I’ve missed the fun of riding my previous 2003
250 “Café racer”, so I decided to “build” another.
I picked up this 01 Ninja 250 at the beginning of Nov for $750, it was quite beat-on and neglected, but with only 3k miles it was a perfect candidate. It had been crashed a few times, so no upper fairings, it did come with a crashed café headlight though, a leaking gas tank, an extra set of rims and years of filth and grime…..so I got busy.
It did not come with the airbox, just some naty looking pods, so I tossed those and went with a single K&N pod filter, after playing with the jetting more times than I can remember, I can now pull into the garage and have the carb on the work bench in 4 minutes.
I repaired and bondo’d the leaking gas tank, Lubed all cables, moved/rewired battery and electrical, wired vapor, installed temp sender & speedo sender, cut seat & had it reupholstered, replaced brake fluid, modified rear reservoir, replaced fork oil, made license plate bracket, cut subframe, removed extra parts, painted a lot of things.
I still have some finishing touches to do like redo the vapor mount and replace the rashed headlight.
In all I’ve spent almost $600 in parts and couldn’t be happier.
Bringing it home, the work begins…
The usual- strip it down, cut off all extra parts, rewire the battery, clean it up and start replacing parts…
Here is my uncle taking it for a spin a while ago, I liked this red/white paint job at first, but it just wasn’t right….