The story of our DR350 begins in 1993 and… continues up to this day.
Born in Japan she traveled to Austria to find us in Slovakia, where she was waiting for her time in a garage for 2 years, not even able to start.
We wanted to buy a bike for some time, but couldn’t find any around the area, where we live. So as we were in Austria and near Slovakia, we tried to find something there, on a Austrian equivalent of Craiglist. We didn’t expect much, when we rode to inspect the bike live, but… From the first sight we knew we can’t left her. We bought her, took her apart and brought back to our home to start the big revival.
Starting from investigating why the engine won’t start, we checked everything in the electrical system, restored the carburetor, checked the camshaft, rebuilt suspension, took care of the frame painting, fixed the neutral gear and dragging clutch problems, adjusted the valve clearance and… many more as we wanted to make her a long distance adventure motorcycle. And although it was risky to buy a not running, over 20 years old bike, the whole rebuilding effort wasn’t for nothing.
The DR runs through the streets and trails up to this day, over 5000 kilometers after the rebuild without any problems. So below we share our DR350 rebuild story, so other DRs can run forever too :)
Electrical System
You can check out each post from this section if you have problem with the bike not running and spark missing in your motorcycle. We chronologically describe our journey in search of the lost spark, so that the whole electrical adventure can be reproduced.
Carburetor
If spark is there, maybe DR is not running because there’s no fuel flow? When we retained the spark, our DR still refused to run the engine. It turned out that carburetor was clean and had just a little thingy missing to work properly. So you can check your carburetor with this section if the spark is there, but the bike still refuses to talk.
- Diagnosing not working carburetor
- Carburetor rebuild
Gearbox
If your DR runs fine, but dealing with its gearbox makes your riding life a pain, then posts in this section may help. I also couldn’t stand the, so-called, quirks of the DR gearbox and… fixed it.
- How to get rid of difficulty finding neutral gear, dragging clutch and jammed gearbox at once
- Clutch friction disc replacement
Suspension
Some say that you shouldn’t rebuild the suspension on your own in your motorcycle. But… we did. And it works :)
Engine
Everything related to DR engine maintenance we did in our DR on our own will appear below:
- Valve clearance adjustment
Other stuff we’ve prepared
Not all of our knowledge is already parked here, so you can check also our YouTube playlist about the DR rebuild in case if something’s missing or you’re just not in the mood for any reading today.
External useful sources
Here are some other pages with useful content and also forums with helpful community, where you can also ask some questions
- thisoldtractor.com DR resources with service manual and more!
- advrider.com DR350 megathread
- thumpertalk.com DR forums