GT750 Project – Steering Lock

 

Continuing on with the GT750 project I’m working on, the steering lock on these old bikes quite often is seized up solid, and as I had a matched set of keyed alike locks and switches for this project, I wanted to get the steering lock working. I tried soaking it in penetrating oil, heating it, chilling it, shocking it (gently) with a hammer etc., but it just was not in a mood to cooperate so I resorted to drastic measures. The Suzuki lock sets are numbered and these numbers are stamped on the face of the lock barrel and the matching key. As I had several steering locks with no keys, and nothing else matching (ignition, seat latch etc.) I decided to make one of these a donor for the project bike.

The steering locks are not designed to be easily re-keyed, and the body is a die cast metal which is easy to damage. The lock cylinder is held in the barrel by a metal tab just in front of the bolt, and the soft metal of the barrel is pinched closed to hold the tab in place. 

• On my seized one, I had to hacksaw the barrel down on either side of the lock pin to ensure I didn’t risk damaging the lock cylinder, and then I cut through the retaining tab to free up the cylinder completely as shown in the photo to the lower left
• I dremelled the top off the key way of my donor latch, and then drew out the retaining tab, after which the lock cylinder just slides out of the barrel, and the lock pin can be pulled straight up. After cleaning up the barrel, lock cylinder and locking pin, I was ready to reassemble the lock as shown in the centre photo below (the retaining tab can be seen just above the lock cylinder, and the slot it goes into is seen in the barrel above it, just to the left of the lock pin bore). I’ll save the donor lock cylinder as I can use the bits for re-keying other locks in the future.
• the assembled unit, with the retaining tab re-inserted and pinched shut again, is shown in the lower right.
• if you need a key – these can sometimes be bought pre-cut on eBay – I have bought from here in the past.

I’ll either replace, or shine up the screws before re-installing it, but at the moment I now have a matched set of keyed alike functional locks and switches again for the project, which has saved me a few bucks on eBay !

GT750 Restoration – continued – Tank

Continuing on with the GT750 restoration, the design has been finalised, and the frame has been in and then out of the The Welding Shop here in Calgary – the tank had to be steamed out before welding, but that wasn’t too hard to arrange as there was a radiator repair shop next door to the welding shop and they were able to do this easily. I either created new mounting tabs based on the GS750E measurements, or adapted/modified GS750E mounts to be fitted to the GT750 frame. Cactus Machine  has finished the work on the new brake lever and everything actually looks pretty good !

The frame with the tank extension and the mounting tabs was sandblasted (you can read about that here) and I have finished off the shaping, filling and priming of the tank so it is now ready for the next couple of steps – these being sealing, and then finish coat painting. As well, I have double checked the location of the mounting tabs for the seat hinges and rear deck and needed to make a couple of minor ‘fitting’ changes. I wasn’t happy with how the GS750 seat sat on the GT750 frame – it was a bit too high – so I modified the rubber bushes that fit into the underside of the seat and which rest on the frame members. This has let me drop the seat about 3/8th of an inch, and overall I think it looks better as a result. I also decided to raise the rear deck slightly at the rear which meant I needed to relocate the mounting tabs from where I had originally planned, by welding new ones in place.

The final result is as below – In the left photo, you can see how I’ve stretched out the GT750 tank, as compared to the stock shape (the black tank) along side it. In the middle photo you can see how things line up when mounted – the rear deck is off a 1978 GS750E, the seat likewise and the tank is from a 1976 GT750, and which has been modified as described. To the right is a photo of the tank lining kit I plan to use this week to seal the inside of the tank and ensure everything is leak proof and (hopefully) will stay rust free.

There are many products on the market for sealing gas tanks – and these days it is complicated somewhat by the introduction of methanol into gasolines making fuel more corrosive. Some tank lining products, used for example in aircraft tanks and which have been used in some cases for motorcycles will work fine on pure gasoline/petrol fuels, but these linings will actually dissolve if exposed for a prolonged period to newer bio-fuel mixes. There is some very good information here , and as well more information here and here. After reading what I could find, I went with the Caswell product (the American link is here for those folks from outside of Canada) and we’ll see how it goes.

Once the tank is sealed, I will be able to proceed with the finish paint work on the tank, side covers, and rear deck – but before that I need to refurbish the controls, gauges, headlight etc., etc. – so there is no lack of things to do !

The ‘home’ site for the GT750 rebuild project is here.

UPS Canada Issues

While working on my GT750 project bike, I’ve had to source a few bits and pieces from overseas as parts to fit older vehicles like this just can’t easily be found here in Canada, if at all. Generally this has worked well, but I (and apparently many others) have had a couple of ‘interesting’ trans border shipping experiences along the way.

If you check Epinions or Google “UPS Canada rip offs” you will find a long list of rants from many people about a little known, or at least not obvious scam that UPS Canada operates on shipments from the USA, and which US based shippers using UPS in the US either are not generally aware of, or just don’t care about. I recently was taken to the cleaners by UPS Canada, and evidently this fleecing is completely legal – the scam works like this: if you order a US item for delivery, and prepay the shipping charges to UPS in the USA, when it crosses the border UPS here in Canada then tacks on their own additional brokerage, preparation, disbursement charges, plus a COD charge to collect these new fees, plus tax on these additional fees  etc., etc., etc.. Note that I have no objection to having to pay either import duty when required, or the GST (a Canadian version of VAT) charge the feds in Canada usually tack on, as right, wrong or otherwise that’s just what you have to put up with if you want to live here.  In my specific case, a duty free part valued at $25 for which I paid $23 in packaging, handling and UPS USA shipping, then had $19.23 in additional charges tacked on by UPS Canada, making my $25 duty free part a $67 item. This is of course, the equivelent of being mugged in broad daylight, but I do have to admire their gall as well as their utter smugness in being allowed to get away with it. When I spoke to the UPS Canada customer service folks, I could practically hear them smiling contentedly as they assured me it was all totally legal and that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.  Heck – if I had access to this sort of cash cow, I wouldn’t want to do anything about it either !! 

Bottom line – the experience has made me wonder whether I should consider getting into the small package courier business myself, as I’m thinking that being a legal modern day highwayman could be fun, not to mention lucrative ! I wonder if you get to wear a cutlass and an eye patch ? While I mull over a career change,  I’ll try to specify the use of US and Canadian postal services for anything that I buy from the USA in the future, as they appear to be more interested in getting the mail through than in hitting you over the head and cleaning out your wallet !

I’ve Been Chrome’d !

Like many techno folks, I have been test driving Google’s Chrome browser for much of this past week, and I have to say that I really like it. There has been more than enough press about it as well as much speculation about Google’s motives, what this does to Mozilla, what does it mean for Microsoft, etc. , so I won’t duplicate that here. At the end of the day what interests me personally is:

• Chrome is fast, offering a better Web user experience than Microsoft’s Explorer when accessing modern, open standards and standards based web sites – if you hit a site using proprietary extensions then the results are mixed
• I like that it is Open Source, so I expect Mozilla (which is still receiving funding from Google), Opera and others to adopt some of the features in upcoming releases – Microsoft on the other hand is unlikely to use Google contributed code as they prefer to create or buy their own intellectual property, as that is after all how they make money
• a key point is that Chrome is focused on secure support of web based applications, and of social web applications – the Web 2.0 and 3.0 environment – and as such is positioned for the future rather than committed to supporting the past. This is important as while the internet infrastructure globally is at best marginal to support this model currently, eventually it will be.
• for for a beta solution ( and like pretty much everything else Google offers, it is beta) it is a good technical demonstration of off-line web services capability using Google Gears. Offline capability as demonstrated in Google Reader , Google Docs and Zoho is critical for the web based applications environment generally, but is especially so for the mobility environment – more on this later.
• Chrome will not be installed on most new PC’s and laptops sold globally as they generally come pre-loaded with Microsoft products, so the likelyhood of Chrome and other competing solutions becoming mainstream on the PC platform in the short term is slim at best. The ‘average user’ is generally just going to use what is provided and never know or really care about other options, and although corporate customers may be attracted to lower cost applications delivery options, their freedom of movement is limited by their investment in their legacy applications portfolio.

Considering the last two points, ‘user’ and corporate inertia may not matter in the longer term as the growth area for user compute devices globally is the ultra mobility (the ASUS eee PC for example) and the hand held platform space. The growth of wireless handsets in places like China and India has been amazing (according to India’s TRAI, 8.5 million wireless subscribers were added just in February and the Chinese Ministry of Information recently said there were already 250 million cellular phones in China compared with 140 million in the USA, and China is adding about 6 to 7 million users per month). Although shareholders and corporate managers generally reward short term gain rather than longer term thinking, I suspect that by positioning itself to support the rapidly evolving mobility applications platform, Google may be demonstrating that ‘vision’ thing many people in business like to talk about, but generally don’t actually have. 

For the moment at least, I’m a happy Google Chrome user on my Windows XP box, and I will be installing it on my Linux machines as soon as a native version (and yes I realise that you can run it under wine) becomes readily available. And of course, I’m also looking forward to getting Chrome on a mobile phone whenever one becomes available in Canada – I see T-Mobile plans an Android release later this month, and that Android may eventually include Chrome functionality, so perhaps there will be an offering on this side of the border some time in late 2009 – possibly a good Christmas gift !

Burgundy is Brown ?

It has been the most frustrating past few days – I have spent more than just a few hours trying to figure out what the Suzuki paint code is for the colour I want to paint my GT750 project bike. It had been painted with what looked to be 1978 GS750 colours, and as that fit with my design premise I had planned to go with the same colour scheme. I am wiser now.

I had originally thought it would be fairly simple – the ownership/registration said it was ‘brown’, and the side covers and original tank certainly looked brown, but there was an obvious snag with this – none of the GT750’s were actually ‘brown’ so that meant that the registration must have been changed at some point from the original (whatever that was) when it was re-done in GS750 colours. Unfortunately when you start to dig into things, the colour ‘brown’ actually doesn’t show up on the Suzuki colour listings at all, other than for tape used as tank trim in 1978, although there is a ‘brownish black’ listed in 1983. To add to the confusion, when I look at photos of 1978 GS750 Suzuki’s like the one to the right, at least a few of them certainly do look ‘brownish’, so it was a bit of a puzzle which led me to do more than a few searches on the web to try and solve it.

Although I found several good information sources, they each seemed to be short on some detail – the Ozbook site has a really good list put together by an Rick Best, which is a fantastic bit of work, but focuses on Suzuki 2 strokes between 1968 and 1977, and it doesn’t include trim information and which colour combinations were used on the different models of bikes. Another really great source of information is maintained by Jarmo Haapamaki called Suzuki Cycles and which includes data and photos of almost (I’ll be honest – I personally do not know of one he has missed, but I’m being cautious) every Suzuki ever made. This is a site to bookmark as the photos are invaluable, but again, it misses paint code data in many cases, and also doesn’t show which colour combinations were used in each model, other than via the photos. Most of the on line fiches do not show paint code information, other than on the part numbers themselves, but having just a number and no idea what colour it actually was is not a lot of help. Suzuki part numbers of painted items are in the form 00000-00000-xxx, where the last three places on the right are the colour code. So 291 for example happens to be a semi-gloss black, and a side cover for a 1977 GT750B is part number 47211-31200-291, but just by itself, ‘291′ doesn’t tell you much.

Luckily, this is when I found Alpha Sports and I am most grateful to them – they have put on line the full fiche set for Suzuki all the way back to 1965, and most importantly, unlike most other sites, they have not left out the pages with all of the paint and colour combination information !

So – what I’ve been doing for the past few days, is compiling a spreadsheet with this data which will be available from my GT750 project site this coming weekend. A few words of caution – this is a work in progress, and as such will change. It may (most probably does) have a few errors and it is incomplete as I’ve focused on the models I’m personally interested in between 1972 and 1979 (although I have tried to capture all the models between 1965 and 1971) – I also do not plan to include bikes made after 1983 for the moment, as I’m only interested in ‘vintage’ bikes and I somewhat arbitrarily choose to consider those to be anything over 25 years of age ! I have cross checked it with the data provided by Rick Best on the OZbook site, the cross part reference database from Zedder, the photos in Suzuki Cycles and spot checked against the fiche data on the Power Sport site. The sheet is offered as a PDF – if anyone has data they think should be included, or has a correction they feel I need to make (and has documentation to support it) just let me know via email at oldjapanesebikes (at) shaw (dot) ca.

And the colour for the project bike ? You’ll recall that trying to resolve that puzzle is what started this journey – it turns out that what looks like brown is either a burgundy, colour code 05N or perhaps a maroon colour code 05U or 05L. Now I just have to narrow it down, and then find someone to mix it for me here in Calgary.

Sept 13th update – my first pass at the Suzuki paint code data is now available here.

Deep Creek Tool Museum, and “Hit and Miss” Engines

We were in the Salmon Arm area of British Columbia visiting family this past week, and I had seen a sign for the Deep Creek Tool Museum, between Enderby and Salmon Arm off of highway 97B and I was curious as to what exactly it had to offer. Luckily our wives allowed us a ‘free’ morning one day, so my brother-in-law John and I decided to check it out. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but when we got there, at first glance it appeared to be a private home and attached garage in which the museum was housed. It also had a large “Closed” sign out front, but I decided to ring the door bell anyway just to see if anyone was home, and if so what the museum hours were. I’m glad I did, as we ended up having a great visit and a personal tour !

First of all, this is not your “formal” museum with everything neatly tagged, labelled and hidden away in sterile cases – it is obviously a labour of love and life time hobby by the owner, Herb Higginbottom, who was more than happy to give us a personal tour pointing out the various gems he’d collected. Many of these were in working condition, and I was especially interested in his ‘hit and miss’ engine collection. These simple 4 stroke stationary engines were common between about 1890 through to about 1930, and get their name from the sound they make due to the way they govern their speed. Rather than having a throttle, the exhaust valve is held open and the intake valve stays closed when the engine is at speed – as the engine slows, the exhaust valve starts to actuate, and the engine starts to fire. The intake valve generally is not ‘operated’ in the usual sense, but has a very weak spring which allows the valve to be opened by atmospheric pressure when the cylinder pressure drops following an exhaust stroke. These engines have massive fly wheels to help maintain the engine speed, and which are also used for starting them – open the oiler, adjust the needle valve for the fuel (there is no carburettor), grab the flywheel and give it a spin ! He had one connected to a log splitter which he demonstrated for us and is shown to the upper right.

I suppose I’m not the only one, but I’ll admit I hadn’t ever given much thought to how things were powered before the introduction of electricity – I’d assumed things were either done by hand, or with water wheels or draft animals, so another item I found interesting was the gasoline powered Maytag clothes washer – this one dates from the early 1920’s and is probably a Maytag model 82. The little 2 stroke engine, called a ‘fruit jar’ multi-motor due to the shape of the cylinder, sat underneath the washing basin and was started with a small foot operated pedal. Presumably the exhaust gases were vented outside as otherwise, this would have been a real hazard to operate inside the house due to carbon monoxide fumes !

The garage itself turned out to be stuffed with every kind of imaginable tool dating from the late 1800’s through to present day – many old breast drills, foot operated fret saws, small gasoline powered circular saws and all sorts of hand tools, including the only double ended Crescent wrenches I’ve ever seen. It is an amazing collection and Herb can tell you what each one was created for, and how it was used.

In the future, the museum will be easier to find as Herb is in the process of building an 18 foot high (!!) working reel type lawn mower to sit out front, and may also expand the building so more of the display can be kept under roof.

Bottom line – if you like tools then this is the place. We managed to quickly spend a couple of hours and could have gladly stayed longer ! If you are in the area , give it a look see – recommended.