Abused Suzuki Quadzilla 500 restored after complete engine failure

this is a 1987 suzuki quadzilla 500. the quadzilla was made from 1987 to 1990 and it sported a 500cc two-stroke engine in terms of speed the quadzilla is one of the fastest production quads of all time to this day it's super iconic and it's also super rare but along with being rare that makes getting parts for it extra hard this one was brought to me by someone who paid 2500 bucks for it in hopes that all it needed was a simple top-end job unfortunately once we started breaking it down it turned out to be quite a bit more it was a totally grenaded top end and a tanked bottom end as well why does it always seem that craigslist and marketplace deals go this way i just don't know on top of the engine problems this quad has seen better days in general so along with the engine mods we'll be taking care of some other issues this machine has and bringing back the appearance to bring this thing back to its former glory because she deserves it regardless even with the severe engine damage 2 500 is still a decent deal for this machine finding one of these in good conditions can easily bring over ten thousand dollars in today's market so the owner wants this quad ready for the sand dunes in two months to make things even more interesting the customer has an extremely tight budget so we'll be working around that the entire time so can we get the parts and fix this thing in time for the dunes probably not will i stay up extremely late throwing tools at the wall and screaming curse words just to get this thing done absolutely let's get into it [Music] [Music] all right guys we're racing against the clock here so first thing i want to do is get the bottom end out of the frame and tear into that thing so that we can assess the damage and see which parts we need to get on order grab some popcorn and a cold drink because i think this is going to be a good one [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right guys we've got quite a mess here i'm looking at the bottom end of the quadzilla have a look oh man she is looking ugly i don't know if you guys are gonna be able to see in there oh you can see pieces of piston skirt in the bottom we've got a busted skirt dropped right down in the crank and just got shredded luckily i think the cases are going to be okay but we have to split these things in order to clean out all those fragments and everything we have to check the crank the crank feels good i don't know if anything got in the lower crank bearing uh really it should be replaced this is kind of going to be more on the lines of a budget build just to get this thing back together going so we'll see what that looks like i want to see what the crank bearings look like i'd really like to flush everything and honestly i think crank bearings are a must for replacement i mean really we just won't know until we start tearing the thing apart so let's get to it got a brand new suzuki service manual here i couldn't find a climber for this thing we probably won't need that for disassembling it but it is there and i've also got a casket laid out for our dead quadzilla this is where all the engine parts and everything going to go so we can keep it all nice and clean because we'll organize anyways because we got the yz build going on over here we still haven't done the internals i still want to mix up any of the parts although everything for the quadzilla is freaking huge and probably wouldn't fit in this tiny yz125 engine so foreign [Music] [Music] gotta be careful with that it's a reverse thread [Music] everything's stuck so so do all right here we go moment of truth we're going to use the crank case splitter on this thing slide this baby in place that's a good sign at least seems to be splitting no problem [Music] [Music] man these cases did not want to come apart i think the crank was holding it up see all these little bits of skirt and stuff jammed down here it was dragging on both sides it just didn't want to let the cases come apart nice and easy so you guys can probably see we got some case damage down here some of those bits got shoved in here and blew out that portion of the case and then on the other half up here now it looks bad but the good news is i can probably i'll dremel that out fill it with weld and then use the dremel to shape it bring it back to its original form and then when i surface the cases they should be okay but man that thing is blown out all right let me flip this case half over we'll pull the crank out entirely see what the other side looks like the good news is this crank bearing is good actually it looks like somebody so in quadzillas they do these brass inserts around the bearings and it looks like this is all this one's already been done there's already a brass insert so that's good news at least all right let's see what we can do here maybe this side will come out a little bit easier you know i guess i probably should pull the transmission [Music] now what we're looking for when we're doing this is that the crank pushes out and the bearing doesn't i really doubt that will happen though because the other side had the brass insert so i would assume that this side does too uh which is the fix for when the cases wear out and the bearings yep we're good bearing is nice and tight but it actually doesn't look like this side has the insert that's all right though because it looks like the bearing's in there real good man that did some damage that is for sure i do think this is savable though this is the worst of it right here like i said i can cut that out build up the weld and then shape the case back to how it was originally you can see this side does not have a brass insert around the crank bearing but the bearing is tight you don't want the bearings coming out on the crank you want the bearing staying in the case because otherwise that means that the case can be a little bit worn out in the bearing the outer race can actually spin in the cases and at that point your cases are shot or you have to get the brass inserts but i think we should be good to go in that region so looks like i got a little bit of welding to do and uh clean up as for the crank i think we're actually okay i don't feel any play at all in the up and down motion so this thing ate a skirt doesn't necessarily mean it did anything to the bearing i'm gonna have to clean that out and inspect it that's to be determined you can see this has been rebuilt before oh man so here's all our engine parts laid out good news and bad news i guess transmission appears to be good that's good and on the chassis some things i noticed the rear carrier bearings are shot i don't know if you guys can see that but there's a little bit of play there they're on their way out so those are going to get replaced we got some obor tires the obor advent it's the advent s so that actually it's their competition compound super soft these are supposed to be like ultra grippy and then we got some ams rims on there brand new rims and you'll notice it is a four lug pattern because the quadzilla actually has five lug but a lot of people swap over to z 400 or kfx 400 hubs their direct swap we had these kfx 400 hubs painted them the suzuki blue should match really nicely we'll swap them out because these old tires there's no way we were going to put down the power with these these are these are wasted all right well it looks like i got my work cut out for me so the next step is going to be taking all these pieces put them in the parts washer clean them up so i can get a better look at them and then i guess i'll just repair these cases it's really weird i forgot to point this out but i don't know what whoever did this work before i don't know what they used as a case sealer but it shouldn't be running in the cases like that so that just kind of makes me question the work that was done on this engine in general but it kind of just is what it is uh that's the nice part about taking things down entirely because now you know we're gonna know exactly what we're working with after i'm done it'll be all together nice and solid we won't have any issues hopefully i took all the quadzilla stuff we have everything nice and clean oh we got a fresh cylinder not fresh but uh more fresh than the old one the cylinder that came off of the machine was totally trashed the this skirt was snapped had fallen right into the bottom of the crank and just you know tanked the whole thing totally grenaded it didn't look exactly like this i spent quite a good amount of time uh cleaning all the surfaces on this making sure everything's gonna we don't have any leaks or anything especially the head you can see i surfaced the head got my surfacing block over here let's go nice and dirty we're gonna be using that a little bit more today too because we're going to finish up these cases but this is a very good cylinder the sleeve is really nice and thick i gave it a quick hone it really almost didn't need anything cleaned up the exhaust port and just cleaned the hell out of it man it was really dirty uh we're gonna reuse the piston that he gave it gave us with it too um i did have to clean the carbon and stuff off of it you can see this had gotten hot the the carbon build up on the underside of the piston that's a sign that this might have been running a little bit lean but the piston i think is in perfectly good shape um the skirts and everything look good yes i did clean it up but there's no like deep grooves or anything the tolerance in the side the cylinder is tight we should be good to go this is not my budget guys so just just keep that in mind before you start hammering me in the comments section um this is all on somebody else's budget so this is essentially going to be a repair job not a performance job but it's going to be exciting just to get to know this motor inside and out i've never even touched a quadzole before but what's also cool is it's going to be tight so i'm going to make sure that everything is really good to go it doesn't matter that we're not putting performance stuff in we can you can use used stuff it's it's cool to do stuff in a an economical way every once in a while so anyways here are all the other parts um we're putting a cool head on here we've got the dome right here you can see it's got like an offset spark plug i think that's so that it can clear the frame this is such a big ass motor but this was a huge recommendation apparently the stock heads like to warp got a tusk competition clutch kit and springs we've got some mousse gaskets uh we have a seat cover here gonna wrap up that seat and uh those are actually graphics believe it or not factory style got brand new plastics for this thing uh it's gonna look pretty nice got uh some gold bars there got some new levers and stuff for it it'll look pretty trick here's what i want to do today i want to get these cases prepared so i've already done a really good cleaning job on these uh you can see they need to be surfaced they're they're they're just dirty um like up here whoever powder coated this just they they bolted the engine together and powder coated over everything i mean like the seals and everything have powder coat on them you can see the shift shaft seal powder coat right over it and unfortunately because of that when i pulled the bolts out a lot of the powder coat like snapped and cracked off and they're not going to look terrible but that sure doesn't look as good as it did um but yeah so we're gonna clean up all the surfaces that's what our block is for make sure they're super flat we don't want any leaks or anything and of course we have the repaired cases to contend with uh so yeah john and i fixed these up at his place john's gonna pile up the weld i shaved this out the other night and sort of angled it so that the weld will be piled on top so that if it was to crack or something all the force is coming from the inside out so basically john's just going to pile this up and then i'm just going to clean it up it'll look like it was never there john actually noticed i missed this if you guys can see there was a weld yeah right there somebody had repaired this case before that's pretty ugly too so this thing has been cracked into quite a few times most likely so before you guys go tearing up john he's a totally new uh to tig welding anyways uh i can't tig weld i mean i guess i could but i have like no practice uh so i had told john and he's like dude bring it up here i'll take care of it and i know you guys are gonna be oh god oh my god look at this thing you guys are gonna be tearing them up i know it uh but you gotta really realize uh tig welding is kind of like an art uh it's a skill that i planned to master one day so he really just the key was to make sure that this is gonna be solid so he like super blobbed it on there but apparently he got really good fusion uh underneath of this so it should be really nice when this is done dude you'll never even know and it should be nice and strong that's really all that matters so we're gonna do that all right now before we get to cleaning up those uh beautiful welds what i want to do is take out our dowels so these little dowels here that's what keeps your covers aligned and everything in order to surface this they need to be removed now i actually have these two dowels right here i removed these from the center cases they were tight but they weren't that bad these other ones are super tight though so i figure i'll show you a trick to get these things out if we can get them out and then we can go ahead and surface them so as you can see these are hollow so if you really crush them down with you know like a pair of vice grips or something they'll collapse and then you're just gonna have it's gonna be a pain in the ass probably so what you can do is take drill bits and fit them in there and that way when you grip it it won't collapse and get a really good grip on it and when you do this you don't want to be right up against the case because when you're spinning you'll you'll mar up the case wow it's like not even spinning lovely oh man that's just great so you can see this dowel is splitting it had a seam to begin with but it's like pulling apart just making my job that much easier at least it's moving that's a that's a sign that we're winning did you like the stupid little things that when you send your bike off for work and it comes back with a huge bill and you're like oh that's ridiculous looks like like this it's like super time consuming this is probably this might need a little bit of heat i can't believe how tight this is we got it now there we go all right now before we can surface these i want to address our weld here uh we can't really surface it until that's at least close to smooth when we surface it that will take care of you know all of the finishing and making sure it's perfectly flat all right so there's that there's definitely quicker ways to take that down but that's probably the safest and most controllable way you see i almost got it flat i don't want to go too much though because if we go too low then we'll have a low spot there so we'll get the rest of that out when we actually surface it so now i'm going to go ahead and carve out this portion with the bird [Music] [Music] it's actually it's not too bad and you can tell it was repaired but it's strong and it's smooth so all that's really left to do for this case is to surface both sides now along with surfacing both sides of each case half i decided to remove the lower cylinder studs this way i could surface that portion where the cylinder jug actually meets the cases it's notorious the suzuki cylinders they just don't have the best tolerances here so i wanted to make sure it was flat and i'm really glad i did because they were not flat at all one of the dowels that i pulled out was it gave me a little bit of trouble i had to use the torch and we finally got that one out and then of course i cleaned out the cases really well because i did not mask off the bearings and a lot of debris probably got in there all right guys check it out you can see uh case surfaces are super flush our repairs are looking good here's the one repair it was right here really doesn't look that bad honestly you probably wouldn't notice it because there's other imperfections in there if you didn't know on this side you can see it but it looks pretty good nice and flush i don't think we'll have any leaking problems there up here i had to play a little bit with this previous weld that was done just to clean it up and on this side right here is where the other brake was you can see i had to contour this to the case and if we flip this over you can see that's nice and surfaced perfectly same thing with this side perfectly surfaced not going to have any leaks at all this should be a really nice solid engine and i even cleaned up our dowel pins this should really be replaced but you can clean them up and reuse them if you have to you can see these cleaned up really nice and i cleaned up the dowel pin holes so that they snap right in place nice and easy they're still nice and tight but now it won't be a pain in the ass pulling these things apart and putting them back together pop these things together because not only did i surface that but i surfaced where our cylinder mates as well and it needed it man these are probably the worst cases i've ever worked with i had to take down quite a bit i mean not like a crazy amount but more than i normally would and even right here you can see there's still a low spot i don't want to go much lower than that though because you know you're going to be raising the compression the more that you take off of this thing so now it should be nice and solid i did have to clean this out also i'm starting to think these weren't mated cases i think maybe the guy broke a case and it was replaced because these weren't even even they didn't match up at all so i cleaned that up made a match i opened up this portion right here where the other repair was so they should be good to go now so in its entirety i would say it took about i'm going to say six hours to repair these cases we had the break that needed to be fixed john welded that up i'd say that took him about 30 to 45 minutes he's a new welder so it took him a little bit of time and then between cleaning up the cases surfacing the cases removing stuck dowels port matching some of this stuff it's just time consuming man if you want to do it right so time well spent i would say this thing is going to be super reliable that's the biggest thing with this thing i really want this to be reliable like i said john's gonna be taking this out the little sahara want to make sure that we have a good duner out there and something that's gonna last the trip because the sand can be really demanding on machines so i've got my transmission my service manual my crank cases and i also have the crank in the refrigerator right now so the metal will shrink slightly and that should help us install it i've gone ahead and put new crank bearings in here i put new seals in the entire engine so all that stuff is already done we might as well hop right into it before i do it please give me a thumbs up if you enjoy these videos or if they help you out i appreciate that a lot and also consider subscribing if you've been enjoying the content all right let's jump into it yep i think we got it all right now we're gonna go ahead and crank this down and as i'm doing that you guys see it's closing up the gap there it is [Music] [Music] [Music] line it up and hopefully this thing just drops right in place take your time make sure everything is lined up [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that should be good there we go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys it's about time to drop this engine in the frame but i wanted to stop to thank you for making it this far into the video i also wanted to take a second to thank some of the great companies that helped make this channel possible companies like rocky mountain atv rocket ron suspension and obor tires all help keep me going links to their website and all applicable promo codes will be linked in the description below if you're looking for a way to support the channel using the links in the description helps me out big time by giving me a small kickback and there's no extra cost to you also if you're enjoying this video please consider giving me a thumbs up and also consider hitting that subscribe button that helps me out a ton and if you're looking to support the channel even further there is the option to join all channel members get guaranteed responses to their comments all right guys let's get back to the build all right guys i have one goal today and that is to get the quadzilla running check it out the engine is entirely assembled came together relatively easily a couple other things i want to do though after we do put that engine in the frame when i pop the air filter out of here i haven't even looked at it yet i definitely want to clean that make sure that that's nice and clean before we go to the dunes and i want to clean the carburetor this thing is really dirty i can tell without even taking the bowl off and the other thing i want to do is finish off our tires you can see we got a brand new oboe advent tire right here on the front left i already swapped that one out and then the other side i need to switch out okay so let's hop into it let's take that engine and put it in the frame but before we do that remember to give me a thumbs up if you're enjoying these videos and also hit that subscribe button hit that little notification bell i love you guys let's get to it oh whoa wait hold up i jumped the gun there what i want to do is get the carburetor in the ultrasonic cleaner before we do anything so that way it can do its job while we're doing our job putting the motor in so let's just pull this thing apart first things certain look at that just popped right off these are these are pretty dry rotted these old lines get these out of the way just want to get everything apart that way all the little nooks and crannies and stuff are nice and clean pull our bowl off here see what we're working with it's actually quite clean i wonder if this was cleaned uh prior to john buying this regardless i'm still going to throw it through the cleaner and uh that way we'll know that all of the the uh everything is clean because just because it looks clean doesn't necessarily mean that it's clean all right we're gonna put this stuff into the ultrasonic cleaner here's our carburetor body only thing i didn't remove was the uh choke assembly i pulled everything else apart this one screw down here that holds the needle valve seat was stripped somebody thought they'd leave me a little surprise a booby trap if you will but you can't beat me i cut a slot in this thing and turn it into a flathead ass you can't beat me so this is actually a harbor freight ultrasonic cleaner it's really uh probably bottom of the barrel very entry level but i'll tell you what it gets the job done you have to run it multiple times like like 10 times basically and then i'm going to use awesome stuff really is awesome i've used this in other videos you get this at dollar tree oh my god oh the heater's on so you guys hear that sizzle uh probably shouldn't have turned that on until there was fluid in here i'll probably use about half of this and then this is just really hot water now when i pop this on the screen it's probably going to go it didn't do it my old phone used to go crazy um it's going to be tough to see but if you look really close it's literally just pulling the dirt and grease off of the carburetor this it had like a tacky feel on the inside it's a common issue with two strokes when you don't maintain the carburetors but yeah so that'll get cleaned up nice and good and now let's pull our air cleaner off so we can get this thing drying see what we're working with in here because when we wash this thing it's going to be wet so clean it now so while we're putting the engine in we'll give it some time to dry out it's kind of cool the frame is actually an intake tube on the quadzilla and it's the same on the lt250r if i remember correctly but that intake boot jams air into the air box apparently this is another one of those things going open airbox is supposed to give a considerable gain of power on these quadzillas well the outerwear oh look at that it's like seeds or something i don't know if an animal put them in here or what there's all kinds of crap in there definitely this needs to be cleaned out so i'm going to go ahead and do that and then while this is drying we'll put the engine in actually i remember reading in dirt wheels that if you put seeds in your air filter you get better performance actually i did [Music] [Music] oh man wow would you look at that it actually went in fairly easy i thought it was going to be more of a pain in the ass everything lined up really nice i torqued all of the bolts if i'm going to torque any bolts motor mount bolts i think are really important i put loctite on all of those especially on a two-stroke you get a lot of vibrations and whatnot now you can see we got the shifter on there the kickstarters on the other side it's really easy to start throwing things together especially because i'm getting really excited to get this thing fired up but before we go any further i want to check the squish i didn't do that on the bench uh so yeah we're going to go ahead and we're going to do that with these if this damn camera would focus please i guess not okay so what we're going to do here to measure the squoosh is we're going to use the solder method so i have two pretty thick pieces of solder here you have to make sure that this is at least as thick as the largest tolerance you're looking for so what we're doing is we're checking the area of between the squish band and the crown of the piston at top dead center so how we're going to do that is by bending these and fishing them into the cylinder i like to go to the sides of the cylinder if you go front to back the piston can rock this way whereas it's not going to rock this way when we go side to side we do both sides just in case there is any a little bit of um movement in the piston this way if there's one on each side there's an equal amount of pressure on each side so what you want to do is bend this to about the end of the cylinder wall fit this in place there we go and i can feel it's scraping up against the wall so we're all the way on the one side there and then we'll do the same thing with the other side so you get those in place and then i'm just going to kick it over a few times and that's going to squish the ends of the solder and then we can measure all right here is our solder you guys can see the end is flattened out so we're going to do is take a pair of calipers we're going to measure see if this will focus just over 0.05 inches that is 1.28 millimeters i believe we're right in the money there um from what i read in my two-stroke manual it is i believe point nine to one point two millimeters is the perfect squish for three to five hundred cc's and from what i caught on some forums the uh .05 to .055 is ideal for the quadzilla so we should be good to go and before we put everything on let's go ahead and look and see what our carburetor parts look like because we're gonna have to put this on anyways oh that's actually really hot you know what let me uh pull this stuff out and i'll show you guys once i get it out of this dirty water but you can see all that dirt and everything i mean the water was clean we put it in there pulled all that dirt out of the carb well guys unfortunately after tinkering around with this carb uh just looking at all the internal components and stuff this thing really needs a rebuild kit at least at the very least just you know the pieces are just like really worn out i think we can make it work but check this out the needle was so brittle the top actually snapped off so we can't put the little c-clip on there and this thing is rough i don't know if it's pitted or what like i'm not really sure if this thing had been sitting for a very long time or something but the needle's actually rough you can feel it and uh it should just really be replaced so that along with that's just an indicator that other components should probably be replaced too i don't even know if this thing's going to leak it's possible that the uh the float valve needs to be changed out luckily i do have a couple extra needles here i didn't have the right one but i was able to machine this one down and it's very very close to the one that came out so we should be able to get going tonight uh basically just in uh in the name of getting this thing fired up tonight we'll run it like this but i think i talked to john we might actually swap this out for a different carb entirely but for now we'll put it on as it is and we'll see if we get a run [Music] [Applause] [Music] now [Music] so [Music] oh man we're uh we're ready to fire this thing up check it out we're all set engines in there exhaust is in there intakes on there clean the air filter oiled the air filter put that outerwear on there we're gonna run it without the air box uh wired everything up the only i put a thousand uh milliliters of the 2850 recluse oil in there uh got um we're running on 95 octane with uh 24 to 1 klotz benol what else we got i didn't put any coolant in it yet i want to fire it up really quick just make sure everything's working well because if we have to tear it down we have to spill out the coolant it's okay to run it uh briefly with no coolant you just don't want the engine to get hot i don't see any leaks that's always a good sign no gas leaks no oil leaks so man let's let's see if it starts all right here we go first start attempt to try it with the choke on oh this is a twist throttle it's definitely got compression okay i'm playing games no more bro every time i kick this damn thing my toe hits the peg [Applause] let's make sure we get a spark all right let's try this again we got spark i don't think the spark plug boot was all the way clipped down though here we go oh all right that surprised me i honestly was not expecting it to start [Music] maybe now yeah she's really rich okay man is it smoky in here well it runs i'm uh pretty excited about that it's got like a really deep powerful tone man it sounds sick but you can tell it is mad rich it was getting flooded out every time i backed the fuel air screw i i um i leaned it out literally to the max i came out like four turns and it doesn't want to idle so i have the idle screw turned all the way in the the only way to make it idle is really to crack the throttle just a little bit and it you saw it dies out so i'll have to play with the jetting but we got a runner here uh it wasn't the easiest start had to break out das boot you hear that that's the sound of success check this thing out swapped out the mikuni for a 40 millimeter kian you guys are not gonna believe how cheap that carburetor was i'm gonna show you guys in a second now i can actually like ride it around it's like decent it's not easy to start but it's a lot easier to start than before i was able to do it with regular sneakers definitely not easy but you know and it's not leaking i swear that's because i was doing jetting and uh kept having to dump the carburetor to change the jets out but it is it's running really well it's been running for probably 20 minutes got the fan on in the front just in case i don't want it to overheat so yeah let me tell you about this carburetor though believe it or not that's actually a replica carb and it only costs 32 bucks check this out i mean this looks pretty legit to me keon on there is spelt correctly sudco the carburetor itself i mean it feels just like a genuine key in two and if it's not scary seeing how good the carburetor looks wait till you see the box so i have two boxes here one is the knockoff one is genuine it wasn't for this made in china sticker i mean honestly they look identical besides like the product the part numbers and then on this side i noticed they taped off a segment of the box i wonder if that would make it like illegal or something see what the inside looks like looks pretty legit i wish i had a 38 or a genuine carb here to actually compare it side by side it looks like standard key and style jets i'm assuming the genuine canes will swap right over which we will be using genuine uh jets in this at least crazy so now that we basically have the engine sorted out we're gonna have to do a little bit of tuning but i can't really do that until i can actually ride the quad put it under some load but now the way that it sits i'm ready to get all the other stuff done we have the brand new o-board tires we're going to throw in this thing i'm going to do the carrier bearings because they are roasted um we have a steering stem coming that i don't know if that'll be in the mail today or not that thing's been on backorder keeps saying that it's like out for delivery but it never comes so i don't know what the deal is with that also got handlebars levers grips and i also want to bleed the brakes because these are really mushy they suck i also have a seat cover i'll put a new seat cover on this thing new plastics graphics and make this thing actually look like a quad now the first thing i want to do is get rid of these old dingy shitty tires and replace them with some brand new oboe advents but before i do that remember to give me a thumbs up if you enjoy these videos and consider hitting that subscribe button so i'm going to go ahead and take these off i just got a cool new tool that i want to show you guys it's a bead breaker if it wasn't for that probably just do this on my own time so this is the cool new tool right here it's a bead breaker i picked this up at harbor freight i will have a link in the description below where you can get one of these super simple tool it's pretty self-explanatory you can probably see how it works this goes on the lip of your rim press this down and it'll take the bead off of the tire so with all this stuff here we should be able to change the tire out we got a brand new over tire there got some motion pro tire irons and some old-school tire irons and of course some windex just to help ease the tire on and i've also got a valve stem removal tool so that's the first thing i'm going to do is remove the valve stem and get all the air out of these tires so we'll put our rim in here there's a little lip here that holds the tire from scooting away from us and sometimes you got to do this a couple times oh there it goes pop the bead right off [Music] there we go that one's a little more stubborn that's pretty cool though isn't it so now we're going to get these off what you want to do is tuck the one half of your tire so that it goes into this belly in your rim and when you do that it'll enable you to get this [Music] spoon in over here there we go all right so now i like to put a towel down because things can start to slide around especially once you introduce any kind of soap into the mix and on a tile floor things just want to slip and move so the the towel just keeps things from moving they have to have bears on them otherwise it's not going to work take our new valve stem it's a shorty i like these put a little bit of soap on this to ease it through you come through the back side go to the front the valve stem tool this will just spin into place and then you just pull it through boom pops right into place i like to spin it just a couple times just to make sure that the rubber is seated and you don't get any air leaks or anything i'm going to take my windex and just get it all over the end the bead and the inside lip of the tire you can sometimes push them into place and it'll pop on the bead it depends on the tire and the rim but you keep the weight on the one side otherwise it'll slip there we go boom let's just walk it on you see i'm keeping my knee over here so that the bead doesn't just slip around this side now the tire's on there there's one thing i actually forgot to do and that is clean the inner lip of the bead this one was in pretty good shape so we probably wouldn't have a problem but a lot of times dirt and debris and stuff gets like caked up against there and if you don't clean that out your bead won't see you'll get leaks around the bead luckily because we haven't seeded the bead i'm able to get in here with a scotch brite and just clean up that inner bead don't really have to do much this one wasn't that bad it's just a good habit to get into when you put new tires on though just to ensure you don't get leaks and then we'll clean off the debris go ahead and fill it up luckily this one took sometimes oh it's going to pop on real quick i don't know if you guys can see it working its way around [Music] the other side went boom both sides are good to go yeah sometimes if the air doesn't want to take you got to put like a strap around it sometimes and can be a real pain in the ass i'm going to bring these down probably to nine foot pounds for the front all right get this thing in place quadzilla's got these tiny little studs i don't know why but they're from 1987 and they still haven't bent or anything so i guess you don't really need more and of course don't forget your valve stem cover because if you forget that like what are we even doing here all right now i want to go ahead and take off the axle assembly because we have to swap out our carrier bearings and we can throw our brand new oboe tires on the back as well uh first thing we have to do is break loose this axle nut sometimes that can be a major pain in the ass the best way to keep the tire from moving really is to have somebody sit on the quad and hold the brake and especially having them their weight on the quad too it keeps the wheels from spinning and everything it's just nice since we don't have anybody here i've created a method to help hold the rear brake when you break those loose you take a clamp and clamp your brake pedal down to something in this case i was able to clamp it to the stand there you go those hubs are way loose but yeah now our axle won't spin brake is nice and tight all right now we'll take our big ass wrench and pray to god that this thing comes off we got it moving that's good all right the axle nuts are off so we're going to take our rear caliper off so we can slide the brake rotor away get our axle out so we got two bolts holding our caliper stay on the bottom one here one here and there's one up here i'm gonna break loose just so that we can bring this whole thing up now we're able to sneak it up a lot of these bolts were not very tight before i move on i want to take our hubs off oh wow finger tight big surprise [Music] [Music] all right well this s axle is stuck really good i don't know what is holding this because it does move there's no clips or anything in there i looked in the service manual it should come out from this side before we do too much damage to the end of our axle i have a trick that i like to do take a piece of pipe that has the same inner diameter as your splines and that'll fit on there and you can go to town on this smashing the hell out of it and you shouldn't just damage anything see if we can finally get this thing out of here all right guys we're hitting this thing way too hard it definitely should have come out by now even if one of the inner races of the bearings was seized to the axle it should have pushed the bearing out so i took the axle nuts off of the other side of the axle and sure enough the axle popped right out the wording in the suzuki service manual is a little bit confusing it looks like you hit it from the right side to the left but apparently the axle comes out of the right side well that was fun but at least nothing broke and only a few tears were shed [Music] [Music] so [Music] so i brought those in and then i loosened them up because we're gonna have to adjust this axle anyways now we have these studs that go in the back this is what allows us to adjust our chain this one i had to retrace the entire thing with a die because some genius tried to force a standard bolt on here but we all do dumb things right i just tried pushing the axle out the wrong side for like an hour and a half [Music] and now for the moment you've all been waiting for finally put on these brand new rims and tires dude check these out that is aggressive i love the look of the advent tires from obor they just look killer also got the chain on there i have it pretty tight because i imagine that's going to have to stretch a little bit i did adjust the chain i torqued these down 70 foot pounds on this side 60 on this side wheels are all good to go so the whole back end is ready to rock and roll and what's scary is that i can actually ride it the way that it sits right now but we're not going to do that what i want to do is put the steering stem on check this out got a brand new lsr plus two plus zero yeah i think it's a plus two plus zero really nice steering stem you can see it's stepped up right here and of course we've got the risers got some gold levers pro taper bars new scott grips and we have a seat cover and graphics over here um i'm oh and this too temperature gauge i'm gonna get on there that's from mod quad so in the interest of time i'm just gonna go ahead and get all this stuff on there oh and uh new bearings and bushings for the steering stem so everything should be really nice and tight let's get it [Music] see those two tabs on the oem one there's no tabs that is for 88 to 90 i believe so they sent the wrong steering stem we don't have time to waste so i'm gonna cut them off and this should still work [Music] yeah [Applause] that's not even close definitely gonna have to do some modifications to this side all right there it is guys i finally got it to fit pretty time consuming getting it to this state had to take a lot off but it should look good what'd we learn we learned that a five-minute job can turn into an hour and a half long job so our steering stem we had to modify wrong year sent that wasn't as bad but these levers ended up taking about an hour and a half to get them to work right i might still have to do a little bit of adjusting with them put a new clutch perch on here for john i took the this junk clunky piece of crap out of here definitely looks way more streamlined and clean with just a basic clutch perch and it fit on this one that one it would have taken even more modification if those were the right levers it would have been a five-minute job literally just swap them right in when you get cheap stuff a lot of times things don't fit it's not even close it's like a universal kind of deal and then it ends up being something like that so we're pretty uh close to i mean i could ride it how it is now um i also snuck the temperature gauge in under here it has to be on this upper line because the flow comes down this line through the impeller up the cylinder and then out the top so if you had it down here that would be fluid coming through the radiator after it's already cooled it wouldn't really be very effective so that's why i had to tuck it way up under here so that the coolant comes right out of the head and it goes right to the temperature gauge so that should be very accurate in that position all right it is finally time to put on the plastics this is what i've been waiting for [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys check it out it was super rich uh now it idles nice and it actually starts like fairly easily and it feels like it's got a little bit more power i was uh i was cruising around on it just a little bit and it was just falling on its face i was like i can't even post this i actually was i was recording and i was like dude this ain't right man we gotta do the quadzilla some justice [Music] [Applause] [Music] with just a few days before the dune trip i had john come over so he could dial in the carburetor and get this quadzilla running great for the trip [Music] see if we can get this puppy dialed in [Laughter] and that thing has got a deep tone [Laughter] i know this bottom end is crazy [Applause] yes i did oh good 185-ish that's good 95 yeah that's not bad uh that actually sounded rich that's what i thought yeah exactly what i thought let's go down on the main one clip up on the needle because that will make the main a little bit richer but just a little yeah so we'll go we'll we'll come down on the on the main up on the pilot and up on the needle yep i think we'll be good yes let's give it a shot all right cool we're doing it this is not this isn't terrible to change out the jets but that's because i did it like 60 freaking times so like hopefully i'll be getting better at it you know you can have the pleasure of putting this thing back together because getting the throttle cable is a oh yeah it's your quad though you need to learn how to do this yeah you're right john's booting up the carb john would you say this is the easiest part of the job yes easily the hardest part of the job see if it'll start without choke now that we bumped up the pilot [Music] [Applause] sounds pretty good sounds a lot healthier [Music] don't forget it's not warm so if you're going to do a clutch dome i'm going to i'll do other elaborations it sounds really good [Laughter] [Applause] it's crazy oh man do you feel a lot better [Music] it's crazy how much jetting can make a difference [Music] [Laughter] thing sounds way better after a few more minor adjustments we got the quadzilla dialed in almost perfectly and making really good power [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh my god [Applause] yes they do [Music] [Applause] with just a few days left the quadzilla made it to the little sahara sand dunes without any problems at all with the exception of one minor problem we had with one of the wires hanging too low from the wire harness and melting to the exhaust causing it to short out but once we discovered that we had no problems anymore the quadzilla truly is an iconic quad and there's really no other machine that runs quite like it i don't think i've ever ridden a two-stroke that has so much torque down low and literally rides like a four-stroke even in the sand they really do make great dune machines so thank you for making it all the way to the end of the video i appreciate everybody that watches these videos please if you enjoyed the video leave a thumbs up and also leave a comment below let me know what you think of this quadzilla and let me know what bikes you want to see me build in the future for more content like this consider subscribing and if you're looking to support the channel even further there is the option to join all channel members get guaranteed responses to their comments i'll see you guys in the next video peace out dude you're ripping on that thing oh my god dude i just said to the people listen i said dude you're ripping that thing you're having more fun on that than i've seen you have on the kfx well the kfx is so loud we can't do that down here dude it's it's legit i think it's like i was saying you got to get used to it because just doing that a little bit you need a lot of body language yes just through that little power side yeah it feels safe i felt like i really had to well and then the seat kind of stops you from hanging over the edge it's comfy it is comfy that's what makes it a great like it's right like riding a couch dude man it's riding a couch with a two-stroke 500 motor on it i honestly think it feels really good it does i think it cleaned up quite a bit just under 200. okay that's not bad that's not bad for all the ripping we're doing and we'll keep an eye on it maybe when we get out there we might have to rinse it up a little bit yeah yeah buddy i think for sure 200 in the field yeah open it up dude if you're riding for a long period of time yep but it's going to get it'll be getting so hot which you'll have all the heat in the pipe yeah yeah we'll be okay that sounds all right though i'm happy with that yeah dude

Channel: Michael Sabo

Views: 1,207,658

Keywords: restoration, restore, old, rebuild, restoring, restored, vintage, rescue, motocycle, engine, old motocycle, old engine, old suzuki, two-stroke, engine restoration, suzuki restoration, motocycle restoration, restored engine, restored motocycle, restored suzuki, suzuki, quadzilla, suzuki quadzilla, sport quad, 2 stroke, quadzilla rebuild, two stroke build, suzuki 2 stroke, fix quadzilla, 2022 quadzilla, suzuki lt500, suzuki lt500r, quadzilla 500

Id: _OTXGxN5JgM

Length: 72min 39sec (4359 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022