Some backstory

My love affair with motorcycles began years ago on our dairy farm growing up.  The machine that most fascinated me was the old red Yamaha that sat in the back of our machine shed.  I can remember wandering in behind the tractors and tools to look at that bike covered in dust and cobwebs and hearing the occasional story from my dad or my grandfather about riding bikes.  This bike belonged to my grandfather, a 1973 Yamaha RD 350.  He had always wanted a bike when he was younger, a Harley like his brother's, but being rather short he was always afraid of dropping the big heavy Harley.  He finally got his chance in the '70s when he bought this bike second hand.  He put some miles on it for the first 10 or 15 years he had it (there is 12,000 miles on it now), but at some point it got put up in the shed.  Sure enough he kept it running though.  I can remember him starting it up and driving it the short distance to the milk house and washing it off and then it went back in the shed.  Time went on and he retired and someone else took over the farm.  The bike moved over to the open end of the old chicken coop, exposed to the elements where it sat for several years.  I spent a summer with my grandparents during college and it was then that I promised myself to some day restore this bike.

I got my first bike a few years later in graduate school, a 1981 Kawasaki KZ550.  I rode for a year or so in North Carolina where my family moved and it was truly everything I dreamed as a child, I was hooked.  On a visit to my grandparents after another summer internship, I saw the Yamaha sitting in its new, thankfully now covered, location at their new house.  I talked with my grandfather about it and asked if he had any desire to ride it again, he said he would like that, but he didn't know why it didn't run anymore.  I spent an afternoon with the bike checking components, cleaning carbs, and putting parts back on that had been taken off, sadly I was missing a battery so i couldn't test it.  I must have sparked something because over the next few months he decided to get it running again and took it down to an old mechanic who took care of it.  He rode it around for a few more summers after that, in his 70s.  I was so happy!  Other people in the family were worried he would get hurt, but I was glad that he had something he could do again that he so enjoyed.  He would putt around the dirt roads near their house and generally just enjoy being outside.  I was planning on making a motorcycle trip up to see him after I moved north for my new job and go riding with him around town, something I wanted to do since I was little.  Sadly, he passed away suddenly from pancreatic cancer a few months after I had moved.  During that a visit to see my grandmother that Christmas, she asked if I would like to take the bike back with me.  I felt bittersweet about the moment, I had dreamed of this bike since I was little, but I would rather gotten a hold of it under different circumstances.  The bike sat in my shop for a year as I found other things to take up my time and I don't think I was really ready to deal with some of the emotions that went along with it.  Last winter I finally bit the bullet and ordered a battery to see what state the bike was in, not having run for a year or two.  I dropped the battery in and kicked the bike over a few times and it roared to life and idled almost perfectly.  We this makes my job easier!

The bike as it looked when it was brought home before cleaning

I drove it around the roads here last summer a few times and had a blast (though my wife had to come get after I ran out of gas a few times).  So this winter I have been slowly working on restoring/rejuvenating the bike.  This is a documentation of this progress as well as a guide for myself.