My late introduction

I've been on for awhile, got some great advice, but never introduced myself.
I live in Minnesota, I had just finished a snowmobile restoration and need another project. I also wanted to get my 20 year old son in the garage to teach him some much needed mechanical skills before he moves out. I've owned a few bikes over my 51 years, first one was a 1970 Honda Trail 70, then a 73 Yamaha 175 Enduro, and had a 2000 Yamaha VStar that I sold a couple of years ago.
I spent a couple of days on Craigslist and found these.


An 85 750X with a blown engine, no title, and an 82 750J that I was told runs good, has title but was an unfinished project. For $250 I decided I could get the 82 back on the road while doing some modifications to it to make it more fun. Maybe using some of the parts from the 85, and selling whatever parts are left over. At the time, I didn't realize how few parts are interchangeable.

To make this short, here's how it looks today. I'll start another thread maybe in modifications? To post more photos.



Thanks to Chacal for a lot of parts to this point, more to come. Also to k-moe and others for a lot of help.

 

you put the X front end and speedo and tach on the 82? looks good.
that was quite a bite taken out of the frame of the 82!

 

Thanks, I did. The 85 forks are about 3" longer and I like the looks of the round headlight, gauges, bars. Of course this created a wiring nightmare but I'm working my way through it. The 82 has the big square headlight with the wiring connections inside. The 85 has small round headlight the doesn't have the room, so that's a challenge. I bought a replacement fuse block from Chacal early in the project then realized the 85 has a nice fuseblock integrated into the gauge cluster. So I'm using that.

 

Keep the 750-X frame, etc (as much as is possible), the 750-X is a rare bike..........

 

If that bike had a title, I would have restored it. And the hole in the block was an issue.

 

Even so parts are hard to come by, and frames can get titles in other states without any problem.