Finally getting back onto my longest running project. Like most of my stuff, its old and needing more investment than it will ever be worth, but represents an epoch of my life that I never want to forget. I’m sure I’ve put a few photos of it up on here over the years, but I don’t think ever started a thread dedicated to it, so here goes.
I’ve had it since 1990 or 91. I also knew both previous owners, one of which is deceased. It’s stared in a lot of stories over the past 34 years including being stolen, drag raced, road raced, used as a daily driver and it’s been in 4 countries if I count Japan. I recall I got it with about 30,000KM on it and removed the pod around the 90,000KM mark.
It looked like this when I got it (not mine)
Then it aged (a lot) so it was chromed up and painted to look like this for a few years
Then I got bored of it, tore it apart and started changing everything
I shot it yellow in 2010, dropped the motor in, wired it and got into dirt bikes. Fortunately I purchased almost everything needed to finish the bike 7 years ago and looking at prices and availability now I’m glad I did. Still kudos to Suzuki for still carrying a lot of parts for these old beasts. I raked the frame to just shy of 37 degrees, did some gusseting and frame notching to fit a 4130 swing-arm custom made by the now retired John Trutnau that utilizes a 6” GSXR wheel and installed custom made bearings from some Russian guy to allow a 2004 GSXR 1000 front end and steering damper. A bunch of other tweaks were made to get the GSXR wheel to align with the counter sprocket and clear the chain. Forks have been lengthened .375” and a set of Traxxion Dynamics springs that can handle the extra 150 pounds this thing has on the GSXR.
The motor is a 1327cc with a every possible modification needed to reliably drag race it, but the compression has been lowered to run on pump gas. It has an oil cooler, but heat will still be its biggest enemy if I ever run into traffic while going for breakfast tacos.
The plastic had a lot of layers of primer, paint and clear on them, so a lot of sanding is needed. The stock tank had some bad dents and had started to rust, so I picked up what looked like a perfect replacement, but the clear was so thick I could sand through it, so I stripped it and as feared there was some Bondo underneath.
So it sits like this, but I expect to have it completed before summer
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Originally Posted by tripledog
