The main difference between the original style and newer ones is the diameter of the release button – early ones are small and later ones are large as seen in the photo above.

Referring to the photo above, the release mechanism consists of parts 1 through 6 and is disassembled by carefully removing the two half clips (#5 from their seating positions in the retaining collars item  #2. At this point, if you are not careful it will all fly apart and the small and crucially important little spring (which I only just noticed is not labelled) and other bits will disappear forever into the dark corners of your shop meaning you have no choice but to buy a new cap. If you were careful though, you will have eased it all apart and the various bits will appear as per the photo. The collars (item #2) are an insidious design being plastic and so tend to crack and fall apart quite easily. Item #7 which is a retained spring and seal may be prised out of the outside shell item #8 which can then be sent away to be chromed. Having the spring retainer out also makes it easier to replace the sealing gasket which is still available from Suzuki.

This specific cap in the photo is an early style – as mentioned the later ones had  a larger diameter collar. The caps used in 1972 actually are quite similar but lack the locking buttons, using instead a release lever.

Whether you buy a new one or rebuild your old one is a personal choice as the cost is about the same, and included with a new one are new latch and hinge pins, plus a couple of keys. At the same time I also think it is nice to know that if you want to preserve the original look it is possible to do so. Enjoy !

QR is short for ‘quick response’ and is just a 2D bar code which was first designed for the automotive industry by Toyota. One of its principal attractions is that it can be read and decoded very quickly, and as well can be used to encode different types of data (alpha, numeric, binary, etc.). The range of uses is limited only by the imagination – it is used in hard copy advertising to store URL’s of web sites to provide additional sales information, features, colours, special targeted discounts, etc. or on things such as transit tickets to be scanned by ticket readers. I wanted to stick them on fuel pumps at service stations. The growth in usage within North America is tied directly to the relatively recent and rapid rate of uptake of smartphones – as you often hear, ‘there is an app for that’ on the iPhone and of course other devices that use the camera and some software to scan and then decode the QR codes with your phone. And of course as there is geo-location awareness in most phones these days, so not only do the advertisers know what ad you’ve looked at but also where you are when you do so which is useful for targeting consumers with special offers and promotions.

While it only took my old firm a few years to finally take our advice and get with the program, I’m pleased to see that at least the Canadian arm do now finally have a few QR code applications and usage modes. Better late than never I suppose …..

It may seen a bit redundant as you are already here (! ), but below is the QR code for the OJB web site for you to play with – enjoy !

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 !

As  possibly some readers may be aware, I also have taken over responsibility for the Suzuki T and GT Resources site that used to be hosted on the 3cyl.com web site and were originally compiled by ‘mraxl’ . This has been a very time consuming exercise as I had to verify and reformat all the existing material and then start to add in material I had been collecting for a while. It is far from complete, and I still have to go back in and optimise and give a consistent look and feel to the site as a whole, but it is starting to come together. As with the rest of the material hosted on my OJB site, the material will continue to be available for free, although I am happy to accept contributions of documents either in the public domain or from Suzuki.

In addition to the above, I also still maintain the web site of the local CVMG chapter here in Calgary (Rocky Mountain Section) plus I  share support duties for the national CVMG web site . This last has been and continues to be an interesting learning experience as it provides an opportunity to engage with a wide range of interests and skill levels. The most interesting aspects to date include getting the executive on a standardised email system and working with the different sections across Canada to help them establish their own individual web presences – I now have twelve mini-web sites operating under the national web site, each generating their own material and posting photos of local events. It has been interesting watching it develop.

In the shop – not too much, other than the addition or the 1967 CL77 Honda to the herd. This had been in a private collection and on display in the USA for many years and when the owner passed away, the collection was dispersed. I have been spending time recommissioning it – it didn’t really need too much at all and runs quite well. Other than adding a pair of new tires, time will reveal anything else it needs. I had been looking for one of these for many years in the original orange candy colour – naturally there is a story related to ‘why this bike’ which I may share at some point. Honda only built in this combination right at the end of the CL77 production – while the purists refer to it as a 1967, in Canada they were known as being the 1968 model, and they available in both a candy blue as well as this orange. You don’t see them often, but I personally think it was the best one of the model series.

On the bench currently is a 1975 GT750 engine I’m rebuilding for a friend, after which I will be completing the final finishing on the second engine rebuild of the 1973 GT750 project I finished last year (there is of course a painful story to go with this which will be shared later) and I also have the GT500 to finish breaking in, along with the new CL77. After all of that – I have a 1968 T500 Cobra to work on – should be interesting !

All in all, it promises to be a busy 2012 !

The turn signal indicator lamp on this style of housing is slightly recessed and so water pools there – over time the sealant around the amber lens breaks down and then water fills up the lamp housing, corroding the bulb unit into a solid mass of rust ! As well and as was the case with the other areas of the wiring harness, the sleeving had perished and cracked and needed to be replaced.

The clocks when fully disassembled can be seen here with the major parts numbered:

1. housing
2. trip reset cover
3. trip reset knob
4. wire harness
5. speedometer and trip reset and above it the tachometer
6. under plates that hold the gauges in the housing
7. chrome underside covers
8. amber turn signal lens and beside it the Suzuki ‘S’ emblem
9. turn signal lamp holder rubber sleeve
10. turn signal lamp holder

Item #9 typically perishes and rots away completely and is what provides a weather and I suppose light seal for the turn signal indicator lamp. I replaced this with a short length of harness sleeving, and then re-glued the amber lens back into the housing. I also had to replace the turn signal lamp and lamp socket as it had corroded into a solid lump, and then re-sleeved the harness and replaced the connector blocks.

Another item I was missing was a VIN label for the front headstock. Reproductions of these are readily available for the GT750 and other models, but not for the GT500. A fellow member of the Sundial board had previously run into the same problem and had arranged with a fellow in Michigan. Jerry (his email address is jrure@aol.com) offers a very handy service as he will duplicate exactly what you need, at what I think was a very reasonable price.  The labels are the same sort of aluminium foil material as the  originals, and you have the option of having the VIN number and build date printed on the label, or left blank so you can stamp it on yourself.

I had been searching for some time for the bushes that hold the rear of the seat, rear fender and rear turn signal stalks but as these are the first things to be tossed when someone converts these bikes into either a club racer or cafe project, they are quite rare. As well of course Suzuki hasn’t offered them for sale in quite some time. I did make a set myself, but was not happy with how they looked so I bit the bullet and had Roy at 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 !

At some point I’ll have to ask Santa for a small lathe, as the need for this sort of small, fairly simple item pops up on a regular basis and I could easily have made them myself. Maybe next year !

Previously I had taken the main wiring harness apart and re-sleeved it with new PVC black plastic sleeving and tape and now I wanted to replace the sleeving on a few of the smaller leads for the magneto, front brake stop switch and the left control switch. I normally buy sleeving from  Vintage Connections but they didn’t have the 10mm OD size I needed for the magneto lead. I finally tracked down what I was looking for at a place specialising in H-D wiring repairs and custom harnesses called 4RCustoms. Although what they had was in imperial measure, the 3/8 size was close enough to to the job – the critical issue being that the lead passed through a grommet and so it needed to be a tight fit to prevent water leaking past it.

On the T/GT500′s and of course many other bikes also, the magneto coils and in this case also the coils used for the electronic ignition, are soldered in, and given it had been quite a few years since I had wielded a soldering gun in anger, I took my time. Although the coils themselves checked out OK as far as ohmic value the fibre bushes on the side had disintegrated allowing the coils to flop back and forth on the armatures. As well, there were spots that were missing the insulating varnish so the copper was exposed – rather than take a chance and have to replace them later, I elected to just get it over with and replace all four coils used. The photo shows the completed job with the new sleeving installed.

Next I re-sleeved the engine stop switch on the right control switch. This is the same 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.

The left switch assembly used in 1977 in Canada had the driving lights always on by default. This is done by using a modified on/off switch that has a tab preventing you from turning the lights off. I personally think this is dumb as when trying to start these things you need all the juice you can get, and interestingly you can still buy these from Suzuki – what they do still sell is the style used prior to 1977 which does allow you to turn the lights off – so I replaced the original seen in the photo above and to the right with the older style.

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 by clicking here. I had trouble locating 1/2 mm sizes locally, but after a bit of searching found a place in the USA called MFGSupply that had stock and also had stock at reasonable prices.

Next on the list is carburettors !

I then switched to Apple’s Safari as a secondary browser which is quite good in many ways – but alas it can’t spell. For whatever ludicrous reason, it insists and persists in thinking that its English actually is English when in fact its just American. No matter what I tried, or who I talked to I could not make real English dictionaries stick. Actually that isn’t quite correct – I was of course informed by one of those ever so typically smug and self satisfied Mac-advocates, that if I just went out and bought a Mac all would be well ! From my own perspective, if the software is designed correctly then I don’t understand why that should be required, so Safari was de-installed.

That left me with having to take a look again at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – as I didn’t have a working copy on my test machine, I pulled down the latest version (actually not quite the latest version as release 9 won’t run on XP which is what I use as a test box – I had to use release 8). So far, so good – and then as so often happens I was Microsoft’d from behind when I least expected it !

As I tried out the IE8 on my own web sites, I was stunned to find that lots of things didn’t work !  There are photos and search bars not loading as per the screen shot to the right.

As can be seen in the screen shot below, they all looked perfect in Chrome, FireFox and Safari – absolutely no issues with missing photos, search bars or anything else. For whatever silly stupid reason, when using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer there were lots of things that just were not displaying !

To say that I was annoyed doesn’t quite capture how I felt, and it has taken me the better part of a couple of days of fiddling to kludge things back to the point that the MS rubbish is happy and will deign to display the pages the same way Chrome, Safari and FireFox do.

At any rate – I’m now back to where I started and left with one mystery – I don’t get a huge amount of traffic, but for a personal site dealing in a niche topic I do get a  far bit – typically about 100 visits per day. Based on the site statistics I capture, roughly 36% were using Microsoft’s IE (the actual numbers are 36% for IE, 32% for FireFox, 19% for Chrome, 12% for Safari and 1% for Opera) so I wonder why it is that none of the IE users thought to mention to me that there were some gaps and things not working on the site ? Are they just accustomed to Microsoft tools not working ?

Strange.

I previously wrote about Craig Vetter, his wife Carol and the Windjammer fairings their company made in the early 1970′s here. The Vetter family have continued to add Windjammer repair and service items to their web site, along with ‘how to’ documentation and short videos so it has become quite the one stop shop ! Last year I had ordered in new edging trim to replace the road rashed trim on my fairing. As you can possibly see in photo, the trim is plastic and has a metal U channel that clamps the edge of the ABS plastic fairing shell. It is held in place with glue and the Vetter’s sell a repair kit with everything you need to repair the edging on one fairing included.

All seemed well as I pulled off the old trim, and then shaped the new trim to the edge using a hot air gun . The warmed edge trim moulds quite easily and then as it cools, it holds its new shape making the whole process quite straight forward as can be seen to the left. It was all starting to look really good – naturally, this could not continue !

The glue appears to be a two part urethane adhesive of some kind and when I opened the container, to my dismay I found that after a year, although the catalyst seemed fine the resin had turned to jelly. I did try mixing up a couple of test batches, and while it kicked off, it just didn’t seem to have any ‘stick’ once it had set up. Clearly I needed some fresh glue.

I was fully prepared to have to buy more, as after the length of time I had had the kit sitting waiting to be installed, it was clearly my fault and no one else’s that it had gone ‘bad’. Imagine my surprise then when two things happened. After sending an email to the Vetter company email address explaining my problem I got a quick response on a weekend no less ! And secondly, that Carol offered to ship me out some fresh glue ASAP and at no charge ! Frankly you could have knocked me over with a feather as this just never happens to me.

As I said in my previous post – personal responses, cheerful advice and friendly service is a very precious thing in this day and age and I’m sure goes a long way to explaining why so many of these fairing and bag sets are still being used today. There are a lot of companies out there who could learn from the Vetter example.

So, with the fairing just about repaired, I think perhaps I may revisit the Boyer Bransden ignition that I really just installed on the orange GT750 as I have a new toy from Accent in Germany to play with ! The ELZ2Coil !

The engine is back together after Joe at RPM Services in De Winton rebuilt the crankshaft for me and also bored the cylinders – but now I think I may have to take it apart again as I think a thrust washer is missing from the oil pump drive shaft. There was only one in each of the two engines I dismantled, but a close examination of the parts listings actually shows two of them and as the engines had both been apart previously by prior owners I don’t know for certain whether it was a late change by Suzuki to move to having just one, or whether one was just lost on both engines during previous rebuilds. It seems odd to me that both would have had the same washer lost – but then both engines had other things incorrectly assembled so I will double check just to be sure.

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 of each line are also working properly. The same check valve design is used on the Suzuki triples and care must be taken to not damage the seat or small spring so blowing these out with compressed air is a recipe for disaster as new ones haven’t been available from Suzuki for quite some time.

The tinware is all in to Cycle Mania Artworks in  for paint - 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 !

I have recovered the seat using a kit from Pit Replica in Thailand. As I think I’ve mentioned previously, I sent them an original sample and they now offer GT500 seat covers specifically to fit the 1976/1977 model years as they are different from either the T500 covers (too narrow and wrong length) , or the GT380/GT550 covers (same seat pan, but the GT500 doesn’t have the cutout for a seat lock as the seat is just bolted to the frame).  The cost is reasonable and the quality is acceptable.

I am still trying to decide if I’ll use the correct stand-offs for the rear turn signals as I think they stick out too far. I can see me catching the left rear signal with my leg every time I try to get on and off the thing, but we will see what it all looks like when I’ve finished putting on the tinware and have the engine re-mounted in the frame.

The other issue I’m playing with is what to do about the front brake. Suzuki used two different suppliers of front brake components for this model (and for other models too of course), but no longer supply all the bits you need to repair the ASCO callipers. For the master cylinder, which is also ASCO, kits are available. The only difference from what was originally installed and the replacement appears to be the shaft that the brake lever pushes on is a larger diameter on the new kit, but everything else seems to be the same. For the calliper however, there is no longer a full ASCO kit available although you still can buy the seals individually. The calliper piston is not offered. After doing a bit of checking, I’ve decided to use a calliper piston from the GT550 Tokico supplied calliper as the bore is identical to the ASCO cylinder housing. The only differences I can see is that the the Tokico piston is perhaps 0.4 mm longer in overall length, and the groove for the dust seal is different. I’m hoping that the difference in length will not mean that I’ll have trouble remounting the calliper housing on the rotor with the new brake pads, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there !

I have new rubber, new rear wheel bearings, new rear brake shoes and a shiny rear wheel already mounted. Today I’ll be working on the front end replacing the fork seals, the front wheel bearings, front tire and doing a bit of metal polishing.

One small step at a time !!

Elizabeth Young-Sandy

January 27th, 1928

December 14th, 2010