1984 Honda ATC 200 powered race mower

chevy8988 wrote:

"Doesn't look that bad on camera"

I dunno man it looked FUBAR to me! Lol

It looked awful in person lol, I really need to get back to work on it, a lot of these pics and videos are from last year if not longer.

Finally fixed the rear half of the frame, also went through and welded the ridiculous amount of holes that MTD puts in the frames, and added some bracing to the front axle. Got her up to 57mph with the engine running like total crap from the wore out needle and seat putting copious amounts of fuel in it lol. I haven't decided what I want to do for a new carb, really would like to go aftermarket like mikuni or something, any suggestions?

Those Keihin carbs that come stock on the Hondas are actually pretty good, you can probably get a new needle/seat for it. I say completely overhaul that carb, open /smooth the intake mouth of the carb, clean up/gasket match the ports and you'll be golden! Small engines really respond well to that stuff, once you've got the jetting dialed back in she's gonna fly!

Sounds like a plan to me, probably be a heck of a lot cheaper than a mikuni anyway, I honestly was only wanting an aftermarket carb for the curb appeal lol. I'll do some searching tonight and see what I can find for rebuild kits for it.

At 57 MPH, the carb won’t be visible from the curb!

Mikuni makes factory carbs as well as aftermarket and aren't necessarily any better.  Lol  Honda spent tens of thousands of dollars designing that carb for that motor, it would be tough to get better!

Lol @Nevadablue good one!

Y'all make some good points lol, and I totally agree, Honda has some good carbs. It's honestly amazing that mine even does work with how messed up the needle is, it's crooked and has definitely been sanded on a couple times by someone in the past, it lets enough fuel in that it black smokes at idle lol.

I've put a couple hundred miles on my racemower, and now that I've built the "Craftsmaha" racemower, I m going to take some of the design elements from it and completely overhaul my racemower. My poor racemower is wore out, it wasn't exactly perfect to start out with, some things were half assed and highly sketchy, but now I'm going to go through it and do everything the way I should have the first time. The steering is super sketchy, I honestly don't know if I ever posted a picture of how I did the steering on this mower, hopefully not lol, and the chain system is so loose I don't know how it's never thrown a chain off. But anyway, I decided that I'd procrastinate and do the least important thing first lol, and start repainting it. In all honesty though, it's kinda an important step, because if you paint something nice enough it gives you motivation to get it done and see it together.

I've never liked the gas tank sticking out of the hood, so I went and cut a patch out of a old junk hood I had sitting around. Then I welded and Bondo'd it and did some sanding. It ain't perfect, but it ain't bad lookin either.










I really didn't have any particular paint scheme in mind, I kinda just grabbed the best color of spray paint I had in my collection that I also had enough cans of to do the whole mower lol. Then I taped and masked off the part I wanted to be a different color. Then I pulled out my airbrush and grabbed some stencils I printed and cut out a while back and painted a Honda logo on it. In the end it kinda has the vibe of the Gulf GT40 paint scheme.







I also used a lens restoration kit on the headlights and got them looking brand new.






I plan on painting the rear fenders next weekend, I still haven't decided whether or not I want to try to salvage the patchwork quilt of a frame this mower has, or just build a custom one like I did for "Craftsmaha". I'll probably go ahead and build a custom one even though it's a heck of a lot of work. Anyway, y'all let me know what you think about it, and have a good one, Cheers!!

Ok, so I may have slacked off on posting progress during the build again lol. She's already done and ripping around. But I did take plenty of pictures during the build.

So after I procrastinated and painted some of the body panels, I started building the new frame, I used 2"x3" angle just like I did on my other racemower. I built the front axle and spindle mounts from scratch instead of using an old go kart axle like I originally did. Then I started working on getting the body mounts in the right spot. After that I started figuring out where the steering rack needed to be and how I was going to set it up. I ended up lengthening the arm on the rack and using fourwheeler tie rods. The steering geometry seems to be pretty spot on for this mower, I learned quite a few things about steering geometry while building this one, mostly about how to set up the akerman properly so that the inner tire turns sharper than the outer. After I got the front done I moved onto the rear axle, I used heavy duty pillow blocks to mount it, I also ditched the old go kart band brake and set up hydraulic brakes.



















I ended up using a pulse fuel pump and just drilled and tapped for a fitting in the intake runner to get my pulse from.















I ended up ditching the normal lawn mower seat and robbing the tractor pan seat off of my mud mower.