Father and Son 1980 Resurrection

deeve

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This thread will hopefully serve as.a fun documentation of a father and son resurrection of a barn find 1980 XS400. I will also post some questions up here as well as I am sure we will get stuck with something along the way.

A little back story on the bike...I bought it from a retired co-worker for $250. That $250 got me a titled running when parked 1980 XS400 and a missing titlemostly-all-there donor bike.

My 15 year old son, Rocco, wants to help me get it running again. He does not have much experience turning a wrench, but he has been around enough as I worked on my various motorcycles over the years from KTM's to Ducati's to Urals. We will see how long his interest stays in this, but at least we will start out working on it together ;)

We started to give it a once over and I know for sure we will need to rebuild the master cylinder, brake caliper and I am sure the carbs. Speaking of carbs, I read somewhere that the XS400 had three (I think) different carbs over the years, but cannot find where I read that for the life of me. I would like to buy the most complete and accurate for my bike rebuild kit I can for them. So, can anyone educate me on which carb I have and where to get the best rebuild kit? It looks like are several different types of kits from different sources and I suspect some are just plain junk.

Happily, I see you can still buy mosts every part one might need for this motorcycle, so that is pretty cool!

Here are some teaser pics with a little fun surprise I found in the gas tank. Thankfully, the donor appears to have a good tank minus a small character dent.

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Looks like the metal mice got into that tank!
Congrats on the find/buy, and doing a project with your son (15 years old = bike license?)
 
15 year old = bike license? That is his hope. My oldest son and I fixed up a KLR 650 for him when he was about the same age so presidence has been set.
 
I worked from home today while Rocco was at school and couldn't help myself during lunch. I pulled the tanks off the two motorcycles and drained the gas from both. The rusty tank was NASTY but hopefully if I can get it to dry out it might be savable my someone. Probably not, but drying out would be good anyway. I swapped over the keys for the tanks as well. I like to tinker, so that was a good diversion from work for a little bit.

I think someone with dent remove skill could take care of these, but at this point it is pretty low on the list of things to do. Here are some shots of the dent and the inside of the tank. Also, I couldn't help myself and cleaned up a little spot on the rear fender to see how the chrome looks. Must be decent quality stuff because it took a shine. Not a bad little glamour shot!

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I noticed while doing the tank swap that the rubbers on the "good" bike are hard as a rock. The fuel line broke like a twig. The stuff on the donor bike is a little dirtier, but softer so I think I will be doing some back and forth. The carb boots to the engine are super hard so I am sure those will leak and need to be replaced. Thankfully there seems to be replacements around easily sourced.
 
Nothing major to update but the weather did clear so I rolled it out for a bath before we start pulling carbs and brakes for cleaning. Also, the MC and caliper rebuild kits showed up yesterday in the mail.

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Uh...pulled the carbs and one looks pretty good. The other one not so much. There is about 1/8" of gooey mess down in the bottom of the bowl. The floats on the gunked up one wont move. Yet.

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Looks like the norm on bikes that sit in the NW...........should clean up though with some work..........
 
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