1999 Suzuki SV650

Update your progress on your various car projects.

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markss327
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Post by markss327 »

When I had my '83 Suzy GS1100, I used 90w gear oil on the chain. The thought process behind that was, thicker oil, stayed on longer.
Every 100 miles. If memory serves, me it was a #630 O ring chain. It was a constant battle, oil the chain, clean the wheel.
I sold the bike in '96, with 32k miles. Original chain and sprockets.
-Mark
2012 Impala LT 3.6 VVTDI
300hp - a bit much for FWD!
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TireSmoker
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Post by TireSmoker »

Wow, 32k miles from chain and sprockets? I've seen people saying 20k is a good life expectancy for a chain.

The original chain on the bike when I bought definitely had some stiff links in, and it only had 15k on it when I replaced them. Usually after a long ride, I try to spray the chain down a bit with WD40, clean off any gunk, and then re-spray it with DuPont multi-purpose teflon lube. I've got about 6k on the new chain and sprockets, and so far -- so good. Chain still looks new after cleaning.

-Dave
markss327
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Post by markss327 »

Yea, and considering it was rated at 96hp!!!!
I can remember quite vividly, 55, 85 and 105mph = 9500rpm redline in 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively.
Along with the original chain, it also had the original clutch too. "Never abused, just exercised and maintained" :shock:
I had replaced the rear tire twice, and the front one, once. Also, a set of brakes.
-Mark
2012 Impala LT 3.6 VVTDI
300hp - a bit much for FWD!
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TireSmoker
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Post by TireSmoker »

21,222 miles.

Two new Continental Road Attacks to replace the completely worn rear and well-worn front Continental ContiForce tires. Took the wheels off last night, went to Shadetree Powersports out on Rt 87 this morning, and had it back together by early afternoon.

I also flushed/bled the front brakes and it's a huge improvement. No more stickyness! Woo hoo! (the rears were completely flushed/bled back in the spring when I replaced the rear caliper, so I have pretty fresh brake fluid front and rear.

-Dave

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Action shots!

Post by TireSmoker »

Some action shots of me on the Tail of the Dragon (US 129, aka Deal's Gap) yesterday.

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/orderpa ... 0091&po=42 (pics 42-48, i think)

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/orderpa ... 0091&po=90 (90-94)

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/orderpa ... 112&po=112 (pics 112-117)


How did I get the photos? There are professional photographers who sit in these corners all day long taking pictures of EVERYONE that goes by. It's kinda weird the first time you see them -- there's like 3-4 guys all sitting in this one corner with very large cameras (think pro-sports camera). Then all these cameras follow you through the corner. They'll sell you hi-res versions (which I plan on getting). I'm going to run through there again tomorrow without the saddles bags.

-Dave
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MostMint
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Post by MostMint »

Nice.

So how did you find out about it?

When they took our picture on the Diamondback at Kings Island, we could look at it at the booth by the exit. These guys had to track you down somehow.
[quote="Basement Paul"]Is that a mint rocketship on the hood?? :shock:
-BP[/quote]
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Post by TireSmoker »

MostMint wrote:Nice.

So how did you find out about it?

When they took our picture on the Diamondback at Kings Island, we could look at it at the booth by the exit. These guys had to track you down somehow.
They are sitting there next to their vans with their website address on the banner. There is also info at Deal's Gap (a motorcycle resort at the south end). They don't track you down. They just photograph EVERYONE going by, and then you browse their site looking for your pics.

I stopped to talk with the guy from us129photo.com briefly, then turned around to make sure I came through nice and leaned over. That site doesn't have Wednesday's posted as of now (thurs night).

-Dave
markss327
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Post by markss327 »

Wow.
Looking good there Mr.Smoker.

...the senior gentleman on the yellow Moto Guzzi. Is that a gas can he's carrying on the back ?????
-Mark
2012 Impala LT 3.6 VVTDI
300hp - a bit much for FWD!
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VeeDub
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Post by VeeDub »

Man that looks like some great riding......you had to have scraped your pegs!! 8)
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Post by TireSmoker »

VeeDub wrote:Man that looks like some great riding......you had to have scraped your pegs!! 8)
Not my pegs, but I have scraped my boots several times. I rode the dragon again today. Sooo cool.

-Dave
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VeeDub
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Post by VeeDub »

Nice!! the lean angle you have going in some of those pics is great... I want a bike!
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Post by TireSmoker »

Winter Maintenance, 2010, ~23k miles

Wow, long time since I posted about the bike. It went into winter storage last year and at some point I left the key on, and didn't find out about it till weeks later, when I went to start it. I tried charging the battery, but it wouldn't take a charge. So the bike hasn't been started since I put it away in the fall. I usually like to start it up a few times over the winter, both to keep everything oiled, and also because it just sounds cool. :-)

Upon removing the battery, it's the same brand as the factory battery. Could it really have lasted 10 years? No matter, I bought a new one.

Right after I got back from Tennessee last summer, I started getting a part throttle stumble. I tried some fuel-system cleaner and a a half-hearted attempt at trying to clean stuff from the outside. It seemed to improve for a week or two, but was then stumbling again. After reading a few threads on SVRider.com, I bought the parts to rebuild my carbs.

While I have the carbs off, I'm going to finally check the valve clearances that were due at 15k (at 23k now). After helping my friend Mike D. check/adjust the valves on his SV, I figured out its not hard to do, and he has a full shim kit. It's a little time consuming, but not difficult. His bike

Finally, since I have so much of the top of the bike apart, I pulled off all the rear body work and the rear undertray so that I can finally eliminate the rear fender. It's soooo much cleaner looking when the stock fender gets hacked off.

Pictures to come soon..

-Dave
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Post by TireSmoker »

Here's the bike in it's current state. Motorcycles sure are a lot easier to work on than cars.

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This is the view with the gas tank and airbox removed.

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Carbs on the bench, ready for teardown.

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The rear cylinder with the cam cover removed. Changing cams would be surprisingly easy. In fact, you have to remove them if a valve bucket shim needs to be changed. I do have to change a couple of mine, as the clearances are a little out of spec. While I did remove the carbs and airbox, it's not required if I was only doing to valve adjustment.

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And this is the the undertray/rear fender. It's all one piece. Doing a Fender Eliminator involves cutting this piece in front of the turn signals. You also need a small piece of metal to replace some of the removed material. I have the replacement piece already cut from a template I got online.

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-Dave
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Post by TireSmoker »

It was a busy day at Tiresmoke central yesterday. My friend Mike D., a fellow SV rider, came over with his shim kit and we went at getting all the valves adjusted. I had helped Mike do his a month ago, when neither of us had done it before. Doing it a second time made it a lot easier. But this is still a time consuming job. Only 3 of the 8 valves needed adjustment, and the ones that did were not far out of spec.

The cam chain tensioners are a real pain, especially for the rear cylinder. I made a reference in my last post about bikes being easy to work on. Can I add some exceptions to that? The rear one is just a pain to get at because you can't really see what you're doing. We managed to tear each tensioner's gasket, so we weren't fully able to re-assemble everything.

Getting at the valves for the front cylinder seemed much easier with the radiator removed, so we pulled that off and flushed out the radiator and the engine. Note: all water was drained back out of the motor. There will be no frozen crankcase here, whatever Mother Nature throws at it.

So what do you do when you can't finish one part of job? Tear something else apart! With that, we tore into the carbs for their rebuild, since I had all the parts for that already. With a good writeup from SVRider.com, it was actually pretty easy. The only difficult part was pulling the pressed-in brass EPA plugs so that we could get at the main mixture screws. I had never really drilled out plugs like that before, so it was slow going. And I was being extra careful to not damage the carb body or the mixture screw under the plug.

Mike had to leave part way through the carb rebuild, but it was relatively easy to finish. Until a little spring flew off into the abyss. Actually two parts flew, but I found the first one (larger) within a minute or two, even though it flew halfway across the garage. The spring, I had to search high and low. It was hours later that I finally found it. I had stopped looking a few times, and had ordered a replacement along with my tensioner gaskets before I eventually found it. So I'm going to end up with an extra $2 spring.

One the tensioners are in and I can verify the chains are tight, I can really start putting a lot of stuff back together. I still need to figure out how I want to chop the rear fender and also engineer some brackets for the license plates and turn signals.

I won't be done before I leave for Australia, which is April 5. But a lot of the hard stuff should be done, at least.

-Dave
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Post by TireSmoker »

The Friday before I left (April 2) was a beautiful day, and I was determined to get my bike together before leaving the continent on the 5th. I needed the cam chain tensioner gaskets, and although I had ordered them online the sunday before, but they still hadn't shown up and I was getting impatient. My dad and I hopped in his Mustang and headed down to State 8 Motorcycles to pick up the needed gaskets. After getting the address wrong, we ended up doing a lot of extra driving, but with the sun shining and the top down, it was a perfect afternoon to drive around together, as we wouldn't be seeing each other for the next few months.

When we finally got to State 8, it was rather busy. They had 5 of the gaskets in stock. I bought 3. After the ride back north and a stop for some pizza, Dad dropped me off at home. VeeDub stopped over a little while later and helped me with the reassembly work.

The tensioners are spring loaded to, obviously, keep tension on the cam chains. The ones I had seen on Mike D's bike had a ratcheting mechanism to keep them fully retracted during installation. Mine, being an older design, werent so friendly. There's a recessed screw in the middle and you have to turn (against spring pressure) to retract it. There is no locking mechanism. It was time to make a tool.

The hole with the screw is pretty small, so I had to take a screwdriver to the grinding wheel to narrow it up a bit. For installing the front cylinder's tensioner, a simple 90* bend in the screwdriver would do the job.

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With the modified screwdriver, and the carbs still on the bench, installing the front tensioner was pretty straightforward.

The rear tensioner was another story. For one thing, it's probably one of the hardest parts to reach. You can't see it from the position you need to be in to install it. The 90* screwdriver was too bulky to fit along with my hands. VeeDub came up with the needed design for the tool which was pretty genius. We added two more 90* bends to the screwdriver, which would then hook on one of the mounting screws, which also held the gasket in line. We used a wood screw (covered in black tape, to prevent galling) as a dowel pin.

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It worked like a charm. After getting the rear tensioner in, there was a bunch of other reassembly work that could begin. Both cam covers could go back on, the radiator could go back on, the carbs, the air box, and the gas tank. At this point, we were able to do a quick start up of the engine. On the first startup, it was only running on one cylinder and the tach didn't work, which was a bit of a bummer. A little investigating revealed a connector which had come off one of the coils. Sliding it back on its terminal, we now had two cylinders and a working tach. Success!

Now it was time to do the mod I've been waiting a long time to do -- the rear fender eliminator. The stock rear fender is hideous looking. Last year, Dub and I had trimmed some of the excess length off of it, which helped, but I had seen pictures on SVrider.com of guys who had cut it off completely. It really cleans up the lines in the back and looks *way* better, IMO.

The rear fender is part of the undertray. At the left side, which ends up right under the seat is where the battery resides. As you move to the right, that's the area between the two seats, and the area under the rear seat (the trunk). You basically need to cut off the area right in front of the turn signals.


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As this is a well-known modification in the SV world, there is a template available on the internet to cover up the now-created hole in the trunk area. Oddly, for the fact that this is a well-known mod with the template available, the instructions for actually cutting the fender off aren't clear-cut (pun intended). We winged it and did pretty good. The template appeared to be much larger than actually needed, and I had read other people say the same thing about it, so we ended up cutting it down a bit. The black along the curved edge is just vacuum tubing that I slit to try to form a gasket-like seal against the taillight.

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The beauty of trimming the template down is that the scrap piece was perfect to bend into a piece for re-mounting the stock turn signals and license plate. I forgot to take pictures of that, though. No matter, as the thin sheet metal is not really good material for that kind of bracket. It functions, but I'll have to come up with something else when I get back home.

This is the finished product. I can't find a good pic at the moment to show a good before/after of the rear fender, but as far as I'm concerned, it looks waaaay better. It was a long day, and I didnt get to go for my first test ride until 3 or 4am or so Saturday morning.

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I finally went to bed and Saturday was as nice as Friday. I was able to get in about 100 miles of riding. The engine ran great with the newly rebuilt carbs and adjusted valves. The mid-throttle stutter was gone. However, I now have a very noticeable oil leak. I didn't investigate it at all before I left, but it has to be coming from the rear cylinder. It'd be nice if it's the cam cover and not the tensioner, but I doubt I'll get that lucky. But it was a nice treat to be able to ride before I left.

WOW -- long post. It's taken me a couple hours to write all this up, find and re-size the pictures, etc. But I have nothing better to do down here anyway.

-Dave
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