Today I’m going to be showing you guys the exact process I use to flip dirt bikes and make money. So when I was in high school I did this a lot and you can actually make pretty decent money doing this. And when you’re doing this you’re also going to learn a ton about different bikes and it’s so much fun just getting to learn like all the little components on each bike and really gaining a good understanding of working on them.
So I couldn’t think of a better way to show you guys this process than getting a bike of my own that I’m going to go through and flip and then I can show you guys the exact process I’m going to use to go through this bike and get it flipped and make some money off of it, so let’s go check out the bike. So the bike we’re going to be working on is a 2006 RMZ450.
It’s not in the best shape as you can see it is torn down pretty far, you can see the engine is out when I bought the bike the guy already had the top end torn off of the engine but the bottom end was still in here.
But anyways first and foremost we need to get this bike back to running condition and after we do that we’re going to be able to get the bike all cleaned up and look much better than it does right now. But the first thing is just to get it running and then we can worry about making it look good to get that higher purchase price from a buyer.
But I’ll tell you guys all about the finances later but right now I just want to show you guys the engine parts real quick and then we’ll get to cleaning this bike.
Alright and here’s the bottom end of this engine which will be looking into later on in the post as well as this box of parts which is going to be probably not very fun trying to figure out where all this stuff came from but it shouldn’t be too hard with all the diagrams we have available to us.
So the bike is outside and already to get cleaned up this Maxima bio wash does a great job on painted finishes or graphics but the purple power is just going to be a little bit cheaper and in this case, I don’t have any of those services so I’m not too worried. And then if you guys have heard of the Mag wheel cleaner before you know it’s great on cast aluminum services so it does great on these frames and swings arms and also any other aluminum part you have around on the bike.
And then as far as scrubbing goes, scotch-brite and Pryme MX cleaning wheels do a great job on scratching up that aluminum and giving it a nice finish as well as I’ll use a few different styles of brushes. It’s important to spend a good amount of time cleaning your bike when you’re trying to flip it, it does add a good amount of value to see a lot of things clean on the bike when a potential buyer is looking at it.
It lets them know that the previous owner took care of the bike and definitely a good thing to do, you don’t need to spend several hours doing this just ‘cause at some point, you lose the value in it but definitely spend a good amount of time making sure everything’s clean on it.
Well now that the bike’s all cleaned up the next step is to inspect the engine kind of go over that I like to go straight from cleaning to the engine ‘cause the engine’s really what’s going to affect how much this bike is going to be worth and how much I have to put into it. But before I get into that I want to talk to you guys a little bit about what process I use when I’m looking to purchase a bike.
Obviously, when you’re looking for a bike you want to find something that’s going to be below its market value. This, I could give you a list of what’s the market value is and how much you want to be below it but it’s really going to depend on where you’re at so I can’t really give you guys a list just because different locations are going to have different values.
I have so many viewers from other countries or other states and I just don’t know what these bikes are worth there, but for now, I’m kind of going to go off what the bike is going to be worth in my state. After you’ve guys research your year and model and kind of determined what the value range is for that bike, you can begin looking for the bikes.
So what I like to do is I look on my phone usually and I check Facebook marketplace, OfferUp and Craigslist, and how I do this is I set search alerts. To get these deals you kind of just got to know where you’re at so here’s OfferUp. OfferUp is really big in Washington state where I live but in other places, it may be a different application that’s big for you guys but I think the same thing still going to apply here.
You’ll want to set search alerts just so you can be the first to know when that bike’s out there and you don’t have to be checking your app all day ‘cause these things do get pretty competitive. So I’m just going to look up a random year and model here to show you guys an example. Okay so surprisingly there is actually a Honda 420 I wasn’t expecting that.
What I can do is you can see here it ask me to save this search so I’ll turn that on and any time Honda 420 gets posted I’ll get notified, I can even change the price. So say the market value for a Honda 420 is $2,000 and I want to be $500 below that, I’ll set my max to 1500 and then in that way I don’t get notified every single time one post because I don’t really care.
If I’m trying to flip the bike I don’t really need to get notified if a one in good shape gets posted but if it’s under that price I know it’s where I want to be at and then I can go ahead and take a serious look at it. So after you guys get notified this is a bike I got notified on about a month ago I’ll show you guys the process I go through to actually determine if this bike is worth going and checking out.
So this one here is 2005 CRF250R listed at A $1,000 and down here is saying that the engine is seized on it or it’s not kicking over so basically the engine seize it has engine issues. That’s the one thing you want to be careful of on these four-stroke bikes especially is when you have engine issues they do tend to add up pretty quickly so I just like to do a little bit of math to make sure I’m good just in case the worst-case scenario happens with the engine.
So in my area, if this bike was in the good running condition it would be worth about 2,500 normally if I saw a bike I would have my search result come up anything $500 off this that’s a good number for me. If you guys were doing this everyday you would want to be doing maybe a little bit less than that just you get more bikes coming up or if you guys weren’t doing this as much maybe you wanted bigger profit margins on each bike.
But anything under 2,000 is kind of what I’m looking for and that bike this bike is under 2,000. So yes this bike is pretty cheap but if we take a look here these four strokes do add up pretty quickly on engine issues. The two strokes do tend to be a little bit cheaper but we’ll say 1500 worst case scenario for engine parts and then another a thousand for the bike on the purchase price you’re looking at 2500 and total expenses so you’re really not making any money there.
Sometimes on these four strokes, you are taking a little bit of a gamble and you do want to be careful. Another thing you can do is look at the date it was posted so this one was posted a month ago so this guy may be willing to go down in price just ‘cause it’s been up so long. But on the RMZ450 I did get a really good price of $650 and we’ll have to wait and see after I take a look at the engine if that’s actually going to be a good price.
To figure out more on this bike I really need to get dived into the engine that’s the first thing I need to work on to get a good sense of the value, so let’s get to work on the engine. Alright, guys here’s the engine and basically what I was told when I bought the engine is that he was trying to do a top-end and he couldn’t get the risk pinout so he just gave up and decided to sell the bike.
It looks like he was trying to remove the wrist pin with some C clamps or something and he kind of damaged the piston, hopefully, he didn’t get to the crankshaft. But anyways this wrist pin is seized in there pretty good so I’m going to have to use a Motion Pro piston pin puller or remover tool it works great. So you have a special adapter here for your shorter four-stroke pistons or for your two strokes or smaller CCs that are going to be all the way around.
You can use a round one there for the piston but this one adapts upright to the four-stroke piston and what I can do with it is I’ll just take a little call it on one end that basically fits in between the small end of the crankshaft but it grabs onto your wrist pin and it will just pull it right through. Alright so you can see here the piston pin was hitting on this one so like sitting too low so I had to switch it out for the regular one.
It’s not fitting on there the best but I was able to jury-rig it on here to where it’s moving now so it’s not working against itself so I’m just going to continue pulling this out of here. Pretty much through it now. Alright, now that we’ve got this piston out the wrist pin you can definitely see there’s a good amount of scoring and there’s like a firm line on it like a weld you can feel your finger running over it.
It’s like this wrist pin got way too hot and woven itself onto the connecting rod so hopefully, there’s not a lot of damage on the connecting rod but there probably is so let’s take a look. Alright and if we look closely at the connecting rod here we can see we have that same line on there that we did on the wrist pin so that basically welded to each other from overheating.
If I took a new wrist pin and tried to fit it in there it’s not going to fit just because of that uprise of the weld there so we’re definitely going to need to tear this engine down and replace some components, we can just hope nothing else is overheated. But this will be a good lesson for you guys when you’re buying a bike where it says it’s the top end usually it’s going to be more than just that so something to be aware of, a lot of people aren’t going to be fully honest with you.
Alright but now I’m going to go ahead and tear into the bottom end of this four-stroke engine here and make sure there’s nothing else that needs to be replaced. I’m not going to go super into depth on the teardown here I’m just going to get it torn down, I do have a series coming where I’m going to be super-detailed about building four-stroke engines coming up so stay tuned for that one.
Alright guys so we got the cases torn down all the way and everything looks pretty good in both these cases, the bearings seem to turn nicely. The only thing I noticed is our oil strainers here they do have a pretty good amount of metal shavings on them so I’m going to take this case over the parts washer to get it all cleaned up while I have it apart and also clean off the outside of it I might as well, well it’s in there.
And then after I’m done cleaning everything up I’m going to go take a look online and see how much it’s going to cost to repair this engine and I’ll get back with you guys then. And since the solvent in the parts washer is water-based I’m going to take a heat gun here and dry out the water in these bearings just so they do not rust while I’m waiting for parts. Alright now the bearings are dry I’m going to put some Boeshield T-9 Rust and Corrosion Protection.
This stuff works a lot better than WD-40 ‘cause it’s not water-based it’s actually a waterproof lubricant so it keeps water out of the bearings. So this stuff works great I also use it on like raw steel pipes to help them not rust and you can see here they even have listed automotive engine and this stuff is made by Boeing the plane manufacturer so if it’s good enough for airplanes it’s probably going to be good enough for dirt bike engines.
And these engine cases did clean up really nicely in the parts washer they’re not perfect you can see there’s still a good amount of oxidation on there but we would need to hit it with something more aggressive to get rid of that but that wouldn’t be worth our time since we’re trying to turn a profit.
I also I went ahead I’m going to add up everything so the bike was $650 it was the purchase price it’s going to be another $25 to get a Tusk top and gasket kit and then a hundred for a Pro X piston and then another 337 and that’s going to be for a wise coat bottom and rebuild kit I decided to be cheaper to just go with that.
And then counting up all these parts we’re going to be out $ 1,112 we still have a lot of parts we need to order but this is where we’re at right now and obviously we’re trying to keep things as cheap as possible so I’m going to put on order what we don’t already have.
Hope you guys liked this post, I know it is a bit lengthy but I tried to cover all the issue you could face when you are trying to rebuild an old bike. It’s fun but also makes you enough money for your work.
Don’t forget to read the part 2 of flipping dirt bikes where I go into more points to consider. I am sure you will get some ideas from there to work with your strategy