Description
While taking my wife’s Z650 for an MOT I noticed a very forlorn looking DT175 that clearly hadn’t turned a wheel in years leaning up against a wall. I am a sucker for wanting to rescue bikes that clearly are a lost hope, so asked the owner how little he would accept for it to have a new home. I obviously had my rose tinted glasses on and could only see what it could look like rather than the stark reality. This fool was soon parted from his money and in more trouble with my wife; I had promised I would finish restoring my RD250B that I had long since lost interest in, before even thinking about buying another wreck. I had anticipated her lack of enthusiasm for the little Yamaha, but the deal had been done and I had paid fifty quid more than I wanted to, by losing the toss of a coin.
When I announced to my friends that I had bought a DT250 for three hundred notes there was great admiration from all sides, and even more so when I realised it wasn’t a 250 at all but a 175 that had been misrepresented; apparently the 175 is far better and more valuable. By the time I had got it home in the van, the scales came away from my eyes and I started to realise what a pile of crap I had bought and that it was clearly going to cost a fortune to put right. For some perverse reason, this didn’t seem to dampen my enthusiasm for the dinky trail bike, and I soon started to strip it to its component parts.
What is curious is that the rear swingarm seems to have been extended and in a reasonably competent way. I don’t know much about dirt bikes, but I can only assume that it was done to dissuade it from sticking its front wheel in the air, though I wouldn’t have thought a tiny 175cc engine would have an untrainable propensity for such behaviour.
