The 1974 GT550

Some time ago, I picked up a 1974 GT550 which came to me with the engine stuck. As a part of the deal, I also was given two donor bikes of the same model, but different years. Basically, the bike was complete, and just looked too good to pass over even though the cost to repair was probably going to be more than its value. As I did with my GT750 project, I’ve started a web site to capture additional details as the repair work on this GT550 progresses.

As was often the case, the donor bikes had been left outside with the carbs and exhaust pipes removed, so water, snow and whatever was blowing by had made their way into the engine cylinders and they were solidly stuck and not looking very good at all – as per the photo to the left.  After letting the engines soak for several weeks with penetrating oil,  I pulled them apart to see what could be saved, Interestingly, both donor engines appear to have failed due to holed pistons, so naturally I was curious whether the project GT550 had the same problem. As well, I had been told that this model of Suzuki had a fragile starter, but when I pulled these apart both donor bikes showed no sign at all of problems. One of them even still had its starter motor fitted, and when I’d pulled it out, I tried it with a power source, and it spun freely.

At the end of the day, I had about one and a half engines with serviceable bits and pieces suitable as spares – one actually had a set of first over pistons which are quite rare to find now. The barrels were in rough shape, but at least could possibly be bored out, and one set of engine side covers were worth keeping    

The next step was to strip down the project bike and see what its problem was. As it turned out, it had more than one. Once the head was off I was initially relieved to not see any holes in the pistons, however the centre cylinder had a lot of small metal particles on the top of the piston as well as in the exhaust port, and once the barrels had been pulled off it was clear where they had come from per the photos below left and centre. The centre piston’s gudgeon pin had snapped, and then the piston had essentially self destructed. The bits falling down from the broken piston were lodged between the crank throws and the case which was why the engine wouldn’t turn over. As well, when I pulled off the clutch basket, the starter clutch assembly basically fall apart as the centre boss had come completely apart. In the photo below to the right, you can see the broken one to the left, and what it’s supposed to look like to the right.   

Suzuki completely redesigned the starter clutch assembly in 1975, the year after my bike was built and obviously the updated version had never been installed.  The service bulletin which details the changes and new part numbers is GT-26, dated August 15, 1975 and a copy can be found here. I have two ‘good’ old style starter clutch assemblies from the donor bikes as neither of them had been updated either,  but I wasn’t too happy with doing this as I could reasonably expect the same failure mode again at some point – and as I was putting this on the road for my wife, I doubt she would be impressed if it quit working !

I am looking to see whether I can track down a new style starter clutch assembly and we’ll see what happens. At the moment, I’m waiting on parts, seals and gaskets before I start to put the engine back together

Windjammer

Every once and a while, you get pleasantly surprised by the unexpected kindness of a stranger – and even less often by someone who has a ‘name’ in the business world. This happened to me recently when I went looking for some parts and pieces to refit my Vetter Windjammer IV for one of my GT750 Suzuki’s.

Back in 1973 when we married, in addition to my newly wed wife, I must admit that I also lusted over what was then the Rolls Royce of motorcycle fairings made by an outfit in the US owned by a guy called Craig Vetter. Back then, motorcycle manufacturers generally did not provide much of anything  other than the actual motorcycle, and there was a good sized aftermarket industry to provide windscreens and pannier bags. Initially this accessories market, with the exception of Harley Davidson accessories, was based in Europe, but as nice people started to meet each other on Honda’s in the US (still, I think, one of the most clever advertising angles invented) there gradually grew a market for similar hardware in the USA and Canada.  Prior to Craig Vetter developing his line of aerodynamically styled  fairings, much of what was on offer was somewhat flimsy, rattled a lot, often looked like an after thought, didn’t really offer much in the way of weather protection and usually did not offer any storage capacity – the Windjammer in contrast was solidly built, solidly attached, provided good weather protection and lots of storage and really looked good. In 1974 when I bought my first new bike, a Suzuki GT750, as can be imagined I immediately (well almost immediately – it took a few months to scrape together enough money to pay for it) went to get a Vetter fairing for it – the model was called a Windjammer II.

To say that I was in heaven once I had the fairing mounted on that bike would be an understatement – it was in many respects a dream come true as it made such a difference when riding it.  Fast forward a few years, and most motorcycle manufacturers woke up to the idea that they could build and sell their own lines of fairings, bags and fittings and while imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery, together with changing tastes of motorcycle owners, they basically killed the after market industry for this sort of accessory. The Vetter product line eventually ceased production in 1985. Craig Vetter had actually sold his business in 1978, but has continued to be involved with motorcycle design and various projects including mileage competitions to this day. He was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999, and if you follow the link there is a good bio of him and his design accomplishments.  

Returning to that 1974 motorcycle – my pride and joy was actually stolen in the fall of 1974, and while I went on to own other bikes and makes and models of fairings I always thought that Suzuki GT750 with its Windjammer fairing looked the best of any that I came to own. When I picked up another Suzuki GT750 in 1986, as may be expected, one of the first things I did was track down and install a Windjammer fairing, although by that time new parts to fit the Suzuki could not be ordered and I actually had to make my own mounting hardware.  

So here it is 35 years after my first Windjammer purchase.  If you check eBay, there is still a very active market for these accessories, and you regularly can see various Windjammer models for sale, as well the the matching Vetter carrier bags together with mounting hardware. The internet and I suppose specifically eBay has provided an easy way to eventually locate almost all the bits you need to put a set together. As I recently dug around the internet looking for parts to refurbish my Vetter fairing, I was pleasantly surprised to find that after all this time Craig Vetter himself is still providing some limited support for his creations in the form of advice, replacement trim pieces and hardware. Better still – he and his wife Carol will actually cheerfully respond in person to queries and requests, and he even sent me a photo of himself on a 1972 GT750 with one of his fairings mounted on it ! You could have knocked me over with a feather, I was that surprised, as this sort of business behaviour is such a welcome contrast to so many other businesses that I deal with these days.  

Personal responses, cheerful advice and friendly service – that’s a precious thing in this day and age, and perhaps a small part of why Vetter fairings are still as sought after as they were 35 years ago. Of course, the fact they still look fantastic must also have a bit to do with it !

Getting Organised – continued

Life is never simple is it ?

Following along after my last post, I was just finalising my upload to the Amazon S3 storage, and then had planned to update the removable hard drive we keep in a safety deposit box, but I first decided to take a few minutes and do a bit of spot checking. In this case, the ‘few minutes’ turned into a few days …….. 

As I checked through the photo files I noticed that here and there – not very often, but often enough to be annoying – the thumbnail view of the photo files was not being displayed. I have seen this before, and if you Google this problem you’ll find that it is a commonly known Microsoft feature. In the past I’ve typically just refreshed the file from one of my other backups and continued on. However this time, I happened to try and open a few photos on either side of files which were missing the thumbnail view and found a new problem – here and there although the thumbnail of the photo looked fine, when I tried to actually open the file there was either no valid JPG file there, or the file opened as a black screen. The result varied with the tool that I used to open the file.

I reached for my bottle of antacids, as this was not good at all.

Everyone knows hardware will fail – that’s just a given as stuff does just wear out and frankly you are a fool if you don’t plan for it, but a search of the web showed that, as for the missing thumbnails, file corruption is also a fairly common problem for which the most common connection is the use of Microsoft products. In fairness given the percentage of the market Microsoft  successfully controls this is not surprising, and it could happen with any vendor’s software – it just doesn’t make it any less annoying.  

I’ve done much Googling for possible solutions, but have not found anything that I would call a definitive answer, although file transfers for USB devices and file transfers in general do seem to be a common issue area. In my own case I suspect that my problems may have started around XP SP1 time as there were some reported driver related issues, and I just had not noticed. Vista users seem to have had this sort of problem a lot, giving me even more incentive to not use that product and its related applications, but at the same time I’m not convinced either MAC or Linux based solutions would be trouble free either as it is all software, so by my definition can’t really be trusted. What I have done is gone back to basics, and double checked that I have all the XP patches and applications updates, plus as per a few suggestions I happened across, I have also updated the firmware on the ASUS motherboard of my XP machine. While I was at it, just for good measure I also updated the firmware on my D-Link DNS-323 home server as a number of incompatibilities with this device were flagged when Vista was released. Doing firmware updates to otherwise working hardware is generally something I try to avoid as you can create more trouble than you solve. In this instance although I’m not using Vista, it wasn’t clear to me whether Vista ‘features’ may not have been introduced to XP with the later SP2 and SP3 XP updates, which may then also have possibly introduced similar Vista file corruption problems to my XP platform.

I have spent a lot of time this past couple of days, doing file transfer tests and I can’t reproduce the problem so for the moment at least it is on ‘monitor’. On top of the testing, I have also spent many, many hours going through my full digital photo collection accumulated over the past 10 years, and at the end of doing so have determined that about 15,000 or 25% of the photos were suspect or had been trashed ! I have been able to recover these files from other backups (I’ll admit that I am anal about backups), and then have reloaded these back into my Amazon S3 storage space.

When you consider the digital age we live in, and increasingly the many years of photos and fond memories that exist only as bits either on a local hard drive or as bits kept somewhere else, it is sobering to consider ones digital past could so easily disappear due to a glitch, be it either software or hardware related. Following this experience, my suggestion to anyone out there who is using either XP, Vista or frankly anything else, and who thinks that their photos are all safely stored on either a local, removable or network hard drive, CD or DVD should perhaps take a look at them and do some in depth checking. You may be surprised, and not in a nice way. In the meantime, I’m going to restock my supply of antacids …….

Getting Organised

Well it isn’t even close to being Spring, but it was time to do some hard drive cleanup, so I’ve spent the past few days sorting through the hard drives of my in-home server, backups and the machine I use for photo editing and video processing. As I wrote here last year,  I have been using the Amazon S3 service as an off-site place to store my photos and I use Bucket Explorer as the front end/user interface. The combination works incredibly well, and so when my brother-in-law John was asking about what off-site storage option he should consider for his several thousands of photos, I had no trouble recommending it to him as an option to explore.

John is the same fellow whom I convinced to by an iMac, as he really wanted to just use a computer rather than have to figure out how it worked, and he has been very pleased with it. I am still running Microsoft’s XP for photo work only because I’ve invested time learning Microsoft Digital Image 10 suite for processing my photos, which is similar to iPhoto on the Mac, and I am comfortable using it. Sadly, Digital Image Pro 10 has been dropped as a standalone product by Microsoft, although some of its elements have since been merged into Vista. While I suppose I could change out XP for Vista, (and I actually do have a couple of copies of Vista sitting in boxes unopened)  based on my experience while working on the pilot to deploy Vista in Shell, it would frankly seem more like a down grade from XP rather than an improvement.  I suppose I’ll either have to wait for Vista’s replacement called Windows 7 to be released  and look at it then (actually not till after at least its first service pack is released of course), or perhaps move fully over to Ubuntu’s version of Linux which is what I have running on most of my other machines – or just buy a Mac and not have to mess around as much as you do with Windows products. We’ll see what happens.   

As I started into the disc cleanup, it became quickly obvious that I needed something that would allow me to easily check folders and files for duplications and differences in file size, content, etc. I wanted to be able to ensure the photos were sorted, and at the same time be certain that none of the versions of the photos were lost or possibly over written due to having the same file name and yet be different in some way (colour corrected copies, cropped or scaled copies etc).  There are quite a few utilities available to help you manage these sorts of issues, and it is disappointing that something isn’t built into the MSWindows OS as it is a fairly basic requirement. After doing some checking around, I decided to try  a freeware product called WinMerge, and I have to admit I really like it. It sort of reminds me of another utility I used many years ago called F31, although it is much more sophisticated. You can do light weight comparisons based on just date and size, or more extensive binary file comparisons to determine differences in files sharing the same name, and then synchronising the contents of the directories is a snap. Quite useful.

As I type this, I’m just waiting for my updated photo library uploads into Amazon’s S3 environment to complete, then I’ll refresh the copy that I keep on a removable hard drive which I keep stored in our safety deposit box after which I’ll be ready to start on my next little project – scanning and storing my slides, negatives, family films and also a few audio cassette tapes that my grandparents made for us as children.  As they are long gone these many years, it is nice to still be able to listen to them once and a while – and ideally I’ll get the tapes converted before it becomes impossible to find a way to play them !  

I expect this will keep me busy for a little while …….