.
02:15All right, need to not forget about the speedo drive.
02:20Wiggle our speedometer cable free.
02:22That O-ring has seen better days.
02:24So while this is all apart, I'm going to put some new grease on the speedometer bevel
02:28and see if I can't find a new O-ring to fit that speedo drive,
02:32just because I don't want dirt and crap getting into our hub there
02:36and screwing up the speedo drive or getting on our brakes.
02:39And I forgot about the pinch bolts, so I need to go grab a 12 mil or 13 mil wrench
02:44to get those pinch bolts off.
02:46And once that's done, the wheel's out.
02:47Here's a handy top tip for those of you who don't like to waste time.
02:50If you haven't gotten so good that you can eyeball these bolts, get three wrenches.
02:55It's bound to be one of them, right?
02:57Start with a 13.
02:57I think I remember it's a 13.
03:00It's a 14.
03:01See, that's why you get three wrenches.
03:03If you get the wrong three wrenches, obviously, you're hooched.
03:06But usually, three around the same ballpark are going to get you where you need to be.
03:12One slight bummer is that one of the air bleed screws at the bottom of this fork leg
03:18has started to leak.
03:21So we did the fork seals last time, and we're already leaking a little bit of fork oil.
03:24It's not from the seal itself.
03:26It's from this little screw down here on the other side.
03:29So it should be fairly easy to get a cross washer or some pipe dope or something on there
03:33and prevent that from happening.
03:35But that's one of the things you'll have on old bikes like this is sometimes you fix a
03:40leak, and it keeps right on leaking.
03:41Got a mallet with a softer end in the axle, and I'm just going to ever so tenderly start
03:46tapping our axle out.
03:49There we go.
03:50Yep.
03:51There we go.
03:52That's free.
03:53Keep track of your spacer.
03:56Put the spacer on the side of the axle it goes on.
03:59Let's see.
04:00Our brake and hub assembly will stay in place.
04:04Pull this out and set it somewhere where it's going to stay together and stay clean.
04:09Get some brake clean on here.
04:10There's obviously some glazing from the inside of the rim in there, so we'll have to hit
04:14all this with a Scotch-Brite and clean up our braking surfaces a little bit so we don't
04:19ruin these brand new pads.
04:20And as you can see, this is cool.
04:22This little gear in here is the speedometer drive.
04:25Basically, there's a gear in the hub that engages with that, and when the wheel turns,
04:29it turns the cable, which turns the speedometer.
04:31But I said I needed to put a new O-ring on there, and it's to keep dust from going into
04:35that hole, because it'll gum the gear up and then get whatever mud and water and stuff
04:39goes down there into your brake, which you do not want.
04:43Now, I think what I can do to get the air out of this the quick way, instead of just pushing
04:48down the Schrader valve, there's a little valve core remover tool, I think, as part of
04:53this valve stem cap.
04:54So what I'm going to try to do...
04:56Oh yeah, you can hear it.
04:57Let's pull this out, pull the valve core out with the valve stem cap.
05:03Anyway, TLDR here is if you pull the core out, it will let all the air out in one shot,
05:10opposed to having it sit there and leak.
05:12And this one, because it's old, appears to have frozen on the way out.
05:17So that thing is not wanting to come out of there.
05:19Slow way for us.
05:20There is our valve core, basically the interior of a, well, actually a pretty old Schrader
05:25valve.
05:26That's what keeps air in your tire.
05:29This tire is about as flat as it can get.
05:31Nope, that's going to need a wrench.
05:33Maybe that's a 12.
05:36That's a 12.
05:37See?
05:38Three wrenches.
05:39Every time.
05:40Oh, there's so much dirt and grime.
05:42Again, I have no idea when the last time this was done.
05:45One other thing that you have on tubed tires, which I'm sure most of you know, is on the other
05:49side opposite the valve stem, there's a rim lock and basically that's got a screw on one
05:56side that comes through the rim.
05:58And then it's just a piece of rubber that kind of sits inside the rim and holds the tire
06:02bead on and keeps things from moving around.
06:05And so you're never going to get the tire off the rim if you don't remove the rim lock.
06:13So I got the hub on these pieces of wood to protect it a little bit.
06:18And then I'm going to try to break the bead.
06:22Oh my goodness.
06:24Normally you can do this by hand by just kind of working your weight along the outside of
06:29the tire to break the seal between the rim and the bead.
06:33But these tires have been on this rim since Ronald Reagan was president and so they really
06:38don't want to come off.
06:39I am going to go find a tire iron and I'm actually starting to get pretty worried here.
06:44It's fairly obvious that this rim sat in muck and water or I don't know, something acidic
06:50for a while.
06:51I mean you can see where there's cracking in the tire, this was flat.
06:54So this was under leaves or something and even though it's aluminum it didn't rust but
06:58it's super pitted right here.
07:00So I'm going to have to be very careful getting this tire off, putting the new one on and
07:04also there's every chance that this rim isn't viable.
07:06I had seen that spot before but it looked like it could be like brushed off with a Brillo
07:10pad or whatever but that's like actual metal fatigue.
07:14Hopefully that's not a showstopper this week but there's nothing to it but to do it and
07:19find out.
07:20Alright so I'm just going to try to get a knee under the bead on one corner of this here.
07:25Just enough to make room for the tire iron.
07:27There we go.
07:29Oh there she went.
07:31With a little bit of leverage the bead is starting to break.
07:34Work my way around with my tire iron, taking small bites, knock this bead off of this rim.
07:41Get the old tire off and the new tire on.
07:43If you want to get real fancy you can use two tire irons.
07:46Work your way around.
07:47In the middle of this rim there's sort of, you know it's not flat the whole way through
07:50there should be sort of a ditch in the middle and the closer you can get the bead on this
07:55side into that ditch the easier it is going to be to get the bead off the other side and
07:59in turn the tire off the rim.
08:01That is our bead broken all the way around except at the rim lock.
08:07I'm going to take our dead blow and just give it a smack.
08:13So that is now pushed up off of the rim lock.
08:15There it is.
08:17Alright.
08:18The other side.
08:22Process is the same.
08:23Tire iron in and work your way slowly around.
08:29Okay.
08:30So if you watched the last ran when parked on the XS650 with Mark Hoyer you'll remember
08:36that he changed tires also and down in the center of the rim in the sort of little valley
08:41there was a bunch of rust and corrosion and dirt and gook and he used a wire brush on a drill
08:48to get it out of there and make it clean.
08:50We've got the same problem with our rim but worse.
08:54As I mentioned when I was taking the tire off it looked like it had sat kind of like
08:58on the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic for a while and it's worse in the rim and
09:02obviously this is not going to be good for our new rim strip or our new tube or our new
09:06rim lock.
09:07So I'm going to go ahead and knock this stuff off with this little wire brush.
09:12I might spritz a bit of WD-40 or something in there just to lubricate it a little bit and
09:16then knock this off so that when we get our new tubes and our new rim strip they've got a nice
09:20clean place to land.
09:21So if you look I'm using as little pressure as I possibly can I'm not pushing down or
09:26forcing into this.
09:27One this is aluminum which is pretty soft to begin with and two this is old aluminum which
09:31means it's even softer than it would have been to begin with so I really don't want to damage
09:34the rim so I'm just giving it a gentle scrape and most of this stuff is already starting
09:39to come up so we should be in good shape.
09:41Okay welcome back.
09:42I took a wire wheel on a drill and cleaned up this rim I won't say as best as I could.
09:47I probably could have done a little bit better job but I did clean it up.
09:50I have our new tube and I put a new rim strip in here off camera so we went to our local
09:55motorcycle parts supply store bought some generic tubes.
09:59This is a 21 inch tube by two and three quarter by three inch which will fit our 90 90 21 rim.
10:08I'm just going to do a little test fit just to make sure that you know everything's happy
10:12and healthy and sitting where I want it to and then I will go over to our air gun probably
10:17less than a pound it would not register on a tire gauge just that much air in here to
10:22keep it from pinch flatting when I go to put the tire on and then I will grab our tire hole
10:27in the rim strips not quite big enough so I'm going to work that through work our valve stem
10:31through there it goes yeah so this tube will work it looks like just double check oh yeah yeah okay
10:41so we're good on tube so that's my test fit done I will take this off put some air in it put the
10:46washer back on it and I've got this bucket this handy bucket to put our rim on to protect the spokes
10:53the next thing we're going to do after we put some air in this tube is we're going to go grab our tire
10:57we're going to lubricate it and we're going to make sure that it is going on the bike in the
11:01correct rotation direction that's maybe the trickiest part of this whole operation there's
11:06going to be some screwing around with the rim locks and I go to put those on that will be both
11:10uncomfortable and probably hilarious to watch but anyway we're going to lubricate the tire and then
11:15we will hold the tire relative to the bike and the rim relative to the bike the way that it's going to
11:19sit and just make sure that all the arrows are going in the correct direction so that we don't have a tire
11:23turning around backwards all right so here you'll see on the tire is written the rotation direction
11:28which means tire wants to be going that way which is forwards imagine that so I'm going to bring it
11:33over here to the bike and that all matches up but to make sure I do this properly I'm going to grab our
11:40rim and the easiest way to do this is you'll see that the brake drum is on the left hand side of the
11:46wheel so I'm going to line that up with the boss that holds the brake shoe just make sure that that's
11:51all relative to where it's going to sit on the bike and now since it is I've got our rotation direction
11:58arrow going forward the rim is set next to the bike the way it's going to go on so that I know the rim
12:04is going to go in the tire like this and that'll be the correct rotation direction so I'm going to
12:08bring my tire over to my bucket got this handy dandy bucket and now I know that if I have the rotation
12:16arrow facing forward and the drum on the left hand side of the bucket which is up in this case
12:24that we're all rotating the right way so now I'm going to get some lubrication and put this tire
12:28on the rim now usually so you'll see tires are marked that is the heavy side so this rim doesn't
12:36have any balance weights on it and I don't think it'll need some but what I'm going to do is make sure
12:41that this heavy side of the tire is on the opposite side of our rim lock this didn't have
12:46a rim lock I would do it on the opposite side of the valve because that's going to be the heaviest
12:50part of the tube but the rim locks a lot heavier than the valve so I'm going to put this opposite
12:55the rim lock and then get to getting it on the bike this is our rim lock it's a bigger hole this is our
13:00valve so I'm going to have the heavy side opposite the rim lock make sure our yellow dot is about where
13:08our rim lock sits okay there's nothing worse than putting that on and realizing you've got
13:12the tire backwards you've got the balance off because then you have to take the whole operation
13:15apart like is not you're going to tear your tube doing it it's just good to spend the extra 17
13:22seconds on the front end so that you don't have a big screw up on the back end oh and the bucket
13:27this is just a nice platform to keep your tire on and it keeps everything vaguely stable while you're
13:33popping the bead over the rim which can be kind of an annoying procedure
13:36welcome back to ranwen park and we've got just a few little things to button up on this bike before
13:41we get out to windrock and give it a rip the intention is fully to make this thing street
13:45legal but while the paperwork is still pending we're going to take this to our local off-road park
13:49and go for a little ride around but before we do that we have a few more parts to put on from our
13:53friends at keto they sent us a brake switch for the front and rear so we still have to install those
14:00a couple other little various and sundry things we'd like to thank them for their help and then
14:04we're going to put tires on this thing and the really the last thing we need to do to make it
14:09safe unfortunately after we get the tires on i got to hit the road so i'm going to hand it off to
14:14anders who is going to sort out the rear brake if you remember from the last episode we were having
14:18some issues with the leverage from the pedal to the rear rod linkage and there was not a brake stay so
14:23we're going to try and fabricate one or i should say anders is going to try to fabricate one so we have
14:28both front and rear brakes and brake lights and with that the xt will be pretty much done aside from any
14:34cosmetic work that anders wants to do later we'd love to thank our friends at keto cycles and
14:39visionary cycles for sending us all the parts for this thing if you need parts for an xt 500 an sr 500
14:45or a tt 500 in the united states hit up visionarycycles.com they've got everything you need to
14:51restore one of these things from stem to stern we got fork seals we got brake shoes front and rear we got
14:57a chain carburetor connection parts we got a petcock rear shocks we got wheel bearings what about a steering
15:04stem we clearly forgot something yeah steering stem bearings we haven't done those yet uh as i
15:08mentioned the brake switches uh the grips the throttle cable the throttle tube all that stuff
15:13everything you need to rebuild one of these we'd love to thank them yet again we're going to put in
15:18the description below a list of the parts we put on this bike and that's a quick recipe to fixing one
15:22of these up yourself so hit them up okay so i mentioned the brakes a quick second ago and uh i'm more
15:27of a disc brake guy so a disc brake is a spinning dinner plate with a clamp on the back and hydraulic
15:33pressure tells the clamp to pinch when you pull the lever it's a really simple system that requires
15:38no maintenance my weird friend anders here however loves a drum brake anders why don't you tell us uh
15:44briefly what a drum brake is and does and then how you're going to make these uh work because right
15:49now they really don't well what we're going to do is we're going to replace the uh we're probably
15:53going to resurface the in the interior of the drum brake we're probably going to get some new shoes
15:57in there brake shoes not disc i'm a fan once they're properly sorted drum brakes are absolutely
16:03fine they are 90 as good as disc brakes and they have a really nice vintagey sort of feel so where
16:08do you get those sorted out okay disc brakes use hydraulic pressure drums are all rods and linkages
16:13and springs right that's right there's no brake fluid or anything there's no reservoir it's just
16:17cables so no bleeding no bleeding oh that sounds pretty see that's a huge upside i think right i think
16:22okay so uh tell us a little bit about this brake rod situation so there's a stay on the drum and
16:26when you hit the drum brake if there's nothing holding it to the frame of the bike it'll turn
16:30right so you want to prevent that from happening exactly the the brake stay actually mounts to the
16:35swing arm and if you don't have that nothing will actually break it's just going to spin round and
16:40round and round and on the front uh in the forks that we redid there's a slot where the drum housing
16:46actually uh connects and is fixed in place right to the fork we have to do basically the same thing to
16:52the back and the reason that we're having trouble with that is that this is an
16:56aftermarket or an upgrade swing arm uh and so the original xt500 would have had that and we would
17:02have been fine but because somebody decided aluminum was the way to go and that was configured differently
17:08on the bike this came on stock we're now having to kind of reconfigure some stuff exactly the the
17:13aluminum swing arm it's trick it's an upgrade it's lighter and everything else however we don't have
17:18all the stuff that this bike originally came with so we will have to come up with a solution of some
17:22sort and it doesn't have to be that complicated it can literally just be a piece of metal that
17:26you machine and put together and measure carefully and you can get this stuff from home depot if you
17:31want so we're going to fab something together yeah i'm going to get these tires on and then i'm going
17:35to let you mess with that while i drive home and and get on with the rest of my life all right sounds
17:40great okay so the rear tires back on uh that process was in some ways harder in some ways easier than
17:46the front but basically uh these d606 rears are uni-directional that's so that when these knobs
17:52wear down if you want to get aggressive off-road you can just flip the tire around and you have
17:55like a hard bite on a soft surface it meant that i didn't need to worry about the the rotation
18:00direction but anyway we got this bead pop back on and now the tires off the bike and i'm going to
18:04leave it off rather than installing it right now because again andres is going to mess with the brakes
18:09so it's just going to be easier for him to do what he needs to do to the drum brake if i leave the tire
18:13off a little disappointing i'd kind of like to ride the bike with the new tires and i'm not going
18:17to have time to wait for him to fix the brakes but yeah all things being equal this is the most
18:21efficient way to get this project done so i'm going to roll this over into the corner of the shop i'm
18:25so proud of how far this bike has come it is going to be such a good little ripper on road and off
18:30it was 2 000 bucks okay and we have i don't know the value of the keto parts is a little less than
18:37that again so less than three grand into this bike for one of the coolest rippers on the street
18:43you're not going to spend two thousand bucks on a used modern dirt bike and be anywhere near this
18:48cool and it's rewarding to get your hands dirty one of the reasons we do this hobby and we don't
18:52just go out and buy brand new bikes is it's nice to get your hands inside the motorcycle you're going
18:57to ride you get to know it literally i know it's a little woo woo but like it's nice to get to know
19:01the thing you've had your hands on every inch of it so you know exactly what's been done to it you
19:07know where all the variables are and you know your machine there's nothing like riding a bike that
19:11you already know all the ins and outs of plus look how cool it is what else can you spend two grand
19:16on and go out and look this cool i'm going to hand it off to anders and you'll see this thing
19:20ripping in just a few minutes hey it's honest d carlson we are here picking up on aaron richardson's
19:24fine work with the 1979 yamaha xt 500 there was a lengthy to-do list although we had actually
19:31checked quite a bit of stuff off we have a lovely new brand new uh mcuni carb courtesy of our friends
19:37at keto and visionary cycle uh and there are a number of other sexy sexy bits we've got new shocks
19:43we sourced a new swing arm in the back there's a number of other new internals we went through the
19:48electrical stuff on this bike we've got new navi tires uh front and back and we had to go through
19:55a rear brake that did not like to do rear brake things like stop so we did all of this stuff off camera
20:01to save you the tedious process of uh watching people swear and throw things and not figure
20:08things out in a quick or timely way but what we have done is we have figured out a brake stay
20:13so this aftermarket swing arm is lovely and strong and better than stock however we had to get creative
20:19in terms of the brake stay for the drum brake that's in back this is uh in the best shade tree mechanic
20:26tradition this is a little longer than we need uh so we're going to trim this up at some point
20:31we do want to leave a couple of these uh sort of notches here just in case we have to move things
20:34around that's in progress ip as it as they say um and we do have a new canine uh air filter on the back
20:43to uh keep the clean air clean and in addition to all that we have new lovely cables here to help us
20:51go and stop uh better we have new oil filter oil change new plugs and we actually even went inside
20:57this tank and uh switched it around with a little bit of acetone cleaned out all the old gunk and
21:01varnish so now we are at the point in time where we need to take this thing out and we need to rip this
21:07thing around uh last time the brakes did not work they were not up to snuff we're gonna have a little
21:11bit of a test driving in our fine knoxville facilities here and uh so the rear brakes work really good the
21:20front brakes work pretty good we're gonna put it through its paces we're gonna take this thing back to
21:24its natural environment dirt see you there okay as promised we are out at windrock and we are out
21:30here with the ranwen park xt 500 the only thing left is to take it out on the trails and see if it rips
21:35all right hey so first impressions this thing pulls so much better than it did before the dearly departed
21:42aaron richardson got some really really great tuning on this thing and involved uh leaning it up uh it was
21:48running extremely rich which uh you can just sort of tell every time we started it up and it was
21:54bogging down in the mid-range but now getting a nice low range decent mid-range and we're gonna find out
22:00if we get some nice high range up here too so far this thing just pulls this must have been so much
22:05fun back in 1979 either way a couple years after that they uh went up to a 550 call it uh displacement
22:13inflation maybe but this thing just just rips hey you gotta just love love love the big old thumper
22:19it's happy at 1500 it's happy at 3500 and well it might not be super happy after that but with all
22:27the low down grunt that we want now we're getting into uh a little fun with seeing how all the uh the
22:32suspension from keto and visionary works i'm getting really great i know we rebuilt the forks in the front
22:37front and we are getting about as nice a travel and damping and suspending as uh you could get
22:44in uh 1979 1980 and the back is really really supple it's really soaking up everything this is pretty
22:50nice i gotta say we'll say that the uh seat could be a little bit more supple the seat is also pretty uh
22:56period from 1979 or so look at that america that's tennessee right there there's some smoky mountains
23:05shifting is a little mushy on this uh but that could just be uh period shifters from uh the late
23:1070s early 80s look at that how nice thank you troops in america look at that hard to disagree with
23:19that's a little gnarly a little bit for a dirt noob such as myself my defense they don't have a lot of
23:26it in chicago so you know there you go 50 50 i'm gonna dump this thing but it's a dirt bike you're
23:33supposed to get dumped occasionally that was a great first run we are figuring out what is
23:38working and what needs a little bit more work the front brake is not quite ready for prime time i'd
23:44say it's 75 okay it's all right we're on trails we're getting a lot of engine braking it's gonna be
23:49okay the rear brake works awesome it just locks up when you breathe on it which is great for getting
23:56around tight stuff sometimes you want to lock up the rear to uh get around stuff so carburation is
24:02also a 9.5 out of 10 there's a couple spots where it bogs but on the whole uh aaron did a great job
24:10and jackson both did a great job uh remapping and refiguring this thing out okay there's actually no
24:14mapping with carburation but you know what i'm saying all right and that is gonna wrap it up for
24:18this episode of ran went parked this is the final one uh we're gonna say goodbye to the yamaha xt500
24:24and thanks to our partners at keto and visionary cycles if you like what you've seen hit the like
24:29and subscribe button leave some comments down there i cannot emphasize this enough how much we
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