Rusty Old Barn Find Indian Motorcycle, Will It Run?

Thank you, Shopify, for sponsoring this video. We're down here in Maryland now at the farm. See, look, barns. And it's inside of here. You wanna see this? I'm excited, too. Ho, ho, ho. Oh, boy. Now, this is a 1974 Indian, and I think it's an ME 125. And from what I'm hearing is last time this bike was maybe out for a rip around the yard was 2013. In the early to mid 70s, Indian mini bikes were hugely popular and they're super cool. So, when I was cruising Marketplace the other week and I saw this picture, I was like, I gotta have that bike. So, I bought it. In the meantime, I did a little homework. I think this bike is a little rare. So, I'm gonna wash it up. We're gonna get it inside, check it out, and see exactly what it is we have. This thing was a true barn find. I wonder how this thing's gonna clean up. It's a good thing we got a heat wave. Yeah, right. One of the things I'm really excited about is I think in the new shop, we're gonna have a spot where we can actually do this inside maybe. That'll be nice. There's a lot of years of barn dirt on this bike. Is it coming off? Eh. Then we make a cup of coffee and wait. Feels cleaner. Look at that. Nice. All right. Step two is a blow off. Carb tunes. Dry it off. We don't want the fenders to get rusty. This is what I believe is a 1974 Indian ME 125. And today I'm gonna give you a little history on it and try to convince you that this is more closely related to that than it is to that. I don't have an Indian chief. So, editor, let's put an Indian picture of an Indian chief up. I'm not kidding. It actually is, but we'll get there. First, let's go over this bike, see what we have. I'll tell you the story of how I got it and go from there. What do we got? We got rusty wheels. What kind of rubber are we running on here? Good old ching changs in a 19 inch. Of course we have drum brakes. Grease zerk here on the bearing. That's really cool. Forks are shot. Front fender is intact. Headlight's intact. Oh no, they left the key switch on. That's gonna have a dead battery for sure. Oh no, it was off. That was good. Key switch works. Clutch. It's doing clutch things. Looks like there's a nest of those mud daubers in there. Look at that Indian on the grip. How cool is that? Gas tank is in really nice condition on the outside. Should we see what it looks like on the inside? What does it look like? It's clean, isn't it? That is not what I thought it was gonna look like. Rate lock? It's really nice. I wanna, how do you pronounce this? Motor. Motori Minarelli. Now I believe this bike was advertised as an ME100. If it was an ME100, it would've had the Japanese Fuji engine in it. That's who made the 100cc engines. The Motori Minarelli. Motori. Motori Minarelli. They made the 125cc engines to put into this bike. But one of my favorite features is the all-thread kickstand. I mean, that's fantastic. The rubbers are off the pegs. There should be rubbers that slide on here. Yeah, look, the clutch does clutch stuff here. It's a little crunchy. Passenger pegs. And that's so you can pick up the neighbor girl and go chase the cows in. Rear fender. So there would've been a taillight hanging on here and that has broken off because it rusted. Seat is really nice. Seat cover still has Indian on here. Of course, we have the drum brake and probably, yeah, another 19 ching-ching on the back. Gonna need some tubes and tires for this bike. Have the customized brake lever. Mirrors. This would've had mirrors here. And I'm guessing some sort of speedometer or something would've mounted here. Big fins on the head. Only one cracked fin and that's up here by the spark plug. Probably hit it with a wrench when he was out on the trail trying to get the spark plug out one day. Rubbers missing on this foot peg. Look, the exhaust shield. The heat shield has an Indian in it. Cool as that. Should we see if it turns over? Look at that. Oh! Oh, there's a bumblebee. Hey, little fella. Oh, it's not a bumblebee. That's just a bee. All right. Well, we're gonna take the first couple steps here and that is gonna be, we have compression. We're gonna pull the plug. We're gonna juice the cylinder. Check out the carburetor. We need tires and tubes. That's gonna be important. Once this thing fires up, makes the vroom vroom noises. Gonna have to hit this thing with a lot of penetrating oil as well. But first steps first, let's get it up in the air. So this bike came from Maryland. It was on a little farm down there and the lady I bought it from remembers her dad buying it new. He bought this to ride around the farm. Turned into her bike and she had a lot of good memories riding this around the farm. Crying out loud, that was a good catch. Actually doesn't look too bad. She believes the last time this was running was in, what'd she tell me? Like 2013, I believe. So that was what, 11 years ago, which actually isn't too bad. We're gonna see if we can make it zero years ago. So we're gonna wanna pull that and we'll get to the carb. I'm gonna spray some stuff into the piston. Give it a few cranks. Oh man, I do not like that smell. We're gonna pull that carburetor off. I said that this bike is more closely related to that bike than an actual Indian. And here, I'm gonna give you a little history on why I'm making that claim. Starting back in about 1901 to 1953, Indians were produced in, I think it was Springfield, Massachusetts. And in 1953, the last one of those came off the assembly line. After that, there wasn't much to the Indian brand other than the logo and the name. And it changed hands a couple times. This is not fun to get to. And that's stamped Indian. It's pretty cool. So from 53 to about 63, somewhere in there, Brockhaus had purchased the Indian name and the rights to the logo and that sort of stuff. And they started importing bikes. And actually, they were importing Royal Enfields there for a while and modifying them and calling them Indians. So that was going on for a while. And then that went belly up. And in 1960, I think it was 63, Floyd Clymer, that name should sound familiar to anybody that turns wrenches, that is the same Floyd Clymer that has Clymer manuals. If you ever saw the Clymer manuals, that's him. Not only was he an accomplished publisher, he was also an accomplished motorcycle racer. He won the 1920 Cycar Championship. He won Pike's Peak. And he won some other hill climb championships over the years. He was also, get this. I told my kids this last night. They lost it. They thought it was so cool. He was the youngest person in the United States to own a Ford dealership. Yeah. Guess how old he was? 24. Younger. 17. Younger. 15. Younger. 14. He was 14 years old. What? And he's the youngest person that ever owned a Ford dealership in the USA. I didn't know you could own. Right? Like how cool is that? His first publication came out in 1910. The guy was only born in like 1895. Like talk about an accomplished individual. Floyd Climber, he must've really been something. Well, he saw that Indian wasn't going anywhere and Brock House pretty much ceased all operation. So he bought the name that came with the logo. And he had big dreams of bringing back the bigger Indians of yesteryear, the Chiefs and the whatnots. But that never happened. He passed away shortly after he bought the company. Oh my. I have some wear. It's not horrible. This is the slide from inside the carburetor. And then it's just from where it was rubbing on the bore of the carburetor, but it's not bad. So in 1970, Floyd Climber passed away, unfortunately. And his attorney, Alan Newman, bought the rights to Indian from Floyd's widow. Now he ran it from 1970 to 1977. Oh yeah. It's not a bing, it's a dollar opto. What was I thinking? There we go. A lot though. The Lord though. What did you say? Something like that. Hey, there we have a carb. Missing the side cover here. It's a bit of a bummer, but I think I found where I can get one. This does not look dangerous at all. If you crash this bike, you're not getting impaled by anything. All right. So we have the carb out. Oh, yo, yo. This thing came to life. Yeah, man. He's alive. All right, bumblebee. We're just going to let you chill there for a bit. So there we have an oil fill. Let's drain the oil out of the trans. See what we have. I'd use the zip gun, but everybody says they want longer videos, so. Now we can get to the drain plug. Oh man. Now this guy's getting pretty active. Now he's starting to walk. What? The bee. Oh, he's walking in circles. You woke him up. Yeah. You walk over there because I need to get to that oil cap right here. Let's pull this oil. That's not good at all. I was hoping more would come out of that than just a little water. It means you get to fill it with oil. Yeah. Something like that. All right. Shush, Mr. Bee. Buddy, I think your nest was up in the clutch lever. Oh, what if that's what was in the oil? It's honey. Yeah, it kind of looks like honey. He's still a little dazed. He's like, my word, is it spring already? Oh no, don't fall in. No, bee, get out of there. Yo, this bee's drunk. Now we're getting a little something out of here. Should open the top. Cut the title of this video. Can I get this Indian running and befriend a bee? We know the answer is yes to both those questions. He's coming down the stairs. He really is your friend. Look at this. I'm going to take him to lunch with us. A lot of goo in there. Hey, buddy, I'm going to want to put some stuff in here. So I'm going to move you over a little bit. Just going to move you over. This is just cheap ATF from the local ATF store. I'm going to put this drain plug back in and I'm going to put some ATF in the trans. So that way, while we're kicking and doing some stuff, that is getting sloshed around in there, hopefully cleaning some things out. And then we'll drain that out and replace it with some clean stuff. Okay, so we have some of this stuff addressed. Let's see if we have some spark. Looks like there's things under here. Oh, look at that. It just pops up. Okay, so I believe I see wires coming up in the bottom here and they were going into this side cover. So under this side cover, we're going to have the counter shaft makes the wheel go around. And then we're going to have our ignition. That's my guess. I doubt we're going to have any spark. The way it is. Depends on how bad that spark plug is. No way. You gotta be kidding. No way. All right. Clear as day. Hold on. Like, I'm not even exaggerating here. I picked this bike up Saturday. It's, I don't even know, Thursday. I swear, I did not look inside the tank and I did not check the Kickstarter to see if the motor was locked up or not. I wanted to do all of that on camera. We're batting three for three right now because the motor was not locked up. The tank was clean and now we have spark. I know I'm as flabbergasted as you are. That's crazy. Truly is a lot better on the inside than the outside. Well, talk about standing the test of time. I would say these Motori Minarellis, let's be honest, they are producing my current favorite engine in the world right now. I'll get to that in a little bit, but they're still in business making engines. Go figure. No way. I'm really flabbergasted. All right. So I guess now all we have to do is the carburetor. Let's see what happens. So when Alan Newman took over the Indian brand, like I said, he had it from 1970 to 1977. He set up shop in Taiwan. So these bikes were actually produced, assembled or whatever in Taiwan. Oh, I got a little juice coming out of this. Smells like you'd expect. Dude, the motorcycle industry was crazy back in this era. It was like, A, to have a dealership in the United States, all you needed was a dinner table to make a deal at. But B, everything's so intertwined. So after Alan Newman, AMC bought it, Associated Motorcycles, and they owned, what, Matchless and Norton. Somewhere in this whole conglomerate, Jawa showed up. Jawa was making, I think, some engines for the smaller Indian motorcycles. Newman realized that there was a big market for these, for minibikes. So that's why, I mean, he was taking full advantage and he was sourcing these parts from where he could get it. Torato carburetor, Motorelli Minarelli engine, made in Taiwan. Yeah, it's just everything, it's like that Alabama trailer park, man. Like everything's all together. Sorry, if you're from Alabama, you can use whatever state. All right, to the healing bench. I walked all the way over here without a single tool in my hand. Oh, I just assumed you were gonna use your teeth this time. Go-go gadget, vice grip fingers. Okay, there's a little juice coming out of here. Oh, that's fun. That's always great. Man, I wish you guys could smell what I'm smelling. Okay, that's not looking excellent. Whoa, that looks like 11 years worth anyway. It is ugly. Can you smell that, Dan? Can you smell that from where you're at? Nope. Wow, this is really potent. So what happens with these is they get stuck around the outside and they get stuck around the inside. But if you're nice and ginger about it, should be able to get them to pop free without much trouble. Mixer screw, remember you always turn it in gently until it seats, count your turns in so you know a good rough setting for it when you go to put it together. And there should be a spring in there. Yep, there's a spring. Now, a lot of older ones like this don't run an O-ring here. The newer ones do. So you always wanna make sure that that O-ring's not stuck in there. I'm not gonna pull that because that's just idle adjustment. That'll be all right. Let's see, I guess we're gonna pull this choke circuit. It's actually not a choke on this one here. It's what they would call an enrichener. When you lift this up, it lifts this plunger and that's allowing more fuel in. When you close this, it pushes that plunger down, closes that passage. So it's actually an enrichener, but you know, common name is choke. Okay, so now I guess we hose this off here a bit. Get the worst of it before we clean it. You know where this is headed, Dan? Back together. Okay, this stuff here needs to head to the Harbor Freight buzz box for a bit. Get the worst of everything off before I put it in there. Pretty gooey. Just working on the big chunks. I always feel like a dentist when I do this. Let's get some heat into that box. Let me get this stuff clean. While that is gonna be cooking in the cleaner, I'm gonna, oh wow. That's why you run a fuel strainer. Bunch of goo in there. I'm gonna finish cleaning this stuff up. I'm gonna order tubes and tires. Carve's gonna be done cooking. We're gonna get that put back together, give it some kicks. Things are gonna fire up, I hope. That's the plan. The other thing we need to do is, should probably hit some things with some penetrating oil so that when we try to do the tubes and tires, things come loose and all sort of that sort of stuff. I can't believe we have spark. Like that's just, that's downright silly, if I'm being honest. What else might we need to take off this in case we need to get into something behind there? Oh, let's do this front. Stuff can soak good then while Carve is cleaning. Yeah, we'll just let all that sit a little so things move when we need them to. Carve tunes, soothing sounds of the fin harp. I have a curiosity. We took a little red cloth and a little WD-40. Dude, do that to the whole frame? What a difference. I'm just a little elbow grease, man. Clean up nicely. I think we should do tubes and tires. What do you think? Only if you want to ride it. Yeah, I want to ride it. Man, I remember when these tires used to be cheap. They're not cheap anymore. What? Chinkos? Yeah, or just tires like this in general. Add to cart. Buy. Buy, add to... Look, it's not that hard. I'm one of the millions of people that trust Shopify for our e-commerce platform. Why? Because it's easy. Look, here is our fulfillment center. We have a tape gun, a scale, and a stapler. And the computer's a brick. But it doesn't matter because Shopify has an easy drag and drop store editor and their seamless transition between devices makes managing our storefront between my phone, tablet, or computer easy. Trusted by millions in over 170 countries, Shopify is the commerce platform that makes sharing your products easy across all your social medias and around the world. So even if your bedroom looks like this, your storefront doesn't have to. If you're ready to think big, go to shopify.com slash bearded mechanic, get your free trial today, start selling. All right, that was fun. Let's get this carburetor put back together and work on this bike. How'd that clean up, Craig? It's cleaning up nicely. Now it's time to put this back on the throttle cable, put the carb back on. Let's clean off the workbench here quick. All right. You know what would be epic? If the bee comes back just in time for the bike to fire up. Oh my gosh. Where are you, Mr. Bee? If the bee doesn't come back. Shoots out the exhaust. Let's get this table cleaned up here a little bit. This is trash. It's all about cleaning up the table. We'll need this. I guess by cleaning off the table, I meant I was gonna get rid of that. Good job. Okay. We need to get the carburetor back together. And while we're doing that, I'm gonna finish my case on why I'm saying this bike is more closely related to my Yamaha than it is to any Indian out there. Dang it. It is so hard to focus on telling a story while doing this. I am 97 and a half percent sure I have this right. We shall see. Now, where was I? In my story to tell you why I think this bike is more closely related to the YZ than it is to any other Indian. Here's why. Remember back in this time, Indian was nothing more than a name and a sticker on a tank. Carburetor and the engine are both Italian. Motori Minarelli started in 1951 as a motorcycle manufacturer. 1954, they started producing mopeds. And in 1956, they went exclusively to producing two-stroke engines. So in the 50s and 60s, Minarelli, I'm gonna pronounce that wrong all the time. Minarelli was just a small company. They employed about 20 people making 70 engines a year. Through the 70s, they grew and were producing more engines to the tune of about 250,000 a year. Life was good. Everything was going on. And then in 1990, Motori Minarelli started a relationship with Yamaha. So they signed that agreement. They went into a business partnership with Yamaha and production ramped up to, I don't know where they were, 450,000-some engines a year. And remember, they were focusing on two-stroke engines. So they were making a lot of motors. You guys see where this is headed yet? I don't know, Craig. The partnership between Minarelli and Yamaha lasted until 2020, when Fantech bought 100% of the shares from Yamaha and started creating the Fantech 300, which is basically nothing more than a YZ250 with a 300-fuel injected motor in it. That is my argument for why this Indian is more closely related to my YZ than it is any other Indian on the road. There you go. Least Indian Indian there is. I'm not 100% sure I have that right, but I'm pretty sure I have that right. What else do we need here, Dan? We need a spark plug and we need fuel. Now we need a little fuel line. And I want a way to turn the fuel off. So I'm going to see if I have a cutoff. Anyway, we can make that work. I don't need much, just enough to connect that to that. It's even maybe too much. Where are we headed? Okay, so we're headed over there to that side. If I come here, we can kind of shoot it right across there. Boy, this is getting ugly. This is getting cumbersome, Dan. Get it to flow back uphill. Okay, I think we're ready for gas and everybody's favorite time. Time to clean up the table. Getting to be the moment of truth here, Dan. And I do have the appropriate special Indian go juice in there. Let's turn this on, see if we get any fuel in that filter. Looks like it. Now, let's see if this thing will run. Craig, I'm excited. I'm excited. There is nothing I enjoy more than getting something like this, almost anything old like this running. What a treat. Flat tires and all. How many kicks? It's only flat on the bottom. Give it an old Indian 22. 22, man. Sorry, Craig. That's all right, I'm going seven. Bike looks like it's in bad shape. I'm going, it's not in great shape, but I know I put that slide together right. All right, here we go. How many primer kicks is that? I don't know, it's just, I'm just rolling through. I'm just getting a feel. Okay. All right, here we go, Dan. It's sounding better with each kick. It's sounding better. Whoops. What key position does it need to be in? I don't know. I don't remember. Rust one or rust two? You're right. Seven! Whoa! Not see that coming. Let's see if it'll move. Oh, no. It'll stall out. It'll stall out, sure enough. Nope. Okay, so we got a stuck clutch and we got flat tires. Gotta see if we can get that clutch free. Man, listen to this thing. Turn signals don't work. So last position's off. That's on, that's on, that's off. Okay, so the last, it needs to be in the middle two positions to run. Middle two? How many positions are there? Four? Four. Okay, okay. Okay. That bike does actually sound good. It sounds amazing, right? Yeah. We're not done though. The clutch is stuck and it needs some tires. Let's get to work. Clutch is stuck. I'm afraid that thing is... The kickstand? Now you're still worried about the kickstand? I'm gonna hang a rope going on that thing. Okay, so we got a couple issues. We got a bike that sounds fantastic, but we got flat tires and we have a sticking clutch. One thing at a time. It's not true because I can never do that. Let's do tire. First, I gotta see if I have any tires that'll actually work on this. This is a 17. Let me go out to the woodshed. I'll be right back. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's a 17, 70 by 100. It's gonna be narrower a little bit. That's all right, it'll work. So let's get this thing off. Man, maybe getting it running was the easy part and actually getting it right, it's gonna be the hard part. Now we're getting some separation. There we go. That's what we were after. Only took three hammers. That'll pull off, that'll pull off. That should give enough room for that to come out. Oh shoot, brake line's falling off. Brake shoe's all but fell off. I'm gonna throw a tire on this. I'll be right back. There we go, just like that. Now we just need to do that to the front. Couldn't find a new tire out in the woodshed, so we're just gonna run this one, but I'm gonna put a tube in it. We are making progress here, guys. One more thing to do and that's to get this clutch unstuck. This is generally a pretty straightforward task. Hey, there's our clutch. Figure out how this thing works. This is where most people would probably look in the book and I'm like, yeah, I'll figure it out. Let me see, it probably goes- What book? We don't got time for no book. We ain't got time for no book, that's right. So what's going on is when we pull the clutch, clutch plates aren't releasing. They're all stuck together. Okay, so we need to pop these off. There we go. And then this is where we're gonna start running into some issues. All these plates are gonna be stuck together. So we need a piece of sandpaper. We need a little oil and a flat surface. Hurry, Dan, I can ride off into the sunset. That's true. You gotta beat the sun. Now I'm gonna take another zip tie. I'm gonna zip tie the clutch lever. So as I dump oil in and fill it between those clutch plates, help lubricate a little bit, just like that. If I go too fast, it comes out there at the top. Yay, there we go. Dan, you know what time it is? Time to clean the table again. Everybody's favorite time again. Par-duh. Remember last time we did this and the bike wouldn't start. Last time you did what? Unstuck the clutch? Yeah. It relies on that stuck clutch to start. Now we got air in the tires, oil between the clutch plates, gas is on, key is on. Stow first kick. Wow. Ooh, so far so good. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Dan's gonna put a video here and here. Have a good weekend. Woo!