Me And This Motorcycle

The bike has been cleared of all bee's (I hope), so next up is the electrical system. I opened up the headlight and found a rats nest of wires. Fortunately all were color coded and appeared to be un touched by unskilled hands. Despite the color codes (each and every wire has a different color and stripe combo, which coincides with the Haynes manual I purchased on ebay) I decided it was best to label and photograph everything if I am ever going to get this rewired.

I pulled the handlebars tac and speedometer off, I removed the battery box and air filter - not sure if any of this will end up on the final product. Oh, did I mention what my plans are for this bike? I plan on building a mini cafe-racer. Somewhere in the near future, I'd like to build a british cafe-bike, but I need to do a practice run on something more affordable. Hence, the cb125. Odd choice for a cafe bike you say? Well do a search on cb125 cafe bike and you may see some that look like this one or one of these. Yup all cb125's.

Once the air filter had been removed I popped off the carb and had a look. Ouch, not so good! The white crud in the picture below is the result of 20 year old gasoline. I let them soak in carb cleaner over night though the next day I was still unable to get the parts moving with out chipping internal parts so I ordered a new aftermarket carb from ebay.

The engine also showed signs of major build up so I soaked that in carb cleaner as well. At this point I seriously began to wonder if this engine would ever run again. Remember, the engine IS stuck so I have no idea if it is rusted or if it was run without oil (the latter being much worse). Only one way to find out...