Brusque Bumblebee
I could not recall the last time I saw a Suzuki GT250X7 stroker twin on the road. Nor, come to think of it, any of the old RD's or even the infamous Kawasaki triples. Seventies relics that, for the most part, seemed to have burnt themselves out. But then out of nowhere, I heard the banshee wail of a stroker strung out in the shorter gears, the fog of pollutants ripping through the atmosphere before I actually caught sight of the mechanical throwback.
A rather pretty sight, too. I half expected it to be the last of the rats but it glowed nicely in contrast to the screaming exhaust, somehow avoiding police scrutiny - helped along by a curled in on itself rear numberplate. Enough to give Blair's bum-boys nightmares. I am not quite aged enough to be a sad old git but the loving look I gave the motorcycle, after it pulled into the petrol station, must surely have put me in the frame.
The owner some mechanic type who soon informed me that the bike was for sale at the bike shop he worked for... thirty minutes later I found the place and spied the GT parked on the forecourt. Did I really want to get into this? Definitely not, but before I could escape the good old boy owner had collared me, rammed a crash hat on to my head and insisted I take the Suzuki for a scoot around the nearby country lanes.
Would've been churlish to refuse the offer of a free ride, wouldn't it? I hadn't actually had a bike between my legs for four years but had kept buying the mag's and still had the glint in my eye and pulse in my heart. 30-ish horses probably in a 350lb package that had evidently been tautly upgraded somewhere along the line and it was a total ball to ride for someone who was half-heartedly fighting a life-long addiction. F..k it, a rather large dent in the credit card statement resulted, free helmet and gloves thrown in.
The salesman had an air of having found the perfect sucker but it did not diminish my grin. The rather bemused wife was coerced on to the seat and taken back to the shop to collect the car – the rude bitch said that was the first and last time she was going anywhere near the bike. This probably had something to do with the 80mph tankslapper, which felt more like a ball-splitter from where I was sitting, that only died out after my wrists came close to be being broken.
Mr Wheeler-Dealer intoned that they all did that, SIR, pointed to the swinging-arm area and said it wasn't well braced. The back wheel seemed solid enough when given a good shake and it was pretty stable on the way back at 90mph (no way the wife was going to get home before me, would never hear the last of it), admittedly with most of my body crouched down low over the bars. As mentioned, the suspension was so taut as to be some way from standard, maybe altering the original geometry a touch.
The stroker twin turned out to be a reluctant cold starter, requiring many kicks and much juggling of the choke when it finally pop-pop-popped into life. I was reluctant to scream it to eight thou, or so, from cold, an alternative route to a fast idling mill. The wife looked on my somewhat ungainly antics with barely restrained mirth – except when I decided on a very early morning start and the resulting banshee wail left her, along with the immediate neighbourhood – if not half the county – rather distressed. Manic grin time.
This is an old bike, no idea how much porting or how extreme the expansion chambers turned the delivery, but the stroker twin seemed a long way from the oft mooted idea that Suzuki were trying to make their strokers behave like four-strokes. A very definite power detonation around 6500 revs that seemed worthy of the H1 myth – the power only limited by the amount of vibration put out by the mill as it went into the red zone. All of this madness accompanied by a very antisocial smog haze that possibility made the machine invisible to hidden cameras and loitering plod.
The downside was about 30mpg and no way of riding the bike in a moderate manner. It was actually such a recidivist that it would oil its spark plugs given an ounce of sanity from its rider during low speed manoeuvres. Given a hint of this malaise, an excess of throttle immediately applied would remove the threat of a stalled engine but a minor bit of inattention led to the necessity of a spark plug swap... somewhere around the twentieth occasion of roadside repair one of the threads went AWOL!
Being both lazy and pragmatic, Araldite rode to the rescue – an extended form of mechanical suicide because the next time it happened, of course, the repair worked so well that there was no sensible way of removing the spark plug. Try explaining to an increasingly nervous and irritated better half that the new pride and joy was skulking in the garage due to an irremovable spark plug that required another credit card destroying expenditure to rectify. Indeed, try finding a half decent GT250 cylinder head.
British engineering isn't entirely dead, and after a few false calls, I managed to find a small engineering works who were able to remove said spark plug and insert a life-saving helicoil... except that whilst waiting for this to go down I was foolish enough to remove the cylinders, revealing that the piston rings were eating into their respective pistons.
The wife came home to find a grown man crying into the dregs of his whisky glass... and defined a marriage that had lasted too long by promptly fast-exiting the scene. Well, okay, things had degenerated to the stage where I had much more passion for the GT than the missus, which had absolutely nothing to do with the size of her arse approximating to the width of Siberia. For some reason, I took solace in clicking through Ebay.com, and after half a hour in the truly fascinating lingerie sector, zoomed in on a crashed GT250 with a working motor.
Yes please, my immediate response – the whisky talking with no cognisance of the idea that it might've crashed because of the mill seizing up, in true stroker fashion. Quite frightening what you can do on the internet, when in a drunken, pissed off mood and armed with a valid credit card! GT's are becoming so rare that few other people are interested in them! Seventy quid poorer I was the proud owner of another GT engine... and a perfectly repaired GT cylinder head.
Anyway, the new mill made encouraging ring-ding-a-ding noises when placed in the old chassis with only a few hours of madness following the revelation that the electrical wires exiting the engine were a different colour to the other one's, which themselves showed many signs of bodging. More by luck than any inherent judgement, everything worked okay.
Unfortunately, the replacement mill lacked the zest of the old one, with a couple of big, stuttering holes in the powerband. It didn't run at all well until fitted with the carbs and exhaust that the came from the crashed bike and even then didn't really want to crash though the 80mph barrier – on, the old set-up, I'd seen 110mph on the clock a few times.
By one of those curious quirks of the motorcycle market, by taking it back to near stock condition I'd much increased its value and I had few qualms about selling it for 750 notes after the wife insisted it was either her or the damn motorcycle. I found some consolation in buying her lots of sexy lingerie from Ebay.com but am still loitering in the motorcycle section!
Russell