I had a chance to visit the Solvang Motorcycle Museum located in (no prizes for guessing !) Solvang, California. This town is also the home of the world famous Nimbus gathering which attracts Nimbus owners from around the world – why here you ask ? Well, Solvang was settled by Danish immigrants just prior to WWI and means ‘Sunny Land’ in Danish – Nimbus of course is a Danish motorcycle and couple that with the availability of reasonable wine produced locally in the area and you have the makings of a very sunny time indeed !
The museum is owned by Virgil Elings who races on the vintage motorcycle circuit, but is probably more famous for his inventions in the field of scanning tunnelling microscopes where he is the holder of a number of patents. He has collected an amazing assortment of motorcycle hardware ranging from a Britten to a modified Suzuki GT750, to of course a Nimbus with requisite side car to a host of early racing bikes including many exquisite examples of Italian, English and European models – including my personal favourite, a 500cc Gilera as would have been raced by Geoff Duke back in the early 1950′s.Why Gilera never thought to produce a consumer version of their in-line four just baffles me, but no doubt they had their reasons. Its a pity as it was obviously a wildly successful engine – they won something like six world championships with it, and other manufacturers obviously picked up on the idea a decade later and made a fortune. Quite a lost opportunity.
An appointment is usually required during the week so call ahead, although it is open on weekends. Quite the collection – if you are in the area, it is well worth a look see !
Before starting in on the carburettors, I still had a few other small bits to tidy up beginning with the clocks. For 1977, these were brown faced, and in Canada were also metric for the first time. They also were very hard to find as there were so few of these sold so it took me quite a while to track a set down ! At first glance, the set I managed to pick up looked quite good, but upon closer inspection there were a few problems.
Cactus Machine here in Calgary turn a few sets for me out of stainless steel. They look fantastic and now I have enough for for the 1968 Cobra I’ll be doing up at some point, plus a spare set !
casting as used on other Suzuki’s of the same era, but is missing the hole and lettering for the starter button. I also rebuilt and re-sleeved the front brake stop switch. While this is available from Suzuki under a new part number 57460-33700, the new part is a ‘universal’ unit and so you get both the block and bullet electrical connector options. All that was wrong with mine was it needed new sleeving and for the leads to be re-soldered to the contact slide plate as seen in the photo above. The screws are 3mm and this is a case where the part number is incorrect as normally you can tell the length of the screws from the number 09125-03105 where the ’03′ gives the diameter and the ’10′ should give you the length. In this case they are actually 16mm long rather than 10mm.
Next up was the oil injector pump. This is a single piston style pimp, and quite a lot simpler than the one used on the Suzuki triples but also pretty robust. I was surprised that information specific to rebuilding these was hard to find, but the seals are all easily replaceable if you can find the correct sizes. The photo to the left shows the disassembled pump and a larger copy of the image is available 
I previously wrote about 
The other thing I have to do is repair the oil pumps – both that I have need new oil seals and those are supposedly in the mail to me and should arrive next week. These pump seals of course were not offered by Suzuki as the pumps themselves were not intended to be repaired, so some sleuthing has been required to figure out what will actually fit and where to buy them. As well, owners of Suzuki twins with oil injection from this era often report air leaks in the oil injector lines. Unlike the triples, the twins use a split feed line between the pump and the point of injection, and it seems that after 35+ years. what ever Suzuki used to glue these together is starting to fail, or possibly it is just hair-line cracks developing. Whatever the case, I am putting a drop or two of epoxy on the joint areas (marked in the photo to the left), and will also be flushing out the lines with methyl hydrate to make sure the check valves at the end
I expect that should be back before the end of May, but we shall see. I’m doing the bike up as it was originally when sold, so gloss black, with satin black and then more gloss black – not what I’d call exciting, but it will have the correct striping in cyan blue and gold which will add a little bit of flash !
We’ll miss you Mum
One of the (many) things I’ve lusted over during the years is to have a decent parts washer in the shop. Over the years I have made a couple of my own including making one out of an old wringer washing machine, but for various reasons they didn’t last very long, and so I have continued ‘wash-less’ so to speak. Recently I have had the benefit of being able to use a friend’s parts washer, and this experience rekindled my interest in having something of my own – as luck would have it 
disassembled the pump and discovered that it had (in very small print) a notice to the effect that it was a water fountain pump (!!) requiring a GFI electrical connection. A water fountain pump ? The heart of my shiny new parts washer was a water fountain pump ? There is no macho in water fountains – I was crushed. I was also a tad miffed as other than that one mention in the instructions (kindly and usefully repeated also in French), the rest of the verbiage talks about making sure you use a solvent not have a flash point lower than 100 F, that you don’t smoke, be sure to use in a well ventilated area, not to mess with the fusible link that drops the lid in case of fire, etc. At first glance this all seems inconsistent with the use of water as a cleaning material, but on further reflection of course I realised that like everything else for sale these days, it was made in China and I’ve seen their water so possibly it isn’t too strange after all ………….but I digress.
