“Hi everyone. My name is Steve, and I own a GR.”

There is no “GR Owners Anonymous”, but if there were, I’d be a member. It pains me to admit that I’m addicted to a sad and sorry lump of rusty steel and pitted aluminium alloy, but it’s the truth. I admit it, I can’t live without my GR. I have a problem. I guess that’s one step down. Only eleven to go.

A Suzuki what?

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, I’d never even heard of a GR650 before I picked up a copy of Australian Road Rider magazine. It was included in their list of “25 bikes you must ride before you die”. At the time, I thought that it was a bit odd that something described as a “parking inspector’s bike” was included with such exotica as a 750SS Green Frame and a BSA Gold Star. Then again, a CD250U and a Spacey scooter-rooter were also on the list, so I figured the editor was either a complete tosser or whacked out of his tree on some pretty hard-core drugs (or both) and promptly forgot all about it.

A couple of months later I was discussing motorcycles with a colleague and he mentioned that he owned a GR. It had been rotting under his house for five years and he was never going to get around to reviving it now that he had a young family. Did I want it? I asked him what the hell it was and he provided a few basic details: 650cc parallel twin, 200kg, 40bhp, 15 years old, 95,000 kilometres, advanced state of decay. Originally a Melbourne parking inspector’s bike, many owners since then, very used, much abused, crashed frequently. Charming!

What a piece of crap!

“Nah”, I thought. “Sounds like a piece of crap”. Talk about being right first time! If one could only use three words to describe this bike, “piece of crap” would sum it up perfectly.

That said, many years ago and in a fit of youthful and drunken stupidity I turned down trading a carton of beer for a VT250 (minor crash damage only), which I have regretted ever since. I wasn’t too keen on the GR and I already had two bikes, but there was plenty of room under my Hovel and even in the worst case I could let it rot just as easily as Simon could.

I ummed and ahhed for a while, but eventually I went out to Simon’s place, looked the thing over and started checking everything I could think of. Most of the mechanical bits seemed reasonably OK, so I worked out a rough restoration budget on the back of an envelope and offered him two hundred bucks. He only wanted a hundred for it. We split the difference and settled on $150, with free delivery thrown in.

When it arrived on the back of a trailer I was a bit depressed. In the cold sober light of day, it wasn’t all that impressive. It had originally been white and red, but time and neglect had taken their toll. Every alloy surface was corroded and dull. The tyres were still round and black, but they were cracked and perished. The intermediate pipes, balance pipe and both mufflers were completely rusted out. The sprocket teeth were worn razor sharp and several had their tips broken off. The tank was scratched and dented, there was surface rust everywhere and the front brake master cylinder was corroded beyond repair. I’d paid $150 for this piece of crap? I must be off my trolley! I pushed it right up to the back of the dusty hole under the Hovel and tried to forget about it.

The thing was, it looked so easy to get running. All it needed was fresh oil, new sparkplugs, fuel and a battery. Everything was right there, and it was still in one piece. How hard could it be?

Rust, rats and fuel residue

Simon had made an involuntary contribution to the State Treasury for excessive noise (the rusted-out mufflers) and rather than fix the bike he’d just parked it and walked away. He hadn’t prepared it for storage at all, which made things interesting for me. All the fuel in the carburettors had evaporated, leaving behind a lovely red powder gumming up all the delicate internals. Added to which, they were full of dust, wasp’s nests and the odd chunk of air filter foam. So the carbies had to be removed and cleaned. Yeah, OK, big deal, I was expecting that.

When I removed the airbox to get to the carbies, I found the source of that funny smell. Rats. Not actually present “in rodent”, but only recently departed. The airbox was a rat’s idea of home sweet home, tastefully furnished with gum leaves, bits of chewed-up air filter and plenty of rat turds that looked like chocolate-coated raisins (although they didn’t taste the same). Going by the size of the turds, these rats must’ve been the rodent equivalent of King Kong. Not only had they crapped everywhere, they’d also been busy sharpening their teeth. Strategically placed extra holes in an airbox have been known to improve performance, but rats are not usually tuning experts. Besides, the whole thing stank of rat piss and I didn’t really feel like cleaning it out. I chucked the airbox in the bin and went forth in search of pod filters. (Surprise expense #1)


As with the carburetors, the fuel in the tank had also evaporated, but it hadn’t quite reached the dry powder stage yet. It was more a sort of red-orange gel. The orange part was ferrous oxide from… yes, you guessed it, the tank was rusted out. Not underneath (where I had closely inspected before taking delivery), but on the side, behind the “Suzuki” badges where water had been trapped over the years. Joy. Off to the radiator shop to get it cut out and welded up. (Surprise expense #2)

When I got the tank back I ripped out the fuel float and sender (who needs a fuel gauge on a motorcycle anyway?) and rebuilt the fuel tap. It was so stiff I needed pliers to turn it, but after being disassembled and cleaned it was much easier to operate.

I also treated the inside of the tank with a Kreem kit – basically an acid etch to remove all the surface rust inside the tank followed by a polymer coating to protect the etched surface. This worked surprisingly well. Often, rust is all that’s holding an old fuel tank together, but apart from the holes under the badges, the GR’s tank proved to be as sound as a bell.

Thick Black Sludge

Oil wasn’t much of a problem. I whipped off the drain plug, prodded the black goop inside with a screwdriver and waited a couple of days until it stopped oozing out. I don’t think I got was all of it, but the rest was happy where it was, and I wasn’t prepared to open up the sump and scrape it out. When I changed the oil filter, the inside the filter housing actually had sand in it. That prompted a panic inspection of the cam lobes to ensure that they weren’t worn circular.

Upon removal of the rocker cover, I discovered something interesting and rather worrying. The rocker cover gasket was still present and intact, but a previous abuser had given it some sealing assistance by coating it liberally with Silastic. That probably explained the grit in the filter, but it didn’t make me much happier. Silastic and infernal combustion engines don’t mix well, and there were plenty of places those little grains of destruction could have caused trouble. Anyway, the cam lobes looked fine, so I ripped off the Silastic and replaced the rocker cover feeling slightly relieved. A new filter, a couple of litres of fresh slippery in the sump, a couple of tablespoons in each spark plug hole and the engine turned over by hand with ease.

E-Lek-Trickery

I fully expected the battery to be cactus, and indeed it was. Not a single spark of life anywhere. No worries, I started wiring up another battery, but I didn’t get very far. Yes, another problem, thanks to the rats again. Not only had they chewed up the plastic airbox, they’d also been busy gnawing on the multicoloured plastic and copper spaghetti. Where the wires weren’t chewed right through, they were partially chewed or had their insulation stripped off. Short-circuit city.

I'd be the first to admit that I'm not the most skillfullerest person I know when it comes to electricity and the various devices that are associated with it. (I ain't so real crash hot with grammar, either!) Over time I have, however, developed my own theories of electricity through close observation and repeated electrocution. Electricity is a form of smoke that lives in wires and bites people. If you get too close to the smoke, you get bitten. If you let the smoke out of any electrical or electronic component, it won’t work anymore unless you put all the smoke back in. This is almost impossible, so it’s easier to replace the component with one that still has all it’s smoke. In addition, I firmly believe that multimeters are totally inaccurate and superfluous, and all electrical troubleshooting is more successful (and “stimulating”, in all senses of the word) when it’s done by trial and error. Trust me!

Anyway, I bought a spool of wire from the hardware shop (Surprise expense #3) and started to replace bits of the loom. Much to my surprise, I found I was better at it than Suzuki – I mean, they’d used all different colours which clashed horribly, whereas my rework was all in red. Much more aesthetically pleasing, and because it was red it would make the bike go faster. I even made a proper job of the connections – stripping the insulation off the ends of the wires, twisting them together and wrapping them up with tape. No, it wasn’t electrical tape. It was grey PVC tape. I found a roll of it on the side of the road. Hey, my budget was starting to look a bit sad after all these surprise expenses, so I wasn’t going to fork out a couple of dollars for a roll of actual electrical tape!

(As an aside, after more than a year of riding the GR around, I had an embarrassing smoke-escape incident on another bike and delved into the GR’s fuse box in search of a spare 10A fuse. Much to my surprise, I discovered that a thoughtful previous owner had replaced all the stock 10A and 15A fuses with 30A items. No wonder I didn’t blow any fuses during the weekend when I was busily shorting out the electrical system every three minutes! I have since adopted this fuse arrangement in all my other bikes as well)

Eventually I got the wiring loom bodgied back together such that a battery could be connected without loud snapping noises, showers of sparks and the gentle waft of ozone. I could even turn the key and get the idiot lights to come on! A major achievement for an idiot like me! Making the brake lights and indicators do their thing was a tad more problematic, but I got there in the end. In true engineer fashion, I discovered about half a dozen wires that seemed to go nowhere and do nothing. This seems fairly normal – after all, whenever I reassemble anything I’m left with an assortment of odd bits that don’t fit anywhere and whatever I’ve been working on always seems to work just fine without them. I’ve got a couple of packing cases somewhere which are full of spare bits from things I’ve pulled apart over the years. Anyway, after careful consideration, I just covered the ends of these spare wires with PVC tape and left them where they were. I am slightly annoyed though, because if I’d identified these wires at the beginning of the operation and removed them, I could have used them to patch up the rat damage and I probably wouldn’t have needed to buy any wire at all! Ah well, there’s no sense in crying over missed opportunities to save money.

Now I had the fuel system sorted, fresh oil and a working electrical system it was time to get the bike running. Well, that was the idea. In fact, the starter motor was too weak to turn the engine over. I could have pulled out the starter motor and tried to fix it, but I was getting sick of all these surprise expenses. I had to resort to Plan B: the push start.

Brakes? Who needs brakes?

Push starting a bike with an 8.5:1 compression ratio isn’t hard, but after the engine is running you have to stop somehow, especially when your nice quiet sidestreet ends in a T-junction with a busy urban arterial road. The GR's front master cylinder, however, was badly corroded and completely shot. After about half a nanosecond of deep thought I decided that I didn’t particularly feel like riding a bike with no front brake across four lanes of incompetent psychos driving steel boxes. Time to visit my friendly motorcycle wreckers again. I spent a whole day looking through various wreckers and wiggling brake levers, and eventually I found an old battered 5/8” master cylinder with a broken-off lever that didn’t even look good enough for scrap. It didn’t have a brand name stamped on it anywhere and it was covered in scratches and peeling black paint. I have no idea what it came from or how old it is. It doesn’t look terribly impressive, but some kind soul replaced all the internal seals and now it works extremely well. When I filled it up under the tap at the wreckers it would squirt water all the way across the workshop. None of the other master cylinders in the bin could even manage half that distance.

Anyway, I pulled the front brake caliper apart and re-greased everything. The brake pads still had plenty of wear left, so I “saved” a bit of money and decided to see how they worked (fine, as it turned out. They’re still on there). As a rule, I run braided steel brake lines on all my bikes, but the original rubber line was in decent condition and my budget was hurting. I decided to give the rubber a try, but I didn’t expect much from it except perhaps a nice solid “thunk” when it hit the back of the bin after I’d chucked it away in disgust. I bolted the whole lot back together with the new master cylinder, poured in some fresh brake fluid and bled the air out of the lines. The end result was a huge surprise. GRs have a poxy little single front disk with an ancient single-piston Aisin caliper. The braking technology is from the dark ages, but when combined with the larger-diameter master cylinder (stock is 14mm, the replacement is 5/8”, roughly 16mm), the whole system is transformed. Obviously, it’s not in the same league as a modern twin-disc setup, but it’s amazing for what it is. There’s plenty of initial bite without being grabby, and locking the front wheel is easy with two fingers and a firm squeeze on the lever. There’s very little lever travel due to the larger master cylinder, which I like, but the feel is just a tad wooden, which I don’t. The rubber line and prehistoric pads don't help, but it’s only really a problem for weirdos like me. I have a real fetish about brakes. I really enjoy peeling my eyeballs off the helmet visor at every set of traffic lights. I go through plenty of brake pads and lots of front tyres, but I have fun! The rear drum is… well, it’s a drum brake. It provides gentle, progressive retardation, which is all a rear brake is there for anyway. Nothing special, but it works just fine, the shoes have plenty of meat on them and the bike doesn’t need anything better. I’m more than happy with the brakes.

“We have ignition!”

I pushed the bike up to the end of the street and started bump-starting it. It took forever, but eventually we had ignition and plenty of noise, smoke and cheering. Nothing sounds quite as sweet as a bike you’ve laboured over firing up for the first time. It was great. I put it up on the centrestand in the middle of the backyard and revved it up, grinning like a lunatic. Not for too long, though, because I didn’t want to start bleeding from the ears. Did I mention the rusted-out mufflers? This thing was LOUD. I stopped wondering why Simon got the “excessive noise” ticket and started wondering how he had ridden it further than around the block without rupturing his eardrums.

I rode it around in a private car park and reassured myself that yes, everything worked as well as could be expected. A compression test showed 110psi in the left-hand pot and 100psi in the right. Not the best result, (minimum GR compression is 128psi) but about what I would expect for a $150 bike. A couple of mates had a ride and then spent 15 minutes searching for the hinge in the middle of the frame. They shook their head in disbelief when they watched me get about a foot of air over a couple of those really big flat-topped speed bumps at 80km/hr. The suspension bottomed out with a huge bang on landing, but the bike took it surprisingly well. It’s one tough piece of hardware.

“To love and to destroy”

By this stage of the “restoration” the GR was starting to grow on me (just like a brain tumour, really). I dubbed her “Project Shitbox” and resolved to keep, love, cherish and thrash the crap out of her until she was past any hope of revival. She may be crusty and rusty, but she can (just) pull my fat bum up the hills from A to B, and nobody in their right mind would ever steal her. The soft suspension and ample ground clearance make her perfect for running over potholes, gutters, speedbumps, cats and other urban obstacles. She’s a super commuter, a feral-urban-terrorist-bike- from-hell, a trusty workhorse and a general all-purpose thrash machine, all rolled into one. The perfect steed to use and abuse. Everyone should have one!

Exhausting!

I knew the rusted-out mufflers would probably need to be rebuilt, but after the budget overruns to date I hoped that they could be revived with the generous application of muffler putty. Sadly, it was not to be. I used two tins of putty plugging up all the holes, but as soon as I fired up the old girl, she blew lots of new holes through the rust and sent big lumps of putty flying all over the garage. I surrendered to the inevitable and admitted that I needed specialist help (with the mufflers, I mean).

I took the pipes to an exhaust shop just around the corner where they laughed and told me they weren’t worth fixing. Well, I knew that! The whole bike wasn’t worth fixing, but that didn’t stop me! They gave me a quote to have copies of the mufflers made up and it was double what I had budgeted to revive the old mufflers (Surprise expense #4). I got quotes on second-hand muffs, but custom-made was the cheaper option by a long shot, so I proceeded to hand over big wads of cash. I should have had a bit more of a think about what I was doing before having the new mufflers made up, but I don’t think much at the best of times. The mufflers that were on the bike when I bought her were apparently from a Plastic Maggot (Honda CX500), and they’re longer than the original Suzuki items. If I’d shaken off the hangover, opened my eyes and actually looked at the mufflers, I would have seen that they had to be removed before I could take off the rear wheel. The new ones are the same length, so they have the same problem. Bummer.

The new mufflers are works of art. In fact, they’re almost too good to put on a wreck like Project Shitbox. Almost. They’re long, they’re graceful, and when they’re not covered with grime, they’re shiny. Undoubtedly, they are the bike’s best feature. Each muffler has two stainless steel baffle inserts that can be removed to increase flow and volume, so they’re effectively three mufflers in one. The intermediate pipes and balance pipe are also stainless, but the header pipes are the double-skinned mild steel Maggot bits that came with the bike. They were in pretty good shape, so it wasn’t worth having new headers bent up. I gave them a quick coat of VHT matte black paint to stop them rusting, with moderate success. They're still rusting, but now they're doing it under paint. Out of sight, out of mind. The new exhaust note was exactly what I wanted. The bike is definitely a 650, but a quiet one. A nice deep thump, but at low volume. Just what the doctor ordered.

Also available in baby-poop brown at no extra cost

The paint looked a bit sad after sitting under Simon’s house for so long, so I stripped the tank down, bogged up the dents, sanded back the sidepanels and painted everything maroon. I wasn’t as thorough with my prep work as I should have been, so the finished surface was rougher than I’d like. It’s not the best paintjob in the world, but when I was finished the bike looked better than she did when I started. I call it a success. Everyone else calls it an eyesore.

The beauty of a bike like Project Shitbox is that when I get bored with the colour, it costs me very little to buy a couple of spray cans and give the tank and sidecovers a quick squirt. The colour scheme suggestions from friends, family and cow-workers have been many and varied. Cack black is always a popular suggestion (and very tempting), as is fluro pink, undercoat grey and eyeball-searing orange. Or possibly a mix. All the colours of the rainbow, blended into each other from front to back. A flame job. Go-faster stripes. Graffiti. Murals. The possibilities are endless.

I also replaced the tyres, chain and sprockets, which chewed up what was left of the budget and a bit more besides. Big dollars (relatively – this is a $150 bike we’re talking about, remember?), little worth commenting on.

Legal at last!

I expected a lot of hassle getting the old girl registered, but the process was surprisingly easy. The only pain was of the financial variety, not just because of the various fees and charges, but also because I had to have the starter motor fixed (Surprise expense #5) to get a roadworthy certificate. The credit card whimpered in pain, but the bills were paid, the paperwork was processed and Project Shitbox was finally let loose on an unsuspecting public to cause mayhem and destruction. She may have been over budget, but she was officially safe and legal to ride. Success!

Counting the cost

After all the surprise expenses and budget overruns, I expected a final bill larger than the national debt, but the bottom line wasn’t too bad. I had budgeted roughly $1500 for the restoration, including the initial cost of the bike and the fees and charges for registration. The final cost amounted to just under $1800, about $300 over budget. I was able to save money in a couple of areas, which kept the cost down.

$1800 is well over market value for a cruddy old GR, but I’ve also made savings in other ways. The resurrection kept me busy and off the streets for a few months, in which time I spent less on alcohol and illicit drugs than I usually do. Having Project Shitbox in my garage dramatically reduces wear and tear on my other bikes (which are actually worth something) because she gets used for all the short, high-wear trips to and from work and around town. I used to ride my 250 on short trips, but since the GR has arrived I’ve been able to take the smaller bike off the road and do some work on it, which led to me finally fixing the mystery fault that was causing it to eat starter clutches on a regular basis (at more than $300 a munch).

I’ve definitely spent more on Project Shitbox than she is worth, but I’ve saved a bit of money in other areas, had an incredible amount of fun and jumped a lot of speedbumps and gutters. I’ve met an intriguing assortment of skilled and helpful people who have taught me so much, done a lot of work for not much money and given me innumerable pieces of good advice (usually “Are you still wasting your time on that heap of crap? Throw it away!”). I’ve learned all about undoing frozen bolts and freeing seized nuts. I’ve skinned my knuckles, jammed fingers where no fingers were intended to go and screamed enough swearwords to make a wharfie blush. I’ve discovered first-hand why $2 spanners are so cheap and so expensive at the same time. I’ve learned the true value of a rusty, battered Sidchrome that has outlasted three previous owners and will see my grandkids into the grave unless someone steals it between then and now. None of these things show up on a balance sheet, but they’re real, significant and invaluable. I find it amusing that so much priceless experience and enjoyment has come from something that is widely regarded as being completely worthless.

Still going strong!

At time of writing, Project Shitbox has clocked up about 105,000km of abuse (~10,000km of that in the hands of Yours Very Bodgily) and is still going strong. She uses a bit of oil, some of which leaks out in liquid form but most of it goes past the rings, into smoke and down the left-hand pipe to freedom. Apart from smoking, her hobbies include pinging, backfiring and fouling plugs regularly. She runs very well when she’s cold, and very badly when she’s hot. She starts well when she's cold and very well when she's hot. She doesn't have a choke anymore, and doesn't need it, even during 0°C starts on winter mornings. She’s happiest without much oil and runs beautifully smoothly with less than half a litre in the sump (capacity is 2.4l). I feel guilty when I feed her more slippery stuff, but it must be done occasionally. Even a bike as tough as this one needs some lubrication. According to someone with first-hand experience, a Toyota Crown will run flat-out without oil or water for 15 minutes before it goes pop. I imagine that Project Shitbox could at least match that and possibly even beat it, but I have no intention of finding out.

A few things have gone wrong, but nothing major:

• She's only conked out and left me sitting on the side of the road once (vacuum hose dropped off the fuel tap) and  I was able to get her going again within a couple of minutes and with only minor burns from the hot rocker cover.
• I’ve been left stranded by a fouled plug on only one occasion. We have limped home on one cylinder a few times, but we always got there eventually.
• The fuel tap is getting stiff again, but I can still turn it by hand so it's not a huge issue.
• The engine leaked oil from every gasket, seal, orifice and thread until I found and removed the blockage in the crankcase breather. Now it only leaks from a few places, mainly the rocker cover gasket, the gearbox selector shaft seal and the tacho cable housing. No biggie, bikes should leak a bit of oil. It proves there's some in there. I'd rather have oil leaking out than anything outside leaking in.
• The speedo packed it in with 98,511.4km showing on the dial, which infuriated me more than somewhat. I’d really been looking forward to seeing it do a lap and come up all zeros. Thank you very much to the clowns at Hammamatsu for using a plastic worm gear in the GR speedo drive. You must have known it would flog out in time, but you did it anyway. Bad karma to you all. May the rats of a thousand airboxes piss in your sake. I found a replacement speedo (with a metal worm gear) at the wreckers that worked perfectly when I installed it, but it stopped soon afterwards. A second replacement is currently working perfectly, although going by past performance it should die any day now.
• Both the tacho and speedo cables snapped for no apparent reason, at around the same time.
• The reconditioned starter motor is on the way out. It can't be the brushes this time, which means the commutator has finally worn down to nothing. Time for another starter motor, price approximately three times the book value of the bike. Alternatively, I could just keep pushing.

           

Al and the crew at Al’s Bikes and Bits, Albion
Rob & Co. at Tyres 4 Bikes, Albion
Al and Alex, formerly at All Cycles, Gympie
Mike at Carline Mufflers, Gympie
Paul at Cooloola Sheet Metal, Gympie