July 10, 200818 yr Anyone have a good knowledge of old Montesa's. Basically I am looking at what looks like a good running Cota 200 from 1980/81. I have no knowledge really on details or what models of old are worth more than others and what are the better ones mechanically. The price is
July 10, 200818 yr Cota 200s are nice to ride and relatively light. Montesas of the twinshock era are generally well designed competition machines that won many titles at a high level in their time. The Cota 200 kickstart mechanism has a weakness and the supply of genuine parts to fix it when it breaks have been used up. I haven't heard of anyone making replacement parts yet. The weakness with the kickstart is a design issue that is shared with a few models that use the same mechanism (mainly Cota models 172, 200 and 242). There are design weaknesses with all bikes, including Jap bikes. Other Montesa Cota models have different weaknesses. Maybe you could do a bit of searching on the forums on this website to learn more about twinshock Montesas.
July 10, 200818 yr They also had a problem with the gear box which meant that they jumped out of gear - just as you were half way up a steep climb usually!!!!!!
July 10, 200818 yr I own a 84 123 that is basicly the same bike as the 200, that I bought new, the shift shaft circlip has a tendacy to come off and mess up the shift actuator, I installed a spacer between the cover and the shifter so the shift shaft wont move inward if the circlip comes off, I heard of people cuting the circlip groove deeper and installing a smaler circlip, never had a kick start issue, also toss the amal and put on a mikuni, mine has a kehin which is abought the same as the mikuni, the difference in performance is amazing, one other note, check the base gasket, mine was overlaping the transfer port by a good bit, after trimming the base gasket to match the transfer ports there was a notable performance gain
July 14, 200818 yr Thanks, what about parts availability? I get most of my parts from jared at southwest montesa, jeff (stuck in the sixties) on feebay has a lot of stuff also
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