Hey, thought some of you may find this build interesting and some may be happy that another 350 was saved. but here goes my story. sorry but its kinda lengthy...
Back in 05 or 06, a local guy traded this to my dad (my dad owned the auto repair shop in town and also had a towing business) for an old POS car that he had towed, and impounded and the people never came to pay/pick the car up. The reason that my dad wanted this thing is because it is 100% hand operated, the throttle and brake is all on the steering wheel and that is perfect for me. The reason that i need the full hand control, is because in 03 a wrecked my dirtbike and broke my back and now am in a wheelchair. Anyways, the odyssey had been partially disassembled because the transmission broke and that is why it was just sitting. Initially we were going to try and get this running, but there wasn't a lot of time as my dad was the only mechanic at this shop that he owned, and since these things were made for one year parts are not all that readily available. there was an odyssey salvage yard on the coast that we were always going to get parts for it and never did. The odyssey got shoved back in an oil shed/leanto at the shop and pretty much forgotten about.
For the past year or so my dad had been battling with cancer, started with colon, then liver and complications from that. On june 2 he passed away. He was the mechanic at that shop and without him working there, my step mom did not feel comfortable working in the office and hiring someone to work in his place, so she is pretty much selling everything he had..... I didnt want this thing to just get sent to whomever purchased the shop so last week my buddy and i went and drug it out of the shed and towed it to my moms garage. I decided that i was going to make this run, and make it turn out how we had always wanted it to.
7/20/10 i ran across the tranny on ebay and i got it for a great price. Now i am just waiting on getting that here, so for the next week i am going to be going through and cleaning and lubing and checking to see what little things need fixing. I have a lead on a set of tires that i am certain will work for free/cheap also! I still need to find a few parts for the fuel system, but other than that it is going good. Its got great compression, great spark.. now i just need the 3rd element for a running engine
.
So i ran across a carb and the rest of the parts i needed to make the thing a runner. So here are some pics as i worked through this rebuild. it isnt a complte 100 point restoration, i just wanted to make this machine look decent while performing good too!
Here is what i started out with...(baja lights on top were not even hooked up.. just bolted there
)
(intake was covered through the years, i had just uncovered to have a look at piston)
along with this, there was a large box of parrts with the rest of the required pieces like the skid plate, air box, ect. the things that i was missing at this point was the trans, carb(well i had a carb but didnt wanna screw with finding the pieces that were missing) and the intake boot.
I initially started just taking all the stuff i could off, brackets, skid plates, battery mount, exhaust ect. just all of the little stuff for it. i cleaned them up with a wire wheel(didnt have the acess to the media blaster like i wanted). all of the black plastic air boxs and stuff was pretty well white from oxidation, so i whiped them with an armor all like stuff and got them looking much better.
batt box after i was finished(it was flaky rusty before)
belt guard(im perticular about my stuff, so i took the time and masked off the stickers)
pile o parts waiting for the transmission to get put back in. not sure what pipe that is but i know it isnt stock.
now that alot of the little stuff was off and out of the way i took it out and pressure washed it off, and used some degreaser and got alot of crap off. it isnt perfect i mean it is 25 years old, but its good enough for me!
so at this point i didnt take many more pictures, it was just replacing the stuff that we had taken off and figuring out how exactly things went. the repair manual that i got from this site was a HUGE help figureing out some stuff. i eventually would have got it, but it was very nice having that reference to see what little pieces i was missing!
So here is what we eneded up with
And if you can see the drip pan under it.. we still had an issue... there is oil dripping out from between the eng case and the pullstart housing piece. I'm thinking it is the crank seal that is bad? but i am not sure. Thoughts?
so now that i know it runs, and runs great i can focus on alot of the little things. I would like to find a nice set of driver quality fenders and brackets forit. find the hose that connects the lower airbox to the brakelight/airbox thing. Brakes need adjusted... dont have much rear brake if any
. i need to probably get a new choke cable. the one in the front is broken so you can get the choke pulled on but not returned. I also need to figure out how to make the stupid ignition not just spin inside the housing thing. I just want to get that seal fixed so i can go run it. been years since i was on a bike/4wheeler and its going to be nice to get back out there and ride.
