![]() Mike Palmgren, the builder of this 1982 250R, says “I don’t like seeing machines with heavy rust on the frame and steel components. Broken plastic is common on a 30-year-old machine, but keep in mind that finding good-condition OEM plastic or near-perfect plastic is becoming nearly impossible or very expensive. For example, stay away from frames with cracks or repairs made to them. It’s a good, complete, all-original bike, start looking at things that are beyond repairable. Internally, this engine was in really good shape, but common wearable parts were replaced, such as all the seals, gaskets and bearings. Little pieces and parts that go missing over the years can cost you months of hunting for a replacement, and that is a big deal when it’s holding up the restoration. An amateur cosmetic restoration to make a machine look good to flip or resell may be harder to work with than something unrestored. Its condition is not as important as originality, but you are better off paying more for a bike that literally has never had a wrench on it. Every mark or nick gets worked smooth to complete a perfect restoration. If the donor vehicle is found intact, all the bolts, brackets, rear axle, axle hubs, seat-mount clamps, triple tree hardware and engine bolts get stripped to bare metal. What many people call a restoration is actually a rebuild, or perhaps what hot-rod guys call a “resto-mod”-an older machine that has significant modern performance upgrades whether you can see them or not. When we say “restoration,” we are talking about returning a machine to how it was on the showroom floor. There are a few things to look at when picking a starting point, or a “donor bike” as they are called in the restoration world. The restoration started off just like 99 percent of them do-with a donor that has lived a hard life and was ready for a revival. ![]() You can see the others at For this article, the Vintage Motorsports Honda ATC 250R was paired up with a 1982 Toyota pickup, which had been restored by Greg’s Restorations. It’s that good, and this 1982 Honda 250R is his latest acquisition. Our most recent visit, however, ended abruptly when he shut the doors and started wiping our drool off his floor. This collector opened his doors for a few hours, so we got to take a look at his prized possessions. but for now I plan on getting these.Over the last few years we have highlighted a number of his projects after discovering one of his biggest customers is in Los Angeles near our offices. Id love to run HIDs with a solid state cap, thats my pipedream goal. If I did this to a Tecate then it's absolutely possible with a Honda, and there are a few members around here that have done the mod already (KASEY comes to mind). The battery acts as a filter to the system and absorbs the voltage spikes that might occur from the rectification process. Alternatively you can use a capacitor instead of a battery, however a battery is a much more redundant setup (allowing you to run your lighting incase your engine cuts out for whatever reason). Now all you need to do is wire the Reg/Rec to a 12 volt battery and from there you can run your lights. TrailTech has a good unit that works very well, and it's simple to wire up. From here you need to snip off the other lighting wire and run the 2 leads to a Regulator/Rectifier. You need to lift the ground lug off the stator mount and solder on a length of wire to this lug. There should be 2 wires for the lights- one will be the ground lug (which grounds out where the stator is mounted) and the other will be a lead that runs to the lighting harness. It's not difficult to do, what you have to do is pop open the stator cover and play around with the stator wires. You need to convert the bike to DC power if you wish to run any strictly DC powered applications, such as LED's and HID's. With LED's, it's instant on and instant off, so you will see the switch rate through the lamp. The rate at which the current switches is too fast for the filament to dim down and fire back up fully, so it just stays lit. 250R's output current is AC, Halogen bulbs work just fine on AC current.
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