You waited all these years to ride your grandfather’s motorcycle. Now that you have it, all you need to do is fire it up and enjoy the ride, right? Well, you can but what if your grandfather and dad neglected the motorcycle for many years? The engine’s not starting, the frame is already full of rust, some parts are already missing and the wheels are already rotten.

If this is the case, then you may want to know about motorcycle restoration. If you have a knack for machinery, you consider yourself an amateur mechanic, and you know a bit about engines, then restoring your vintage motorcycle is definitely a great hobby for you. In fact, you can even turn this in to a very lucrative business once you mastered the ins and outs of vintage motorcycle restoration.

Now that you decided to undergo the restoration project yourself, here are some tips that will make the entire process of restoration a lot easier for you. With these tips, you can be sure that you will be able to restore your vintage bike easily and without too much hassle.

The first tip would be taking pictures or a video of the strip down process. A lot of people who attempts to restore a vintage motorcycle make a mistake of not documenting what they are doing. You need to remember that there are a lot of parts that you will be taking off when you are stripping the bike down to its frame. If you don’t want to be confused which parts go where when the time comes to assemble everything back again, you should get pictures taken with a digital camera or a video to record the entire process.

If the engine is not working, you may need to check it if it has any damaged or missing parts. You need to remember that years of neglect can eventually take its toll on the engine. If you don’t know how to repair the engine, you should get a certified mechanic to repair it for you.

As for the parts that you need to get the engine repaired, you will find that this particular step is often the hardest, especially if you are working with a vintage motorcycle. The parts here will already be obsolete and there is a very big chance that you may need to look very hard for them. In fact, some motorcycle enthusiasts who are on the process of restoring a vintage motorcycle travels half way across the world just to obtain parts for their motorcycle.

Using the internet to find parts for your motorcycle is a good idea. Here, you will be able to access forums and websites that may have active members that have the parts that you need to restore your motorcycle.

To clean the frame, you can get it sandblasted to get rid of rust as well as the old and faded paint. You can get it repainted again with the color you prefer.

These are some of the things that you have to know about vintage motorcycle restoration. By following these tips, you can be sure that restoring your vintage bike will be a lot easier and almost hassle-free. After finishing your project, you can definitely enjoy riding your vintage bike around town or you can put it in auction and earn a lot of money for it.