Let me preface this by saying I do what I do or don't do, solely for my bike, lol, and don't advocate anyone else following suit, and many/most of these pics were taken during progress, and not to be confused with the final product. As my sig indicates, I've previously owned several different atv's over the years (mind you, those were just the note-worthy ones), and wanted to get my little boy one a few months back as he's now old enough to ride and work on them with me. A fourtrax 300 was found and took up residence in the garage, which led me to consider "if he's riding out of earshot, how am I supposed to teach him how to operate it?" I needed to ride alongside, so the decision was made to source myself a bike again, after having been without for awhile.
-quick backstory fill: life has dealt some seriously shitty hands lately, so it's not like I've just got a truckload of money to plunk down on something......but since everyone loves a good picture-loaded build thread to scroll through, here goes:
Killing time scrolling across marketplace I spot an ad for an outlander 400, reasonably close to me, and at a price I could "afford", because it's not running, primarily, it would seem.

Bonus it's a max chassis, which I prefer :th_smiliewoo:

Apparently it was just taking up space in the barn, and the guy was ready to get rid of it. We settled on $400 ($400!) for a complete max chassis bike! I was stoked. He said it needed a CDI due to no spark. Other than that it looked fine, just neglected/filthy/covered in barn dust. Pushed it up in the back of my truck and headed home.

First thing I noticed was at the fuel lines leaving the tank, the lines/grommets/90s had just crumbled away to nothing, which I addressed with OEM stuff.

Put a little fresh gas in just to see if it held, and moved on to the spark issue. Just randomly removing panels and got to the ignition switch to find this:

The damn rats had chewed slap through most of the ignition/CDI wiring, but it was a relatively simple fix.
So we've got some fresh gas in it, got good spark now. Oil's clean and full, so what the hell, let's see if it'll fire

-quick backstory fill: life has dealt some seriously shitty hands lately, so it's not like I've just got a truckload of money to plunk down on something......but since everyone loves a good picture-loaded build thread to scroll through, here goes:
Killing time scrolling across marketplace I spot an ad for an outlander 400, reasonably close to me, and at a price I could "afford", because it's not running, primarily, it would seem.
Bonus it's a max chassis, which I prefer :th_smiliewoo:
Apparently it was just taking up space in the barn, and the guy was ready to get rid of it. We settled on $400 ($400!) for a complete max chassis bike! I was stoked. He said it needed a CDI due to no spark. Other than that it looked fine, just neglected/filthy/covered in barn dust. Pushed it up in the back of my truck and headed home.
First thing I noticed was at the fuel lines leaving the tank, the lines/grommets/90s had just crumbled away to nothing, which I addressed with OEM stuff.
Put a little fresh gas in just to see if it held, and moved on to the spark issue. Just randomly removing panels and got to the ignition switch to find this:
The damn rats had chewed slap through most of the ignition/CDI wiring, but it was a relatively simple fix.
So we've got some fresh gas in it, got good spark now. Oil's clean and full, so what the hell, let's see if it'll fire