Gents,
Attached (I hope) is a pic of the Super Bronc I'm preparing to restore. I bought it 16 years ago after my youngest got a Manco Thunderbird for his tenth birthday and kept enjoying long after he moved on to dirt bikes. It received regular use until Hurricane Ike left it floating, balloon tires up, in about 6 feet of seawater, after which I sprayed it down with corrosion guard and haven't touched it since. My recent (re)discovery of all the Heald paperwork I collected back in 2000, and (especially) this site, has me ready to finally get busy.
It's too hot here in Houston to do anything now, for me anyway, so my plan is to start gathering parts until the weather breaks in a couple months. Not unexpectedly, the engine is seized, so obviously I need to either rebuild or replace it. Since my engine is black, instead of white like (almost) every other one of these I've ever seen, I've always assumed that mine is a replacement engine. If I'm correct about that, I'll be looking for a rebuilt (or possibly NOS) engine in the correct white color. My question, then, the first of what I'm sure will be many, is whether my black engine indicates that it's not factory.
I'm assuming also that with these bikes there's no such thing as a "numbers matching" powertrain and that the emphasis instead is on "period correct". Don't hesitate to set me straight if I'm (also) wrong about that.
Thanks in advance for your kind attention to my first post,
Dave
(PS - my first minibike as a kid was a Skat Kitty that my dad bought for $75 from a co-worker who won it in a church raffle and never used it. I literally ran the wheels off of it for several summers, before moving on to a Honda Mini Trail, and have long suspected that its total lack of a suspension is the root cause of the lower back problems that later plagued me in adulthood. And no, sadly, I don't still have the Kitty...)
Attached (I hope) is a pic of the Super Bronc I'm preparing to restore. I bought it 16 years ago after my youngest got a Manco Thunderbird for his tenth birthday and kept enjoying long after he moved on to dirt bikes. It received regular use until Hurricane Ike left it floating, balloon tires up, in about 6 feet of seawater, after which I sprayed it down with corrosion guard and haven't touched it since. My recent (re)discovery of all the Heald paperwork I collected back in 2000, and (especially) this site, has me ready to finally get busy.
It's too hot here in Houston to do anything now, for me anyway, so my plan is to start gathering parts until the weather breaks in a couple months. Not unexpectedly, the engine is seized, so obviously I need to either rebuild or replace it. Since my engine is black, instead of white like (almost) every other one of these I've ever seen, I've always assumed that mine is a replacement engine. If I'm correct about that, I'll be looking for a rebuilt (or possibly NOS) engine in the correct white color. My question, then, the first of what I'm sure will be many, is whether my black engine indicates that it's not factory.
I'm assuming also that with these bikes there's no such thing as a "numbers matching" powertrain and that the emphasis instead is on "period correct". Don't hesitate to set me straight if I'm (also) wrong about that.
Thanks in advance for your kind attention to my first post,
Dave
(PS - my first minibike as a kid was a Skat Kitty that my dad bought for $75 from a co-worker who won it in a church raffle and never used it. I literally ran the wheels off of it for several summers, before moving on to a Honda Mini Trail, and have long suspected that its total lack of a suspension is the root cause of the lower back problems that later plagued me in adulthood. And no, sadly, I don't still have the Kitty...)
