One of the things we knew going into Bonneville is that it’s imperative to have a plan on how you’re going to cover the event. Hell, it is important to have a plan in order to figure out how you are going to get around the place when you are there. Because having two guys riding around in the same car all week is not-productive, we decided that Chad’s mini-bike of death needed to come out of retirement and that would cart his ass around on the salt. Simple, right? Of course not. We gave it our best shot, used what we had close by, got it to do burnouts and run in a semi-pissed off way, but ultimately failed to get the sucker running. We did, however manager to render it useless until there is sufficient time to actually fix the thing (day before we leave for Bonneville in 2015).

So, for those of you who do not know what this thing is, the mini-bike dates all the way back to the CarJunkieTV days when David and Chad took them to an illicit mini-bike race around a parking structure. The original Chinese engine was melted when experimenting with nitromethane and the new Chinese engine is a “big block” 6.5hp model. Chad was clocked (not kidding) at 55mph on the salt riding this contraption a few years ago. Actually, that could have been the last time he actually rode it because when I arrived at the shop on Thursday afternoon after flying into town, Chad’s dad Walt was already wrenching on the sucker. As she’d been “ridden hard and put away wet” there was a modicum of work to do just to get the rest of the thing up to snuff so that we could look at the engine. The chain was so bad that we bought a new one, rear sprocket had barnacles on it and Walt also fixed the brake (singular).

Once we installed the new chain and knew that the engine spun freely, things were aligned, and the brake would at least allow me to ID Chad’s body at the morgue we turned our attention to the engine. We winged the plug out and hit ‘er with some sand paper to clean it up and then winged it right back in. A little shot of carb cleaner down the carb, a pull of the handle and fire….then instant death. We checked to see if there was gas in it. WOAH MAMA! The full tank of two year old gas had gone full rancid and stunk like some sort of nuclear bad grape juice. We then sprung into action and ripped the carb off to see if it was gummed up. We couldn’t get a 30-thousandths welding wire through the main jet so that was the first sign of trouble. How did we fix that?

We busted out the drill and the smallest bit that we had…which effectively doubled the size of the main jet.

This is the type of precision work that happens at BS HQ West. The 60-thousandths drill bit was larger than the hole that was there but it wouldn’t be TOO big a difference…right? Wrong.

With the carb reinstalled, we again blasted some carb cleaner down the throat and pulled the handle. This time it fired and wanted to run but it was burning all of the crap gas and smelling awful along with smoking like a locomotive. Executive decision…we had to get rid of the bad gas by draining the tank. With no vessel to hold the gas where would it go?

We knuckled down and made the hard choices to figure out how to find some storage vessels for the bad gas. Anyone who picked up that Corona would sure have been in for a bad surprise, we can promise them that. Of course this is California and we needed to properly dispose of this hazardous materials by…

Feeding it into the tank of the rental car. It sucked the junk down no problem…at least for as long as we had it. We bet new cars would run on paint thinner if you let them. (DO NOT try to run your new car on paint thinner).

While Chad was reattaching the fuel line we hit the gas station for some fresh swill to feed this thing. Note the prime placement of the BS sticker on the rear fender along with the brand new rear tire that was virtually square.

So now it ran but due to our “customization” of the main jet, it was running WAY too fat and essentially drowning in its own fuel. The thing would not idle and it would not rev at full throttle, it was just kind of bogging and not doing a whole lot of anything….until I had an idea.

We yanked the carb off again (that was done about 100x) and stuck a couple of washers behind it, creating a big vacuum leak between it and the block of the Chinese fire breathing engine. What happened?

THIS! The minibike ran. Now, it did not run well but it ran. The mini-bike would not idle and at full throttle it was not happy but three-quarter throttle, it ran like its hair was on fire. Chad was streaking around the joint and the street like some sort of escaped mental patient, beard flowing in the breeze.While we at least knew that the issue was air, we needed a solution that would allow the thing to idle and function at a reasonable level at part throttle.

That’s when the drill came out again. We found a flat pad of metal on the throat of the carb, behind the throttle blade and started with small bits and worked our way up and up until we could drill no more.

There’s our initial hole…we would bolt the carb back on with every size upgrade to see if it would idle. No dice.

That is the size of the hole we stopped at. We stopped there mainly because we were running out of meat to drill through and figured we were about to bust the ear off the carb. Unfortunately, even with that size air bleed it did not want to run.

Our last brilliant idea was to slot a washer and slide one washer between the carb and block to lessen the air leak we had created earlier with the two washers. It netted us much the same result. Idle and part throttle were junk but 3/4 throttle was mintolicious. At this point, we abandoned the project and kept drinking. The solution? A new stock carb would fix the thing up right. Hell, at least we tried, right?

See ya next year, mini-bike of death!