After acquiring 2 identical 1985 Ventures 18 months ago as a project to help rehab my knees after total knee replacements in Late July 2009, I finally have a complete, good looking, great running Venture Royal. It has been an experience. The primary bike was completely torn apart and it took 3 truck loads to get it all home BUT it had only 13500 miles on a one owner bike but had not been run in over 8 years and the original owner gave it to his son who took it apart with the thought of putting the motor in a golf cart. He got bored with the idea and through a friend offered the bike to me just to get it out of the garage. Free is good! The second bike I found when looking for a manual, went to pick up the manual and the owner asked "what about the bike that goes with it?" The bike was complete BUT had not moved in over 10 years and sat under a pine tree outside uncovered for the whole time. Fortunately the owner had pulled the bags and trunk and stored them in the basement. $30 for the manual and the bike (which we had to dig out since it sunk down to the frame in the soft dirt) Mice had nested in a variety of areas including the air box and had eaten some of the harness but the bike was a great template for assembling the good bike and great for getting useable components and fasteners that were missing or damaged when the first bike was taken apart. Some of the major issues that needed to be dealt with: The carbs - having 2 complete sets of carbs helped. The biggest problem during the entire project was determining why I could not get consistent fuel flow to one cylinder, turned out to be a hairline crack in one of the carb bodies sucking air took forever to diagnose and correct. Front fork tubes needed to be replaced, both sets had pitting and were drawing fluid up when compressed went wit new tubes (Forking by Frank) at around half the price of OEM. Brakes needed serious attention. Biggest problem was finding a replacement rear master cylinder and the rubber diaphragm for the inside of the rear brake reservoir. Once all the components were acquired rebuilding the system was pretty straight forward except for the right front brake which refused to bleed for the longest time. The clutch needed attention but having 2 full sets of components got me a solid working clutch. I'm not a big fan of hydraulic clutch systems just due to the added complexity. Cables are so much easier to deal with. Once all the mechanicals were taken care of, the electrical system came next and generally went fairly well, mostly checking, cleaning and replacing but every thing works. Final repair and reassembly of all the body work completed the project. I was amazed at how fragile some of the mounting points on much of the plastic were but I was also amazed at how much of the mounting hardware and grommets were still available. Repairing the plastic was definitely a learning experience. Unfortuneately much of the plastic from the second bike was badly deteriorated from the years out in the elements so repairing the first bikes plastic that was damaged in disassembly became my only option.
The end result is now a very nice, very good running and very good looking motorcycle as original as I can get it within a very limited budget.
I'm not new to resurrecting old motorcycles but this bike had a level of complexity that I had not worked with before. Having worked on a VMax sure helped. I want to thank those on this forum who offered parts and assistance and the owners of theis group for having a place that offers so much technical information. Without this group, this project would not be possible. By the way the knees turned out better than the bike and now I have to figure out what to do with 4 large storage bins of leftover parts!
I'll post some pictures as soon as I can get some taken. Thanks again
I've had my project Venture up and running for a while now but I am having problems getting up to 14 volts when running. My head light is dim and signals slow. Battery is fully charged and the bike starts and runs fine. Volts will read a max of 13.8 at 3000 rpm. Is it the stator or something else that I can look at? Mike Smegielski Waterbury, CT